Is the Bible Reliable?

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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And we want to wish all of you a happy new year. And we're going to have a little bit of a special episode for you.

00:10

We're going to provide a message that I delivered at NorCal Fire this last year, where we discuss the topic of biblical reliability.

00:20

Can you trust the New Testament? That will be the topic. And we want to just, before we get into today's episode,

00:29

I want to just give you some things to let you know. This next weekend, if you're listening live,

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January 5th, we will be doing a Christian Podcast Community event down at the Museum of the

00:40

Bible. You can contact us if you want information on that at info at strivingforeternity .org.

00:46

And basically, it will be guys from Theology Driven and Wrap Report. We're going to be going down doing a tour.

00:54

I will be teaching through some of the things that you'll hear about in this podcast, things about biblical reliability.

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We're going to go through the New Testament section and talk about that. So if you're in the DC area,

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Saturday, January 5th, check us out. Now, we will let you know that we are looking to get supporters.

01:14

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01:22

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03:04

Welcome to the Rap Report with Andrew Rapport, where we provide biblical, spiritual, and biblical interpretations and applications.

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This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

03:27

I'm glad to be back with you again. I guess now, since Anthony said this,

03:35

I guess I have to tell some stories, don't I? Okay, so, and I will preface this by saying this was his first time speaking, okay?

03:49

So cut him some slack. I don't, but you could, you could. We were at an event.

03:57

The first time that Dr. Silvestro and I were speaking together, it was the first speaking event that he had, and he was scheduled to speak twice in the morning, followed by me who was going to have two sessions.

04:12

And so if you figure about an hour session each, he would have an hour session one, an hour session two,

04:19

I would have an hour session three, an hour session four. He was finishing his session two when

04:28

I was supposed to be ending session four. It caused me to say, you know, this young man has a lot of talent.

04:41

He's, he's, he's very bright and skilled. He just needs some time management when it comes to speaking.

04:48

Because what he didn't realize, see, it was an event where people could ask questions in the middle. If you haven't figured out, if you haven't talked to him when he's not up here and you just go talk to him, you'll realize he has lots of answers and he's very anxious to let you know what they are.

05:03

He's just waiting for you to ask the questions. It actually doesn't matter what question you ask. The answer is Genesis.

05:10

It will always go back to Genesis. So it's really simple. If you want to know where he's going to go in the conversation,

05:18

Genesis, you've picked that up already. Okay. So, so that was, that was the, the interest.

05:25

So I said, look, you know, he's Dr. Special came on with us and started to, to work with us.

05:30

I started discipling him. Uh, he was having his own ministry at that time with creation revival.

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And, um, just to disciple to, that's what we do at Striving for Caring. We want to disciple in lots of different ways.

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And one of the ways we saw frustrations that we saw in ministries, I don't know if you've seen this where ministries attack other ministries to try to build a name for themselves.

05:51

I can't stand that. It's not biblical. So my dad raised me.

05:56

You don't complain about something you can fix. Well, okay. I can't fix that in the world, but I can fix it at least in my little area. So we started trying to disciple others to not do things like that.

06:05

People that wanted to get into ministry and that's how that had started. And one of the first things that I sat down with Dr.

06:11

Silvestro was to say, okay, learn how to manage your time. Even if people are asking questions, you don't actually have to give all of your information at one shot.

06:19

I shouldn't give him too much of a hard time. The first time I ever preached behind a pulpit, a friend of mine, let me have his, his pulpit.

06:25

I do not know how long I spoke. I do know everyone came up to me and said that was really good, but wow, was it long for a

06:31

Wednesday night service? I do know. Okay. I'm dating myself. You guys remember the cassette tapes and they would flip.

06:37

I do know it flipped twice. So I must've went for over an hour and a half.

06:47

People are like, I gotta get the kids in school. Kids gotta go to bed. But Dr.

06:53

Silvestro and I do a lot of travel. I was talking to someone earlier and said how we actually have seen each other quite a bit, even though he's in Ohio and I'm in New Jersey.

07:03

Last year we spent, we saw each other every single weekend for a whole month in a different state.

07:12

This year we did it three times. We had a month this year where we saw each other three weekends out of the month in a different state.

07:20

And so sometimes that happens. We do a lot of travel. And that's really, you know, that's the thing that we talk about striving for eternity and Dr.

07:28

Silvestro mentioned it. Really that's where, what we do is we get support from people.

07:33

So we can, we have a really strange model. We go into churches that can't afford speakers as much as we can.

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That seems odd, doesn't it? Because how do you make the money? That's why he and I both do some side work.

07:47

Mine doesn't pay as well as being a dentist though, just saying. But the reality is that's what our goal is.

07:53

You know, there's so many people that look to build a big name for themselves or go to the big churches and big audiences.

07:59

I was telling Pastor Steve, I got invited to a conference and they said, you know, it's going to be small. I was like, that's okay.

08:04

He's like, no, no, it's really, it could be really small. You sure you want? I said, yeah, it's fine. He's like, it could be like five people.

08:10

I said, okay. It was. That was the, that was the large crowd. There was one day there were two people, the pastor and I and two other people.

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And that was okay because we had supporters that helped fund us to get out there and speak to them.

08:25

So that's some of the, that's the mindset we have. We're all about that which will last for eternity.

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Not trying to build a kingdom for us here and now, but doing what we can for God's kingdom. And if we get no glory here and now, big deal.

08:43

I mean, what does it matter? It's about God getting glory. And so that's, that's our goal.

08:50

And so being, being that Dr.

08:56

Silvestro had started and, before I get in, I do want to mention one thing.

09:02

I noticed the pastor threw me off there a bit for the offering. He said, Andrew, would you pray? I was getting ready to.

09:13

I realized I wasn't the only Andrew here. Actually there's three Andrews, but at least the usher and I are not wearing a skirt.

09:20

I'm just saying, I know this is California, but now

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I say that, which, which I'm, I, I'm going to have to tell a story which embarrasses me.

09:33

Two years ago, we were out here and we, we went out evangelizing after the conference and Andrew was wearing the same skirt that he's wearing now.

09:42

And, and I kept calling it a skirt and he says, it's a kilt. Well, I thought

09:50

I'd be funny. I saw this police officer walking by and I just said, officer, you know, we got to do something about the way this guy dresses in public.

09:57

He's, he's wearing a skirt. And the officer turned to me and said, it's a kilt. And I have one at home.

10:06

I lost that conversation really bad. They started talking about, yeah, we go to these Highland games and all this stuff.

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And I'm like, I'm just going to leave in shame. So I'm, I'm the

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Andrew that's shorter and not wearing the skirt. Okay. The other one's wearing the skirt and the other one's taller than all of us.

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So that's how you could tell the Andrews apart. So it's tall Andrew, short Andrew, and well, okay.

10:32

So my topic today is the reliability of the scripture.

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And I will try not to go over the one hour that we had allotted, hour and seven minutes for Anthony, just saying we did check.

10:49

I won't, you know, maybe I'll try to save his seven minutes. But no, we're going to talk about biblical reliability.

10:57

Can we trust this? In fact, if you talk to unbelievers,

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I can tell you the number one argument that you're going to come up against. Dr.

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Svesh is going to talk about arguments here on the street. I'm going to answer one of them right now. The number one argument comes in several forms, but it is that the

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Bible cannot be trusted. Now it comes in different forms. The Bible has been edited. The Bible has been corrupted.

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The Bible is, is been changed over time, different ways they word it, but what are they really saying?

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You can't trust it. My favorite is the Bible was written by men. Oh, I love that argument.

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I used to carry around in a book in my bag purposely just because I knew I'd get that argument.

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He would say, I quote the Bible that was written by men. Okay. Are you saying we can't trust books written by men?

11:53

Yes. And I like to ask it like four different times to really get them. So you're saying if a book is written by a man, we cannot trust it.

11:59

That's right. So if a man writes a book, you can't trust that at all. Can you? No. I reach in,

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I ended well before I reach, I reach in my bag and as I'm reaching, I usually go, so do you believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution?

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And they go, yes. And I pulled the bag out and I go, I pull out Charles Darwin's book and I go, that's funny.

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That was written by a man. Well, that was a trustworthy man.

12:24

Oh, okay. How about I explain why we can trust the

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Bible and then you explain why we can't. Does that sound fair? There's only one possible answer in the public street to answer, right?

12:38

Yes. What did they just do? They gave me an opportunity to share why I think the Bible is reliable. Then I turned to them and they go, well,

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I've never read it. Oh, that's why I want to get a t -shirt.

12:51

Come debate me for hours about a book you've never read. Because that's really what it comes down to.

12:57

Right. And so we're going to talk about biblical reliability. Now, if you haven't noticed over to your right, my left are a whole series of Bibles.

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You should check them out. Okay. There's more than just Bibles. There's Pilgrim's Progress is over there as well, but you're going to see those

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Bibles. You're going to see some things about the Bible that you end up noticing that the Bible's written like a long time ago.

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We kind of don't see it in America. I loved when I was over in England and I was speaking in England and I'm looking at all the dates on the buildings and I'm like amazed because there's buildings that are older than our country.

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And we had a chance to have lunch with one of the Oxford professors and I mentioned that and he says, well, you know, we have a saying over here in, you know, the

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UK, we think a hundred miles is a far distance. In the U .S. you think a hundred years is a long time.

13:58

Yeah. You know, but when you go through those books and you look at them, understand that literally there are people who died for the

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Bible. First couple centuries there were the Romans came in and said, give us your

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Bible or go to prison. And some people said, you know what, you're going to take me to prison and find my

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Bible anyway, here you go. Others who said, you will not get my

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Bible from me, you'll get it over my dead hands. Well, some of them it was that way.

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Others went to prison. When Christianity was then legalized, it became a big issue of who were the real

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Christians because the ones who went to prison said the others, you know, were compromisers because they gave up the word of God.

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There are people who literally held this so strongly, they were willing to die rather than give it up.

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There's missionaries that you can hear stories about, Adonai Judson, who was in prison during a war.

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He was an American and they went to war with England, but he spoke English, so it was enough. And his wife actually made him a stone pillow.

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Why a stone pillow? Because if she made a soft pillow, the guards wouldn't have given it to him. And inside the pillow was the translation of the

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New Testament he was working on. So he can continue to do his work and read the Bible while in prison.

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The guards didn't know that hidden inside a stone pillow, they kind of felt it probably went, okay, yeah, this is going to be painful to sleep on, yeah, go ahead.

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This book that we get to hold, Pastor said, we, many of us have our own personal copy.

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Do you cherish that? Many people around the world don't have that. Joke that my wife has with me is that we had a friend come to the house and saw all my different translations of the

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Bible that I have. So there's all these Bibles, you should be the holiest man I know, which

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I kind of read into that, but I'm not. We have in America, a privilege that we often take for granted.

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And I want to give for you, in the time that I have, an assurance that the

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Bible you hold in your hands, even in the English, is reliable. Because that is a core thing we have to look at.

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Can we trust the Bible? There are many people who would say we cannot.

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There's many people out there who would argue that you cannot trust the

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Bible, that it's been edited. And I want to highlight one chapter of my book for you, and I'm just trying to see which chapter it is.

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It's chapter two in the book, What Do We Believe?, okay, because that's where this talk is going to come from.

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I won't be able to go into all the detail that I would like to with it, but in that chapter you can go into more detail.

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And actually, speaking of which, Dr. Silvestro mentioned his book, and how nice and shiny it is.

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Okay, his is shiny, just go in the back and feel the nice matte finish.

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Do you want it to look good, or do you want it to feel good in your hands? I liked it to feel good in my hands.

17:31

So, as you can tell, we like to have a lot of fun back and forth with one another. And I actually believed that the chapter on biblical reliability was so important that we put it into Dr.

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Silvestro's book as well. We tried to do some cross -promotion, I took a chapter from his book and put it into mine, so we had some cross, but it is probably the most important topic that we could deal with as Christians in America today.

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So when we look at our New Testament, and I want to stick to New Testament for one reason, if you understand how we got the

18:05

Old Testament scriptures, they're more reliable. Why? Because the way the scribes do this,

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I don't have the patience for the job of an Old Testament scribe. If you've ever been to the

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Museum of the Bible, they actually have a gentleman who they have there that is a scribe for the scrolls, and he is copying it letter by letter.

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But what the scribes would do in the Old Testament is, say I'm going to write the word letter.

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This is how we would do it when we're copying. I read the word letter, and it's over here in my text here in the manuscript, and I want to write it in the new one.

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I'm going to copy it. This was a time before Xerox. Wait, I'm dating myself. It was a time before email.

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Oh, it's still, okay. Before texting. Or no, nowadays they just Snapchat it, just take a picture.

18:58

So they would copy things by hand. What they would do to prevent errors is they would write the letter

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L, they'd see an L, L. They'd look for a chart, they'd find a letter

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L, put a tick mark. E, E, E, tick mark.

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Find the T, write the letter T, find the T on their chart, tick mark. They do that with every letter.

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They get done with the word, then they find the word letter on their chart and put a tick mark.

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And when they are done with all of that, they would then count up the number of words and letters and know if there was a mistake.

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A mistake could have been that they forgot to do a tick mark or put too many tick marks, or it could be that they forgot a letter or a word.

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But if it had, if it had more than three mistakes in it, now think about it.

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Think about, and you could try this, go home and try rewriting the entire Old Testament letter by letter. See if you make any mistakes in doing it.

19:57

This is what they would do day in and day out. If there were more than three mistakes, it was not to be used for synagogue.

20:06

Okay. That's why it's, it's, we don't see too many of these changes. Changes. I mean, if you try this at home, you're going to see, you're going to make some mistakes in copying, right?

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You're going to see the word the, on this line and the, on this line, they're going to line up and you're going to skip a whole line, right?

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That happens. And that would happen in people copying. So the Old Testament was a little bit more reliable, by the way, to really see how tedious this job was when they had to write the word for God, the name for God, I am that we don't even have the vowels for it, but we use the word

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Jehovah or Yahweh for it. Before they go and write that word, they'd have to go home, wash themselves, put on new clothes, come back and write that word.

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That's how sacred the name of God was. So this is the Old Testament.

20:57

Well, New Testament wasn't that way. You know, the Old Testament, there was a lot of laws, very kind of became very legalistic.

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So kind of fit with that system maybe, but you know, New Testament, man, is that freeing, isn't it? The idea that we could be forgiven of sin, who don't we want that message to go like everywhere and as far and wide as possible.

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You know, that was the same excitement that they had in the first century. So they were quick to take those messages.

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They were not trying to get the best scribes. They wanted to get as many scribes to copy it and give it everywhere.

21:31

You know, actually, it's kind of interesting that there were scribes that didn't even know Greek that were doing copying.

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I mean, they can see the letters and make copies. You know, they were actually some of our best, best people to make copies from.

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We could tell the people that didn't know the Greek when we look at manuscripts, but you know why they're the best? They didn't insert theology.

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They didn't insert things or try to change things. We do that. We read things and put things in parentheses to try to explain to people.

22:02

They did that as well. Sometimes you would end up seeing that there would be times where what would happen is you would have somebody speaking and all of a sudden it's like, hey, this sounds like the speaking of the

22:16

Trinity. And in the notes on the side, it might just draw a line and say three or one, maybe.

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Or was that there? Because sometimes what would happen is sometimes what you'd have is someone would actually just skip right over something.

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Oops, I forgot that. Let me put that in and they draw a line and write it in. Now which one's which? That is the topic of what's called textual criticism.

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Textual criticism is this science that we have to try to get back to the original meaning of the

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Bible. Now there are people who do this for a living that do not believe in Jesus Christ.

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Actually most of them. If you want one that believes in Christ and does good work, you could look up the name

23:01

Dan Wallace. I've actually had the privilege of having a class with him and he will.

23:07

He has some great material, but you know, one of his students that he went to or one of his, his colleagues he went to school with is a man by the name of Bart Ehrman.

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I don't know if you know that name. Don't encourage reading anything from him. Here's I'll give you a general rule of thumb in case you ever do read anything from by Bart.

23:25

It's really simple. If he's writing something that's technical for scholarly work, it's probably pretty good.

23:32

If he's writing books for the masses, it's probably pretty bad. He does a very skillful technique by using things that are true in textual criticism and then draw conclusions that are not, but because he sounded like he said something scholarly over here, you know, he's hoping you didn't catch the bait and switch because most people don't study this to know he said this, like the fact that we have scribes that were in a rush to print so they would have made copying mistakes and he says, therefore we can't know what the

24:06

New Testament actually meant. What you're left to think is that if we can't get back to the original writings, then we must not have the

24:15

Bible. We must not be able to trust it. If I do my job right in this hour or less than an hour,

24:24

I will be able to give you the confidence to know that you can trust the

24:29

Bible that you hold in your hands in its meaning. So when we look at these things, there are variances and a variance, just to be a little technical, what a variance is, is just a change.

24:41

Let me give you some. If I was to write and I'm writing the scriptures, I'm making copies, and I see the

24:48

Lord Jesus Christ, you know, many of the times we see that, we see different ways of what's called a variant reading.

24:58

One could be Lord Jesus, another could be Lord Christ, another could be

25:03

Jesus Christ, another could be Christ Jesus. We see that very common. Someone is reading, and this is why, now you see, someone who doesn't know

25:13

Greek is going to write it the same way that they see it, right? But someone who knows, and they're reading and writing as quick as they can, see

25:21

Lord Jesus Christ and just write Jesus Christ. Has the meaning changed any?

25:28

No. So when we do this science of textual criticism, there's three areas that we want to focus on.

25:36

Okay? And I'm going to use an example that we can all understand. I've actually done this when I teach this in a smaller group.

25:42

I give everybody a copy of something I've written out, and it's the one time that I really allow my dyslexia to set in, it's fun.

25:54

But what I'll do is I'll give 10 people a letter that I want them to write, a paragraph. And on different ones of them,

26:01

I've changed some things up. Now, I do it on purpose in this example, but most of it's the same.

26:06

Sometimes I'll say Lord Jesus, sometimes Jesus Christ, things like that. But I do little things.

26:12

Sometimes I'll do a spelling error. And I'll ask everybody to copy it as they see it.

26:19

And it's very interesting because some people, when I do this, will see a spelling error and they automatically correct it because they know what it should be.

26:30

There's other times people do it exactly as they see it, including the spelling error, because that was the instruction.

26:39

So this is the thing we do, and this is what we would see with New Testament. I would copy something.

26:45

I would make 10 copies of it, give it to 10 friends. And then what would happen is those 10 people would make copies, but they wouldn't just make copies.

26:53

They would sometimes go to different places in the world and then make those copies. See the letters in New Testament were copied down and sent out.

27:03

So if I have 10 letters, and some of them go to France and some go to Spain and some of them go to India, and I got to throw in Hong Kong because that's where my wife's from.

27:11

Right. And so we have all these different places where the letters go. But you know, that one that went to Mexico, that's the only one, all the copies there when we have, we look at these copies, all those copies in Mexico seem to have the same reading, and we don't see it anywhere else in the world.

27:32

Would it be easy to conclude that someone had a mistake in just Mexico?

27:40

Because when we compare it to all the others in the world, it's just this one area. So that reading is probably not the original.

27:48

Is that easy enough to understand? We see that happening. So one of the keys we look at is geography.

27:56

Where were these copies? Where were these manuscripts? The second thing we want to know is how many manuscripts?

28:04

Because the more manuscripts you have, the more you can compare. We do not believe what Islam believes.

28:10

See, Islam would say that there is one Quran, it's in Arabic, and it's never been changed.

28:18

Please don't tell them that there's different variances in the Quran in Arabic. They hate that. But it's true.

28:25

Actually, there's a Quran, a very old Quran that just was discovered a few years ago in Turkey, and the

28:32

Turkish government has locked it up and will not let anyone see it after somebody noticed the variant.

28:40

There is a man in the UK, he goes to the speaker's corner, and he puts a whole bunch of Qurans out. He's highlighted them all, and he shows the variances between the

28:48

Sudanian Quran, the Iraqi Quran, the Iranian Quran. There's actually variances in the

28:54

Arabic. They don't allow that because they think it has to be preserved letter by letter. That's a problem for them, but not for us.

29:04

The scriptures say that God's word would be preserved, but he didn't say it would be letter by letter.

29:09

He said in the original writings, it was inspired, it was without error, without flaw.

29:16

In the original. Now sometimes that shatters people, and I hope that this doesn't shatter your faith to go, well, if that's the case, we don't have the

29:24

Bible, I can't trust it. That's what many try to argue, but you know, we have so many manuscripts that we can do these comparisons.

29:33

Dan Wallace, one of the beautiful things he's trying to do is digitize all these so we can do comparisons. With the age of computers, we can start to do so much more than we could ever have done before and do all of these comparisons, but the more manuscripts we have, the more we can compare.

29:49

If I only have one manuscript of something, say the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

29:56

Have you heard about that one? Maybe not. Okay, let me give you a book that was based off the

30:05

Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Maybe you've heard of that. Da Vinci Code? How many copies do you think we have of the

30:11

Gospel of Mary Magdalene? One? Actually not really.

30:17

Actually, we're missing more pages of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene than we actually have. And oh, by the way, it was in French.

30:26

French wasn't developed for about a thousand plus years after Christ.

30:33

I don't think that's an original document. And yet, so many people believe that Jesus actually married

30:40

Mary Magdalene because of a document that we have one copy of.

30:47

How do you know that's what the original said? You have no way to go back and check. You have no other comparisons to make with it.

30:54

So the more copies we have, we can do more comparisons. A third element that becomes important is how close to the original.

31:02

Now, Gospel of Mary Magdalene, you can tell, can't be too close because the French language didn't exist. So how close can we get is important because the longer the period of time, that means the more copies of a copy of a copy of a copy, and the more that you end up seeing the possibility of a mistake happening.

31:21

Okay, so those three principles seem easy. Okay, so I already explained the one of geography.

31:27

Let me explain the one that I just mentioned last, right? How close to the original.

31:34

The closer you are to the original date of its writing, there's going to be less chance that a mistake was made.

31:45

So how close are we with the New Testament? Well, in the

31:51

New Testament, we can actually go within 20 to 30 years of its writing.

32:00

A very interesting document that was found. They found a mummy, and they're taking him apart and whatnot, and they're pulling parchment because that's what they would use, old parchment, right?

32:13

You're going to take garbage paper that can't be used anymore because paper was expensive. It's not like today. What they would do is they'd take the papyrus, and they'd scrape it and reuse it and scrape it and reuse it and scrape it and reuse it, and they'd use both sides.

32:26

Eventually, it got scraped so much, you couldn't reuse it, and they'd throw it away. And whatever was the last thing that was on there was what we have.

32:34

So we actually have two things that are really neat with the computers is the infrared, so you can see where someone's written something, and there's actually a scripture that was underneath it, and that they just kind of whitewashed it and moved right over it.

32:48

But here's a case where they find this mummy's tomb, and someone sees something. It's about the size of a credit card, and they go, that looks like Greek.

32:56

That looks like something from the book of Revelation. It looks like the writings of John.

33:05

We call it P52. It was within just about three decades of its writing.

33:16

We date that back to 125, because that's what we can date the guy who died, right?

33:24

So it was a little bit older than that. How much? We don't know. So you know why that became so important?

33:30

Because many people said, you know what? You never even had a Bible. The whole idea that Jesus was God, and that came over time, hundreds of years.

33:38

The Gospel of John was written in like 300s by the Catholic Church, until you find a document that's 125

33:44

AD. How do you explain that? I guess someone went, and this is no joke. This is what

33:49

Matt Delahunty, a well -known atheist, argued when talking about prophecies. Someone was asking about prophecies.

33:55

He literally said, no joke. He said, we cannot discount the possibility of time travel.

34:04

So maybe if we apply his theory, someone went in the future, grabbed this document, went back in time, and then used it to mummify somebody.

34:12

Okay, yeah, I'm not believing that either, right? So the closer we come, we have one now that is pre -100

34:20

AD. We have a manuscript that has been cataloged, and we think that it is dated in 95, okay, within 20 years of its writing.

34:33

That's pretty close, isn't it? We have about 125

34:40

Bibles and manuscripts that are before 300

34:46

AD. Why does that become important? If you ever talk to a Muslim, and they're going to say, well, the Bible is 300 years old, and the Bible's been corrupted,

34:53

I always like to ask, okay, so was the Bible that Muhammad, when he said that the Bible was trustworthy, was that Bible the one that could be trusted, but it got changed afterwards?

35:03

And they always go, oh, yeah. Okay, do you know we have like hundreds of copies before Muhammad lived of the

35:09

Bible, and they say the same thing as the ones we have today? Oops. When did the corruption happen?

35:16

Because Muhammad said it was good. So the one we have today must be good.

35:22

Okay, I'll go back to, you know, the older manuscripts that say the same thing. How's that?

35:28

Now, what do you do? So when we can, we can see how close these are. The reason that becomes important is because the closer it is, and then there's less chance that those changes to occur.

35:41

Lastly, I want to get to the fact that we have so many manuscripts. I'm going to pull this all together.

35:49

We have, the latest count is about 8 ,000 manuscripts of the

35:59

New Testament now, is the latest count that I've heard. And when we look at that, that's just Greek New Testament.

36:10

But if we're going to look at the meaning of the Bible, you know what? You have it translated into Latin and Coptic and all those.

36:17

When you put translations in there, just to see if we, the meanings of things. Now it's not going to be word for word, but we can understand the meanings or where people might've had changes, even in a translation.

36:28

We're up to about 60 to 70 ,000 manuscripts. That's a lot.

36:36

And we're going to compare that before we close with some other ancient documents and see what's more reliable, the

36:44

Bible or say the writings that tell us about Julius Caesar. No one questions

36:50

Julius Caesar, but they question the Bible. Now, when we talk about these errors,

36:56

I want to help you understand. When we look at these and there's a couple of different ways you can count these variances that occur.

37:04

Number you're often going to hear from people is that there's 400 ,000 variances in the

37:11

Greek New Testament. That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Especially when you consider that there's only about 138 ,000 words.

37:22

Yeah. Hmm. Something seems wrong, right? I mean, it sounds like there's about three variances per word in the

37:30

Greek. I argue that you're doing, that when people do that, they're doing an apples to orange comparison.

37:39

What are they doing? They're looking up all the variant readings, right?

37:45

Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Lord Jesus, Lord Christ, Christ Jesus, five different readings.

37:52

And it's really just three words. So you can read it several different ways, yet it's really that one phrase being read different ways.

38:03

You understand that? So if I'm going to do that, really what I want to do is take all of the manuscripts, multiply it by all of the words that we have and compare that to the 400 ,000.

38:15

And by the way, that those variants are actually that date, that number is from about the 80s, 90s.

38:21

The real number is probably closer to 500 ,000 right now. But the real comparison I should do if I'm going to use that number is to compare it to all of the words we have in the

38:30

Greek. In all of the manuscripts that, you know, those 8 ,000 manuscripts times 135 ,000 words, five, six million compared to 400 ,000, 500 ,000.

38:46

Yeah, it's a little bit smaller. In fact, one of the things I did using some tools that I had available was to go through the entire

38:53

New Testament. It was painstaking. My wife asked me why

38:58

I'm doing it and I did it. So when people say to me, as it has been happening, have you actually gone through the entire

39:04

Greek New Testament and compared? Yes. Have you? They go, uh, it's just nice to be able to say that, right?

39:13

I went through and I had some tools that showed all of the Greek words where there's a different reading in the

39:20

Greek and I counted them up. Yes, I am that nerdy. And I am an engineer by trade.

39:28

So what ended up happening is I sat and went through that and I got about 6 ,500 words that have different variant readings in the

39:39

Greek. Okay, I'm going to ask you to remember the 6 ,500 because that becomes important in a minute.

39:46

Now what I want to do is I want to take some time to explain what kind of variances we see. So I want to give you this chart because this is going to help us.

39:56

You see this big blue area? 75 % of these variances that we have are spelling errors.

40:05

That doesn't change the meaning. It's not viable. Okay, viable means is asking a question, can we get back to the original meaning or not?

40:15

Or the original writing? Okay, so if I spell the word create and I left off the

40:20

E at the end because well, you know, English is really not my first language. My first language was basic.

40:26

Then moved on to Pascal, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, anyone with me?

40:33

I'll see who's the computer programmer here. My wife is at least nodding, you know. I wasn't so good at English.

40:41

That's why I love computers. We write things to correct our spelling. So if I write the word create, can you get back to the original meaning?

40:51

The original writing, I mean? Yeah, you can. You can also, it doesn't change the meaning any because you can figure out what the word should have, how it should have been spelled.

41:00

That's 75 % of all the changes. In fact, actually, it's a little bit more interesting. That 75 % also includes punctuation.

41:09

You're not so cool about that. And I don't know if Dave has Bibles here that would have it the way it was written.

41:15

But there was no punctuation in the original and many early hundred years.

41:22

There was just kind of run on sentences. I like run on sentences. I used to do that a lot in English class.

41:29

I don't know why they complained. You shouldn't do that. I thought they were just made so much more sense. And so what you end up seeing is you can get back to the original with a spelling error.

41:40

So out of those words that I said, the 6 ,500 words, 75 % of them, just toss that aside that we can get back to the original and it doesn't change the meaning.

41:53

Not a big deal. Then you have this next one, 19%. These are not meaningful, but viable.

42:04

In other words, the meaning of the text has not changed, but we cannot get to the original.

42:09

We can't get back to what it originally said, but there's no meaning difference. It doesn't change.

42:15

Now, I know I'm going to ruin some people's maybe favorite passage. I'm going to tell you the most beloved passage that's probably not in the

42:25

Bible. There's an account of Jesus and some people bring a woman caught in adultery to him and bring her there.

42:35

He writes on the ground and they say, what should we do with her? And he says, let him who has no sin cast the first stone.

42:41

And one by one, they leave. And he says to her, you know, who's here to condemn you?

42:47

And she says, no one. And he says, well, neither do I. Go your way. It's probably not in the Bible. You know, we find that passage in a couple of different passages in the

42:56

Bible. It moves around. That's why we think it's not in the original. There's some copies of the manuscripts that don't have it at all.

43:04

We can't find if that actually was in there and dropped out of some places. If some people copied it in the wrong areas, can't get back to the original.

43:12

Does it change the meaning any? I mean, if I remove that story altogether from the Bible, would you still be able to read the

43:19

Bible and realize that Jesus is forgiving? Yeah. Doesn't change the meaning, does it?

43:25

The third category, this 5%, they're meaningful, but not viable.

43:31

In other words, the meaning does change, but we can get back to what the original text said.

43:38

Therefore, we just go back to the original text. So the only area of concern we have is this 1 % of the yellow right there.

43:46

And this is the areas that are both meaningful and viable meaning. The meaning of the text changes and we can't get back to the original.

43:53

Now, if you're going to write a New York Times bestselling book, wouldn't you want to put your best argument forward? Well, that's what

44:00

I think Dan... Wow, that was a slip. What I think... Now I can't think of the name.

44:08

Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman. So in Bart Ehrman's book, Misquoting Jesus, this is the argument he gives.

44:15

He says, we cannot know the meaning of the scriptures because there are passages where we cannot get back to the original meaning and we cannot get back to the original text.

44:28

Here's his example. Are you ready for this? I know this is going to blow you away. Grab onto your seats. I am going to rock your world because there are some manuscripts that actually say that Jesus Christ was a carpenter.

44:40

And there's others that say he was the son of a carpenter. I mean, didn't that just rock your world?

44:47

I don't know of a single doctrine that's based on Jesus being a carpenter. In fact, both could be true because that's the way they would do things back then.

45:00

So both could be true. But that's his best argument. In fact, in his paperback edition,

45:07

Misquoting Jesus, the first edition, the editors, I mean, they didn't expect this hardcover book to be, you know, taken by storm and become a

45:17

New York Times bestseller. So they wanted to get more out of it. So they made it a paperback edition. And in the paperback edition, they said, can you write an epilogue, add some more to it?

45:25

So he made a mistake and he told the truth. In the first edition of Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman said that there is not a single

45:36

Christian doctrine that is affected by any of the variances that we find.

45:43

Second edition, which was done quickly, they pulled that. Because that undermined everything that they were trying to promote in the book.

45:50

The reason the New York Times bestselling is the New York Times bestseller, and everyone loved it is because the atheists and the

45:55

Muslims loved that book is because it tries to argue we can't know what the Bible meant.

46:02

So if you go and you tell the truth and say that there's not a single doctrine that's based on any of these variances affected, then you end up going, what's the big deal?

46:15

Now, this 1 % that we use, we put it up there on purpose because that's a very conservative number.

46:21

I was asking Professor Wallace, I asked him, I said, what is, in your opinion, with the newer manuscripts that we have, because this 1 % has been out there for a long time,

46:32

I said, with all the manuscripts we have, what would be your more accurate number that you think? Not the conservative number, but the one you think is more reality.

46:40

He said, if you're going to ask me, I would say it's one fifth. Of 1%. Now, if you use my numbers, we're talking about 65 words out of 138 ,000 words.

46:56

Doesn't seem so big anymore, does it? You know, if you look at what Dan Wallace would say, if that number is one fifth of 1%, then he is arguing that the

47:07

Bible is 99 .98 % accurate.

47:15

I'll put those numbers up as CNN any day of the week. Go for it.

47:21

I mean, I don't even believe they're that accurate on a single day, any day, especially with Trump being in office.

47:28

No, they don't kind of get along. So you see, when we look at these things, we either can get back to the original text or the meaning hasn't changed any, so we don't worry.

47:43

And if Jesus was the son of a carpenter or carpenter, not a big deal.

47:50

Okay. So I say that to say this is something we shouldn't be worried about. Let me give you a quick example, just so you have it, because I like to put this up because I argue with a friend of mine that he stole this from me and put it on CARM many years before my book came out.

48:07

Anyone of you guys go to carm .org? Okay, so it's a great website on apologetics.

48:12

A friend of mine, Matt Slick, the history behind this joke that we have is Matt Slick has a really big website and he grabbed a picture from Mormon Research Ministry and he used it on his website and Bill McKeever called

48:25

Matt up and said, Matt, did you steal my picture? And he goes, yeah, but I got the bigger website.

48:31

So Bill, believe you got it from me. In doing so, Matt and I were keynote speakers on an apologetics cruise and Matt had this great line.

48:41

Someone asked the question, why is it that all these heretics, they all get together? And Matt just goes, demons of a feather flock together.

48:52

Now, I had internet. I was the only one on the cruise that had the internet in our group. I quickly typed it up online. I said, you know, people may ask why heretics all get together.

49:00

It's because demons of a feather flock together. Watch, Matt Slick will steal this from me next week. Whenever he uses the line, he's quick to say,

49:10

Andrew stole this from me. Okay, so I did get this from CARM. But here's the idea here.

49:16

Here would be the original writing. It's not so good, but you can read this in my book. Here would be a change that occurred.

49:23

It looks a little red there. So this would be like a third century document where there was a change and that would be copied and copied and copied.

49:31

And as you see here, if we do this, this is right here, all this in red would be what's called a text family, a manuscript family.

49:39

That's how we group them. By grouping them in the families, we see that all of these have the same writing maybe in the same area.

49:49

And that is how we end up doing this to get back to the original. And when we do this, we realize most of them don't have any meaning difference at all.

49:56

Now, I said I wanted to compare this to some ancient documents. So let's do that. The orange line here, and this is dated because this says at this time there were 5 ,700

50:08

Greek New Testaments when the person who put this slide together. The orange shows how many manuscripts we have of something.

50:18

And the gray up here shows how the closest we have to the writing of it.

50:25

So the manuscript to the original. So when we look at the New Testament, we have within 25 years and 5 ,700 manuscripts.

50:34

And this is dated. It's even, you know, the date now is getting better and the manuscripts is getting better.

50:40

Well, if you compare it to Homer, no one ever questions Homer. And yet the closest we have for Homer is 500 years from its writing.

50:47

And we only have 643 manuscripts of it. You know that guy

50:53

Caesar? Anyone question whether he was around and about him?

50:58

You know what? Caesar here, closest we have of the works. There is a thousand years.

51:05

I mean, if you can't trust 25 years, how can you trust a thousand? And you only got 10 copies to compare to.

51:17

I kind of like this picture. It shows it in a different way. Same material. The big red or big yellow ball is representing the number of manuscripts.

51:28

And as close as it comes to that little point in the center is how close it is to the writing. I like this because all you gotta do is look at the size of the ball and how close it is to the center.

51:38

And it looks like the Bible outweighs everything, doesn't it? That looks like,

51:44

I mean, this looks like I'm doing a picture of the sun compared to like, you know, Jupiter and, you know, something like that, right?

51:51

And you just go, wow, that's a lot. That's what I hope you'd walk away with, that we can trust our

51:58

Bible. It's reliable. The meaning hasn't changed.

52:04

There's not a single doctrine that's affected by what we look at when we look at our scriptures.

52:13

Don't be worried when people tell you, oh, it's been edited. It's been changed. In fact, if you want, you could do what

52:19

I do. I love doing this. I play dumb. I know, it comes natural to me. You guys may not pull it off as well. I was at Montclair State University and I had a gentleman who told me the

52:29

Bible had been edited. Okay. How many of you have heard of Greg Coco?

52:37

He's on Stand to Reason. He's got great, great show. Stand to Reason is the ministry and str .org

52:45

if you want to go check out the resources. He's got a book called Tactics. Great book. We usually have it with us, but I already had two 70 -pound bags, a 50 -pound bag and a 40 -pound bag coming out here.

52:56

So my encouragement, please buy books for friends because I had to walk through the airport with it.

53:06

I'd really like to lighten up the load on the way back. I mean, look, I do know that I need the exercise.

53:13

I was telling Pastor and his wife, I have to fit into a tux in November. My daughter's getting married and I love the guy she's married.

53:21

The guy flew out from Ohio. Well, okay, sends me a message. Hey, I want to ask you and Mrs.

53:27

Rappaport a question. And by the way, can we visit your jeweler friend? I wonder what question he's going to ask.

53:33

My wife is like, you are not going to tell him no if he's flying all the way out here. And okay,

53:39

I'll try to be serious, but I was still planning on saying no, just as a joke until he asked the question.

53:49

Because he flew in on Friday night. We have Bible study. You know, okay, after Bible study,

53:55

I said, hey, we're going to the jeweler's tomorrow. You have a question you want to ask. You may want to ask now to see whether, you know, what our plans are going to be for tomorrow.

54:02

He goes, oh, okay. He sits down, says, I got some things I want to say. And you know, if you have questions, just ask me.

54:10

And he opens up a notebook and he's got two pages of notes explaining why he thinks my daughter or daughter is so godly and why he wants to marry her and all the things he values in her.

54:20

And I'm like, are we really getting a guy like this as our son -in -law? I literally did that at one point.

54:26

I turned to my wife and was like, there was no way I could say no. I couldn't even fool around with how serious he handled it.

54:33

So I have to fit into a tux. So I know I need the exercise and I am traveling for the next two months, which means when

54:39

I travel, I end up eating late at night and fast food. So, but I really don't need that much exercise.

54:45

So if you guys could buy the books and lighten my load, I'd greatly appreciate it, really. But I was in Montclair State University.

54:56

And when I was there, I have this guy who is telling me that the Bible's been edited. And I, you know, using what

55:05

Greg Coco calls the Columbo tactic. Some of you know who

55:10

Columbo is. You've just dated yourselves. I'm sorry. Those of you who don't know, go look up on whatever

55:17

TV show plays the old reruns, okay? Columbo is a detective that will ask lots of questions. And I just said, you know,

55:23

I was kind of bored that day and I figured I'd just try playing dumb and do this Columbo thing and have fun with it.

55:30

It became a very fun way to evangelize. And I said to the guy, I said, so you're telling me the Bible's been edited. When did that happen?

55:35

He goes, oh, about the 1500s. 1500s? Wow. I said, I may not be as smart as you.

55:44

I want to try to understand this. Let me use an example that maybe I can understand. You're saying that the

55:49

Bible in the 1500s that the Catholic church collected all the copies of the Bible and made changes and replaced them.

55:57

Is that what you're saying? Yes. And I said, okay, let me use an example. Maybe I can understand. And I said, here's the school newspaper.

56:04

How many copies would you think they print? And he goes, well, I happen to be the photographer for the school newspaper.

56:09

There's 1500 printed every week. Okay, 1500. If I wanted to do today, and he said the paper just came out, this is now like four o 'clock.

56:17

The paper came out at 11. I said, if I wanted to do what you said happened with the Bible, with the school newspaper,

56:23

I want to see if I could do that. So where would I find the school newspaper right now? Like the one that came out at 11 o 'clock.

56:29

He goes, well, right there. I said, where else? He's like, well, in the student center all over. I said, where else? Student's dorm rooms.

56:37

Where else? People's car. Where else? The trash. Bingo. I wanted that one.

56:44

Why do I want that one? I want that one because if someone's throwing something out there, they're not going to look to change it and put it back.

56:51

By the way, where did I say we found P52? In the trash. They used it to mummify somebody.

56:59

Right? It becomes important. So, okay, I go through. I said, so you're telling me that I would have, if I'm trying to do this,

57:06

I would go into student's dorm rooms, go into the trash, go into people's cars, grab all of these, go through a student center, grab, collect them all, and then replace them with another one.

57:16

That's what you're saying? He goes, well, you can't really do that. I said, well,

57:24

I'm trying to understand what you're saying because I mean, if you're comparing this to a Bible, by 1500

57:30

AD, the Bible was everywhere in the world. How the Catholic church collect them all?

57:36

He goes, you know, this isn't making a lot of sense to me. I said, it wasn't making sense to me either, but I'm glad that we're finally on the same page.

57:46

You see how easy it is to handle questions of the reliability of scripture and you can do that.

57:52

And if you could play dumb like me, it becomes fun. So what

57:58

I hope that you got through the, out of this, and it is kind of strange that both of my topics

58:03

I was given, neither one of them deal with an actual scripture, presuppositional apologetics and then the reliability.

58:10

So I got the topics that don't deal with scripture. So Anthony just gets to, you know, go through all the scriptures. That just seems wrong, doesn't it? Anyway, so I hope that you've been encouraged.

58:18

I hope that you're encouraged to know that when the Bible you hold in your hands is way more reliable, like by maybe a hundred fold than CNN.

58:28

I mean, it is so reliable that there is no question to say that any of the doctrines of the scriptures changed.

58:35

People that try to argue that Jesus was a man and that the theory changed over time and it got embellished and embellished and then they said he was a

58:43

God. No, we have too many manuscripts, too early, all over the world.

58:51

Not going to happen. We can trust the Bible. All right,

58:57

I'm going to pray and then I'll give you some quick announcements. And by the way, 55 minutes, just saying.

59:05

Lord, we are grateful that we have your word, that we know we can trust it. It is a firm foundation that we can look to and know with absolute surety that we know what you wanted to communicate to us.

59:19

Oh, we don't know everything about you. But as you say in Deuteronomy 29, 29, that which you have revealed to us, that we obey and teach to our children.

59:28

And we're glad that we have your word. We have something we can compare against and look to and know that we have an absolute standard, a firm foundation.

59:38

And we may this be encouraging to us not to allow the world to think that we cannot trust your word.