Apologetics Session 6 - The Bible - Part 2

So I'll open this up in a word of prayer and then we'll get going. Lord God, I thank you for this day.

I thank you for these men who have come out to learn about your word, Lord, and how you've preserved it through time,

God. I just pray that you would bless this night, that everyone here would learn about what you've done.

And I just pray that we would have a good time of fellowship and a good discussion. I pray all these things in Christ's name, amen.

Amen. Alright, so last time we went through the entire

Old Testament and the manuscript evidence for that. Today what

I'm going to try and tackle is the New Testament, the manuscript evidence we have for that.

If I'm lucky, we'll get to how the canon was formed.

And if I'm even luckier, we'll get through some of the Apocrypha as well as an example of things that weren't included in the canon and why they were not.

Whatever I don't get through today, though, we will pick up next time. Next time we'll go through even more stuff with regard to, now that we understand the evidence, the manuscript evidence, what we think about what the

Bible says and do we believe that what's in there is actually true. So last time, if you remember,

I talked a lot about papyrus. Papyrus was the primary mode that people used, the primary paper that they used to write on.

Papyrus is a plant, it's made by taking strips of the papyrus plant, it's like a reed, and actually mashing it together.

And so the New Testament also is written on papyrus. There are other types of documents as well, which we'll talk about, because as time progressed, the method for recording things progressed as well.

So a lot of what we have for the New Testament is papyrus, and there are a few collections of papyrus manuscript examples that we're going to go through.

The first example is the Chester Beatty collection. So I'm going to tell you the story of Alfred Chester Beatty.

He was born in 1875 and lived until 1968. He accrued wealth as a young man.

He went to the western part of the United States and mined gold and got rich mining gold.

And at 33, he had accrued enough wealth, he moved to New York, got married to his wife, but lost her to typhoid, which had a huge effect on him.

And then decided to move to London, where he remarried a woman by the name of Edith Dunn.

He had something called silicosis, which is like a respiratory issue.

It has to do with breathing in too much silica, which is what sand is, but you breathe enough of that stuff in and it messes up your lungs.

From his mining days. Yeah, from his mining days. So he had this condition, and so he used to winter in Egypt because of the climate that was there.

He couldn't take the winters in London, so he would go and winter in Egypt.

And this silicosis is like a pulmonary fibrosis, and again from breathing in that silica.

And while he was in Egypt, he decided to start collecting papyrus.

He would collect it from various dealers that were selling it in the area. And in 1931, he purchased some manuscripts that dated back to the 200s

A .D. And there's a quote from a book peering past the fourth century.

And it says, the library of Sir A. Chester Beatty has been famous since the early 1930s for the

Chester Beatty biblical papyri. A dozen early Greek papyri that were sensational biblical, that were a sensational biblical discovery of that generation.

The Chester Beatty papyri, P45, the Gospels of Acts, P46, the

Pauline Epistles, and P47, the Book of Revelation, traced the text of the New Testament back behind the great fourth century unsealed manuscripts,

Sinaticus and Vaticanus, which had seemed a century ago to be as far back as one could reasonably hope for.

For P45 -47 went back to the third century behind the Diocletian persecutions, which included the imperial decree

Tradition Codicum, the turning in of Christian books for destruction.

One had hardly dared hope to recover biblical manuscripts older than this book -burning holocaust. So I actually didn't know what the

Diocletian persecutions were, so I had to look it up. And the Diocletian, or Great Persecutions, was the last and most severe persecution of the

Christians in the Roman Empire. So in 303, the emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius issued a series of edicts rescinding

Christians' legal rights, made it illegal to be a Christian, and demanding that they comply with traditional religious practices.

So later edicts targeted the clergy and demanded universal sacrifice, ordering all inhabitants to sacrifice to the pantheistic gods of Rome.

The persecution varied in intensity across the empire, the weakest in Gaul and Britain, where only the first edict was applied and the strongest in the eastern provinces.

Persecutory laws were nullified by different emperors, once in 311 by Galerius with the

Edict of Cerdisa. At different times,

Constantine and Licinius, Edict of Milan in 313, had traditionally marked the end of the persecution.

So there was a Great Persecution in Rome where they essentially ordered that Christianity was illegal, that you had to destroy the

Christian manuscripts, and so it was thought prior to some of the fines that he had in Egypt that New Testament manuscripts from before the 4th century just didn't exist, that they were all annihilated, and so this was actually a pretty big discovery.

So it was pretty astounding that they found this, and Chester Beatty made these available to the world by publishing the contents of those.

He ended up moving to Ireland and set up the Chester Beatty Library in a suburb of Dublin, and when he died he donated the entire collection to the country of Ireland.

So they now have it in that library. There's a second example of a collection called the

Martin Bodmer Collection. Martin Bodmer was born in 1899 and lived until 1971.

He came from a wealthy family in Zurich, so he was born rich, Zurich, Switzerland.

He started collecting rare books at 16, so a young man collecting rare books. When he was 17 his father died and left him enormous fortune, and due to his fortune he was able to spend his entire life collecting rare books.

In 1939, when he was 40 years old, his library of world literature had 60 ,000 volumes in it.

So an enormous amount of ancient and old rare books.

Bodmer purchased some papyri from a dealer in Egypt in the 1950s and 60s, found in the Dishna plain east of the

Nile River, just 7 .5 miles from where the Nad Hamadi manuscripts were found. We're going to talk about those in a bit.

Nad Hamadi was another famous place where manuscripts were found. The Nad Hamadi library was known as the,

I cannot pronounce this word, it's the Chenoboskion Manuscripts and the

Gnostic Gospels. This collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the upper

Egyptian town of Nad Hamadi in 1945. That's where it was found.

13 leather -bound papyrus codices. A codex, by the way, is just what we call a book.

So you have the scrolls, which were rolled up, and then you had fragments, obviously, but a codices is just a bound volume.

It's a bound book. So when you hear the word codex, just think book. Every book we have is,

I guess, a codex. So 13 leather -bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local farmer named

Muhammad al -Saman. The writings of these codices comprised 52 mostly

Gnostic treaties, but they also included three works belonging to the

Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation alteration of Plato's Republic.

So other extra -biblical books, non -biblical books. In his introduction to the

Nad Hamadi Library in English, James Robinson suggests these codices may have belonged to a nearby

Patrimean monastery and were buried after Saint Athanasius condemned the use of non -canonical books, books not in the canon, in his

Festal Letter in 367 A .D. The discovery of these texts would significantly influence modern scholarships, pursuits, and knowledge of early

Christianity and Gnosticism. So a quote from the discovery of the

Bodmer papyri, it said, Hassan Muhammad al -Saman, a tall, dull peasant, and Muhammad Khalil al -Azuzi, an ignorant, one -eyed peasant, both from the hamlet of Abu Mana, Bari found a jar containing books about 300 meters out from the foot of the

Jabba Abu Mana at the corner of the cliff. Hassan found the jar buried a couple of meters deep when he was digging sabak to fertilize the fields.

He called over to Muhammad al -Azuzi to see what the poor find, and Hassan broke the jar with his mattock and left the pieces where they lay, and he pulled out a book from the jar and put them in the skirt of his

Jalabiyah. Some of that were torn and in very bad condition, were burned on the spot, and discovery may be dated with some confidence late in 1952.

One of the papyri from the Bodmer collection has John 8, it's labeled

P66. So as far as the papyri for the New Testament, they have this sort of designation.

You'll see this in some of the other documents that we're going to go through. There's the papyri, there's unseals, there's lectionaries, there's minuscules, and so there's all these different kinds of fragments and writings.

For the papyri, you'll see that they'll be designated with this funny -looking

P. And they just have a number, like a P66, so it's just a way of indexing the various papyri that they find.

And this one is a piece of John 8. Now, the

New Testament originally was written in Greek, so we've transitioned now from the Old Testament, which was primarily written in Hebrew.

There was some in Aramaic, but primarily it was written in Hebrew. The New Testament is written in Greek.

Now, there's different kinds of Greek that it was written in. When you start talking about things like the unseals and the minuscules, there's an evolution,

I guess, of the Greek language that you'll see as part of some of this. But that's an image of one of the papyri with John 8 in it.

You can see the Greek lettering there. The third and final example of one of these finds was probably the greatest find for papyri for the

New Testament, which is the Oxyrhynchus collection. Say that three times fast.

The Oxyrhynchus is a city in Middle Egypt. It's about 160 kilometers south -southwest of Cairo.

In Minya Governorate. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered.

Since the late 19th century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been excavated almost continually, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the

Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt. So a lot of old stuff found there.

They also include a few vellum manuscripts. We'll talk a bit about vellum, which are different than papyrus.

It's just a different medium for them to write on. And more recent

Arabic manuscripts on paper. The archaeologists that discovered the manuscripts were

Bernard Grenfell, who lived from 1870 to 1926, and Arthur Hunt, who lived from 1871 to 1934.

Grenfell wanted to dig at Oxyrhynchus because it had been a bustling city with as many as 30 ,000 people living there, and so it must have had, he thought, it must have had rich people that lived in a city that large that would have had enough means to have a library, their own personal library.

And it also had many churches and monasteries. It was known for having many churches and monasteries.

So Christianity had spread rapidly through that area. At first they didn't find anything.

They were digging in cemeteries and they didn't find anything. And then they started digging in the ancient equivalent of a landfill.

So they went to what would have been a place for people to throw their trash, and they started digging there and found a massive number of Greek manuscripts.

They just uncovered these out of the ground. And ultimately they found 500 ,000 ancient documents.

So just, I mean, can you imagine stumbling upon that as they're digging there? They find 500 ,000 ancient documents.

These documents contained everything from, so this is not just biblical text, contained

Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Euripides, Plato, a whole bunch of other ancient documents that they found in this.

There were 53 New Testament manuscripts. There was contracts, wills, receipts, a whole bunch of other stuff, and a bunch of Christian texts that weren't part of the scriptures, just other

Christian writings. I'm seeing Recus is on par with the Dead Sea Scrolls, but for the

New Testament. So we talked about how important the Dead Sea Scroll find was for the Old Testament, not only in volume, but also the fact that it was dated to before Christ's birth.

So it actually aided in making it apparent and dispelling the myth that the

Old Testament had been altered to make it look like it was prophesying for Christ, when in fact they thought maybe it was

Christians that were writing that back into the New Testament. The Dead Sea Scrolls really dispelled that, and Oxyrhynchus was really on par with the

Dead Sea Scrolls with regard to the New Testament. It was just a massive find. Some of the noteworthy papyri that were there are

P1, which is Matthew 1, P5, which is John 1 and 16, and you can read the others.

There's P115, which is Revelations. Revelation, always do that.

And so forth, right? So they found a bunch of papyri, and again you can see that funny

P that they have there for Desirean. That's a picture of one such fragment that they would have found.

So part of this collection included P52. P52, Bernard Grenfell acquired this scrap in 1920, which was 15 years later.

Colin Roberts was sorting through unpublished papyri at the John Rylus Library in Manchester, England.

Colin recognized a small fragment as coming from John, but what's important about this fragment is that this particular fragment of John was dated to 125

AD. So it's about 35 years.

It's thought to be about 35 years from the autograph, from the original writing of John. John is thought to have been written in the 90s.

So to have a fragment that dates that close to the original document means that it was probably written by someone that was alive during the same time that John was written.

So it's the earliest New Testament scrap, the earliest New Testament fragment we've discovered on the planet, and an image of it is here.

So this is an image of the front and back of that particular piece, and the front has

John 1831 -33 on it, and the back is John 1837 -38 on it.

So this was an important find, being so close to the original, being a copy that's so close to the original.

Remember last week we talked about manuscripts and autographs, autograph being the original document, manuscripts being a copy of either an autograph or a copy of another manuscript.

And then here's another image that is showing us the papyri and where they're dated.

So we have three papyri there that are dated between 100 and 125

AD, and then you've got a whole section of them that are dated 110 to 160 and so forth.

So they have all these papyri and you can see how close they are to the originals.

So we're going to talk about another kind of manuscript called unseals.

So unseals are manuscripts that are written in all capital Greek letters, and around the 4th century parchment started to be used over papyrus.

Parchment was far more durable than papyrus, papyrus again being the plant, and so it was better suited to preserving any important documents that you would be copying, scriptures obviously being very important.

And so the Masoretes we talked about last week being super meticulous in how they were, they were master preservers, right?

They were all about preserving the Word of God by making copies of it so that future generations could benefit from it and going through the trouble, the excruciating trouble of actually creating all of the statistics and notes that they would put in those documents.

The early Christian scribes had a bit of a different bent, so it was less about preserving the scriptures and more about evangelizing.

So they would make lots of copies of things so they could spread them out, and so they were very evangelistic in their focus, so it was more about getting the

Word of God out to the world, right? So they were focused on really getting the

Gospels out to new churches that would be springing up in different parts of the world. And in the

Middle Ages, it wasn't until the Middle Ages when the state had professional scribes.

So if you've ever watched, I don't know, who's into history or into period pieces where you'll see, you ever see the monastery and you got the monks and they got their heads shaved and they're in there doing that fancy calligraphy and the first letter is this giant thing that takes up half the page and it's got the gold embossing on it and all that stuff?

Well, that really started around the Middle Ages when they'd have scribes in monasteries or what have you, creating those really fancy, with all the pictures and stuff.

Until then, it was essentially just writing copies of Greek so that they could get them out to the churches that were springing up and really evangelize the world.

One example of an unsealed manuscript is called Codex Sinaiticus. There's a very interesting story about Codex Sinaiticus.

Sinaiticus is just because it comes from Sinai. So, again, my father -in -law is going to yell at me for using big words again.

Codex Sinaiticus. Alright, he's asleep. If he snores, just elbow him.

So this is a pretty interesting story. I found this story so interesting that I actually put it into the document that I'll eventually share with all of you because I just think it's really cool to think about how

God used just happenstance. Somebody happened to be in the right place and happened to see the right thing.

And this is an example of those. So, the story begins with Leibgott Friedrich Constantin von

Tischendorf. That is a mouthful of a name. He lived from 1815 to 1874.

He dedicated his life to recreating the exact text of the

New Testament. He originally became famous for recovering a 5th century text that had been washed and reused.

It's called a palimpsest. It's where they would take a document, generally it would be written on like vellum or something, and then they would want to reuse it to write something else on.

So they'd wash the document, scrub the old letter off the document, and then rewrite something else over top of that.

Well, he became famous by finding one of these and using chemical reagents to actually recover what was underneath the original, or what the original was underneath what had been written over top of it.

So he used these chemical reagents to recover it. It was called Codex Aframi Rescriptus.

And as it turned out, it contained every book of the New Testament other than 2 Thessalonians and 2

John. So he recovered about 60 % of the New Testament as the original document.

So he became famous doing that, but he gets famous for what's next.

Since he was famous, he was able to obtain additional funding to do more research, and in 1844 he went to Egypt and visited the traditional site of Mount Sinai.

Now anybody who knows anything about that area knows that there's a monastery there now,

St. Catherine's Monastery. And so he's at St. Catherine's Monastery, and he finds a wastebasket with old papers in it.

And the monks are using these papers to start fires. So he sees basically a trash can like that, it's got some papers in it, and they're using those papers to start fires.

And so he goes and looks in the trash, and what does he find? He finds parts of the

Septuagint sitting in the trash that they're using to start fires. He was able to rescue 43 documents from the garbage, and returned later but was rejected.

So the monks didn't want him around. So he went back and he returned a third time, but this time he returned under the patronage of the

Tsar of Russia, Alexander II. And so he's there again, again trying to rescue documents, and the day before he's about to leave, a monk invites him over to his cell, basically his room where he slept, and shows him a large book that's wrapped in red cloth.

And the book that was wrapped in the red cloth is not just a

Septuagint, but a complete Greek New Testament. So the full New Testament, and it was in almost pristine condition.

And so he asks to borrow the book, and they say no. So he convinces an abbot to let him copy it, and they transcribe 110 ,000 lines in two months.

So he was basically trying to copy this pristine New Testament that they wouldn't let him take.

And then he eventually convinces the abbot to give the book to the Tsar. The way he did this was actually kind of sneaky.

So what he did was, there was apparently a custom where if they would give the

Tsar something, then the Tsar would then give them something back, right? So he convinces these monks that, hey, if you give this book to the

Tsar, then he's going to be able to give you money or donate a statue or something, right?

So he convinces these abbots to give the book to the Tsar. And in 1862, he was able to publish four volumes of Codex Sinaticus after spending three years working on it.

The British Museum bought it from the USSR for 100 ,000 pounds in 1933, which is equivalent to about $9 million today.

So basically, the British Museum said that they want it, and they paid the equivalent of $9 million.

And the Codex of the original text dates to about 350

AD, so pretty old. Let's see, here's an example of the

Codex Sinaticus. So this is an unseal. You can see it's written in, this is

Mark I. It's written in Greek capital letters. I just thought that was a really interesting story.

This guy is there, he sees in the trash documents, and because he sees things in the trash and is able to rescue them, he's there long enough to have them invite him and show him this book that is a pristine ancient

New Testament. I just, like, how do you say anything but that's a miracle, right?

That he just happens to be around there. So here's a table of some of the unseals that we have today.

So you have Codex Sinaticus. So unseals are weird the way they, that second column is how they designate them.

They're usually with just a letter and a number after it. It's kind of a weird way that they designate the unseals.

It's different than the papyri where you have that funny looking P. But the second to last column here is essentially when they became available, and then the third column there is what they date back to.

So you've got things dating back to the 4th century, 5th century, basically in that.

So you have Codex Sinaticus, which is the entire, you've got the

Old Testament, you've got the New Testament, the Epistles, Barnabas, the Shepherds, Shepherd of Hermas, anyone know how to pronounce that?

And then you've got Codex Alexandrius, Junus, and Codex Vaticanus.

And then there's the Ephraimi Rescriptus, the one that was washed and then they used the chemical reagents on.

So those are some examples. So, that's what an unseal is.

The next thing is called a minuscule. Who here thinks they know what a minuscule is? If an unseal is

Greek in all capital letters, what is a minuscule? Greek in all little letters.

Little letters, right? Minuscule letters. Yeah, so we're going to talk about the minuscules, the lectionaries, and some of the writings of the early church fathers.

Now, first thing I want to do is give a warning. Some of the stuff that I'm referencing in here was from a book called

The Text of the New Testament, which was written by Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman. I think last time

I talked a little bit about Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman was a Christian biblical scholar who is now an atheist biblical scholar.

And I said last time he's kind of a weird unicorn because he's still a biblical scholar, but he doesn't believe that God exists.

So you'll hear me reference, this is from, I think, the work that he did pre -atheism.

If I'm going to reference him, I want to make sure that you understand what his position is on some of this stuff now versus what his position was when he was a

Christian. The way he describes, in a video that I watched, the way he describes his journey is that he started out as a more conservative

Christian, biblical scholar, then sort of became what he referred to as a liberal

Christian who maybe didn't take the Bible literally or didn't believe in its accuracy or total inspiration.

And then finally he just gave it all up and decided to go full atheist. And so that's kind of where he is.

But that doesn't mean that everything that he's done is without value. We'll reference some of that stuff.

He's been a biblical scholar for a long time, so he has discovered some good things. But be careful if you watch some of his videos online now.

I didn't want you to be caught by surprise or watch a video and find out this guy's saying there's 400 ,000 contradictions and all of that stuff.

So just be careful when viewing or reading his stuff. Watch his debates, though.

They're good. But just be careful. What's his name again? Bart Ehrman.

Bart Ehrman. Yeah. E -H -R -M -A -N is his last name.

And you'll see him. I still see him. There's podcasters that I watch that'll have him on, Christian podcasters that'll have him on, and they'll debate or have a discussion with him.

But, yeah, he debates all the time on stuff. And I'll actually go through at the end, probably not today, but next week

I'll go through at the end. We'll actually watch a small clip of Bart Ehrman. And we'll actually watch.

It's an excerpt from a debate that he did. We're going to take a really small section of it. I watched a video by Mike Winger, who's a really good

Christian apologist and pastor. He runs

BibleThinker .org. And he was essentially dissecting this entire argument.

And what I do is I reference Mike Winger, and I essentially begin the dissection, but the dissection is about almost two hours long.

So I basically just dissect the first two points of Ehrman's argument and tell you to go watch

Mike Winger for the rest of it. Because he's really good at that stuff. But just as an example,

I wanted at the end of all of this, because once we get through kind of all of this evidence -based stuff in the first two sessions here, we're going to get into the discussion of how do we know,

A, that it was accurately interpreted or accurately translated, and, B, do we think that what was said in it was true or made up.

And then we'll get into some of the prophetic stuff and get into really more of a discussion about what we think about what the

Bible says. And part of that, at the end, I wanted to add in an attack against it and actually look at an attack on the accuracy, historical accuracy, and truth of the

Bible so that we can kind of get a sample of what that would look like and just show how easy it is to,

I mean, not every argument is going to be easy, but how easy it is if you have an accurate understanding of the

Bible to dissect something like that. So anyway, that's just a PSA here, a little warning about Bart Ehrman.

But miniscules were documents written in minuscule text. The reason they wrote them in this minuscule text is because it allowed them, unscales, as you saw, are written in this capital letter, and minuscules, because the letters are actually smaller, it was sort of an efficient way of putting more text on a page, right?

And so since they were able to be more cost -effective because paper's not free,

I know we probably take it for granted nowadays, but they had to pay for all of this stuff, so it was just a way to be more cost -effective.

So you can think of it kind of as writing in lowercase cursive. It's like the lowercase cursive version of Greek as opposed to sort of the uppercase print version of Greek.

Miniscules came later. Like I said, we're talking about the evolution of writing here.

So unscales were before minuscules, and we have 10 times more minuscules than we do unscales.

So we have about 130 -plus papyri, we have about 320 unscales, we have nearly 3 ,000 minuscules, and about 2 ,500 lectionaries.

And we'll talk about lectionaries in a bit. So we have approximately 5 ,950

Greek New Testament manuscripts, and that's not including the quotations from the early church fathers.

So this is just Greek manuscripts. And we'll talk a little bit later about the totality of all of this.

And one other point is just the quotations from the early church fathers would be enough to almost reconstruct the entire

New Testament, just by looking at the quotes from the early church fathers. So here's a table of some of the minuscules that we have.

And the minuscules just have numbers, that first column there. They don't have a funny P, they don't have any weird letter, they just have numbers.

So one of them is 2017, one of them is 1933. And so these are just examples of some of the minuscules we have that were available to us in the 15th, 14th, and 19th century, and date to around the 9th to 12th to 15th century, and what they have.

Here's an example of a minuscule. It's probably hard to see, you can probably see that side better, but you can see how the text isn't, if you wanted to compare it to an unseal, you can see how the text looks just different.

It looks more like lowercase writing than it does uppercase writing. I mean, I don't know who, I don't know

Greek, so I don't know, it kind of just looks more like uppercase cursive.

So that's what a minuscule is. A lectionary is a book that contains portions of the

Bible that were appointed to be read on particular days of the year. So the early

Christians adopted the Jewish custom of reading extracts from the Old Testament on the

Sabbath, and so they would read parts of what the apostles and evangelists wrote on certain days.

And this is actually talked about in 1 Timothy 4 .13, which says, Until I come, devote yourselves to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.

So this was something that was done in the early church. It's actually still practiced in the

Greek Orthodox Church today.

I actually watched a video. I was pretty interested in the Greek Orthodox Church, because there was a split apparently at one point.

I think I've got it in here somewhere. And the Greek Orthodox Church, they actually have this, it looks

Catholic -y, the sanctuary, the church.

It's very kind of ornate, and they'll actually have someone almost singing.

If you've ever been to a synagogue where they'll sing the Hebrew, they'll kind of like, they're reading the

Hebrew, but they do it in this kind of singing voice. The Greek Orthodox Church, they do a similar thing with the

New Testament as well, where they'll kind of almost sing the New Testament. If you're ever curious, go look up, they've got it on YouTube, where you can look up a

Greek Orthodox, and then you can look up a Jewish synagogue and kind of compare the two. They're very, very similar.

Here's some examples of lectionaries. These have the funny little L in front of them as their designation.

So they'll have different lectionaries that are in different places, like Moscow, France, Oxford, and St.

Catherine's Monastery as well, and what they date back to. So again, we're talking about the 11th, 12th, 15th centuries.

That brings us to the early church fathers and some of the quotes that they had.

So the early church fathers in their writings, they would actually quote parts of the Bible. I mean, kind of think of, not that I'm comparing

Jeff to the early church fathers, but if you think about Pastor Jeff, right, if he was writing a sermon, he was going to talk, or if he's writing a letter like his pastor

Graham would get on Thursdays, he'll have quotations of Scripture in it sometimes, right, where he'll say, you know, we should do

X because the Bible says in, you know, 1 Timothy or whatever, right? So the early church fathers were no different.

They would write things and they would quote the Bible in those. So one example here, you've got the ecclesiastical history.

It says, this was at the time of the first census, a registration mentioned by Flavius Deuciphus, the most famous of Hebrew historians, which we'll talk about him in a probably next week's session as well, who has an account of the

Galilean sect that arose around the same time to which our own Luke refers in Acts. After him arose

Judas the Galilean. At the time of the census, he persuaded some of the people to follow him, but he too perished and his followers were scattered.

So this is, you know, an example of an early church father.

An example of some of the church fathers, we have sort of a chart here of a bunch of them.

And again, you can see this is from Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman in the text of the New Testament, which was published in 2005.

You can see there's early church fathers that go throughout time. So you've got 2nd century, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th century.

You'll probably recognize some of them, like Justin, or Origen is another big famous one.

You probably see Eusebius in 340 there. You might have heard of him. So you'll hear these names bantered about.

And so there's a ton of writings from the early church fathers.

Who's first? Yeah. That's unfortunate. Yes. Yes, that is there.

And I had this exact same reaction. I said, wait a minute. He was a church father?

Am I being punked here? So we have the early.

So we've covered the papyri, the early papyri.

We've covered unseals, which are written on parchment. We've covered minuscules. We've covered lectionaries.

And we've covered the early church fathers. And again, I'm bombarding you guys with a lot of information here.

This is really to get to the foundation of the overwhelming amount of evidence that we have for the scriptures, both

Old and New Testament, so that we can set that as the foundation of, this is not a book that is not well -founded.

We have very old documents, documents going back very close, within a generation of the autographs, in many cases, for the

New Testament. And we'll talk a little bit about how that compares to other ancient books. But in addition to all of, in addition to the original

Greeks, the original Greek, whether it's unseals, minuscules, lectionaries, in addition to the early

Christian church fathers, we have a ton of ancient translations as well. And this was, again, because the bent of the early

Christian church was evangelism, and everyone wanted the Bible in their own language.

So since Christianity was spreading all over the world, right, we had apostles and church fathers going out all over the world.

We have ancient translations in Syriac, Old Latin, Coptic, which

Coptic is the latest form of the Egyptian language. And the

Coptic Christians split from Western Christianity in 451 over a disagreement of the dual nature of Christ.

And then we have in Armenian, Gothic, Georgian, Ethiopic, Old Slavonic, Arabic, Old Nubian, Sogdian, I have no idea what

Sogdian is, and Anglo -Saxon. So we have a lot of ancient translations that as Christianity was spreading all over the world, people would translate the

Bible into their language. So in total for the

New Testament, there's somewhere around 24 ,000 sources that we have for the

New Testament. That is a huge number. Just to put it in perspective, we have roughly 643 copies of Homer.

We have, for Caesar, we have about 10 copies. For a period that spans 944 years.

The New Testament, just copies of the New Testament, fragments or texts of the

New Testament, we have 5 ,900, around 5 ,950 copies of the

New Testament, with over 24 ,000 sources that's inclusive of things like the writings of the early church fathers.

So that brings us to sort of the end of the manuscript evidence for the

New Testament. The amount of ancient manuscripts that we have dwarfs any other ancient document.

And that can only, in my view, can only be explained by God working through the church to preserve his word throughout time.

Just like we said last week for the Old Testament, this is another example of that very same thing happening with the

New Testament. We only have about nine minutes left, but if you're willing to stay,

I'll talk a bit about the canon. It shouldn't take me too long to get through. But the

Christian canon, which all the Christian canon is, is the books that we have said are inspired word of God that are in the

Bible. Sometimes atheists or non -believers will say things like the

Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation. That's not how the

Bible, the transmission versus translation. Whenever a translation is created, it's always created from the original text.

So if it's the New Testament, generally from the original Greek. If it's the Old Testament, it's generally from the original Hebrew. You don't translate from Hebrew or Greek, depending on whether you're the

Old or New Testament, to French, and then from French to English, and then from English to Spanish.

That's not how it works. You always go back to the original. We'll talk a bit about textual criticism. You always go back to the original language when you're doing a translation.

So you'd go from Greek, if we're talking about the New Testament, you'd go from Greek to English, from Greek to French, from Greek to Spanish.

You'd never do a translation of a translation. So anyone who comes at you with that kind of argument, you can dismiss that out of hand.

That's not how transmission works. And then the other thing that many times you'll be called on is, oh, well, you know, there's all these books and, you know, these old church father guys just got together one day and said, these are in and these are out.

But in fact, what we'll talk about here is that what they were looking at is they wanted proof of authorship.

They wanted to make sure that the document was actually written, that the book was actually written by the author.

So John wrote John, for example, right? Or Peter wrote Peter. Like, they wanted to make sure that it was written by its original author.

And they also wanted to make sure that it came from either an apostle or an associate of an apostle.

So when we're talking about the canon of the New Testament, you know, we accept, first of all, for canon just generally, we accept the

Old Testament as, you know, the same Old Testament that Judaism accepts as canon for the

Old Testament. So there are other Old Testament books that are not in the canon. Things like the

Book of Enoch come to mind when you think of things like that. That doesn't mean that they're evil and you can't read them.

It just means that they're not the inspired word of God. I actually find the Book of Enoch super interesting.

Jude called it Enoch. Yeah. And so we accept the Old Testament canon that we talked about, the 39 books, or the

Jewish 24 books, which equate to our 39 books, as the canon for the Old Testament. The New Testament that we accept is the 27 books of the

New Testament, right? Starting in Matthew, ending in Revelation. But the question is, how did we get to those 27 books?

Because there are other books that were considered. We'll talk probably next time about the

Apocrypha, and the Catholic Church actually has brought in some of those books into their canon.

And we'll talk about the reasons why it's thought that they did that, and the reasons why we probably should not.

But we accept those 27 books. But how did we get to the 27 books is the question.

And so you'll hear people throw out the Council of Trent. You'll hear basically that it's sort of random, and whatever people wanted to think.

And there's some truth to some of that stuff when it comes to the Apocrypha. We'll talk more about that next week. But we arrived at it through a process, really.

But there are books like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, that were not brought into the canon.

Just starting with the Scripture, 1 Timothy 5 .18 says, For the Scripture says, You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out grain, and the laborer deserves his wages.

So here, Paul is actually referring to Luke 10 .7

as Scripture. So there's a couple of tests that you wanted to put on Scripture to determine whether or not it should belong in the canon.

One was, are we confident that it was written by the person that claimed authorship, or by an associate of that person?

Generally, was it written by an apostle? And was it quoted as being

Scripture by an apostle, or by an associate of that apostle?

So, in 1 Timothy, there was that reference to Luke 10 .7,

and called Luke 10 .7 Scripture. Luke 10 .7, by the way, says, And remain in the same house, eating and drinking what they provide.

For the laborer deserves his wages. Do not go from house to house. So again, Timothy says,

For Scripture says. And then he basically quotes a similar verse and calls it

Scripture. So that is saying that what Luke wrote is Scripture. So that's, again, one example of that.

2 Peter 3, 14 -16, said,

So again, this is Peter referring to what Paul wrote as Scripture, because he says,

As they do with other Scriptures. So again, referencing what Paul writes as Scripture. So, we also have

Polycarp in AD 125, who's thought to be a disciple of the apostle John, the bishop of Smyrna, quoting

Ephesians and referring to it as part of the sacred Scriptures. We also have

Justin the Martyr, or Justin Martyr, in AD 150, an early Christian apologist.

Probably the earliest Christian apologist. Citing his first apology, the

Gospels were read every Sunday. He called them Memoirs of the Apostles, which obviously means they contained apostolic testimony.

We also have Arrhenius in AD 180, who lived in what is present -day

France, quoted as recognizing the fourfold form of the

Gospels. So again, you have Gospel of Thomas, you have Gospel of Mary, but he was quoted as the fourfold form, meaning the four

Gospels that we have. So this shows that the early church believed that the four

Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were authoritative. So the criteria was, was it written by an apostle or one of their colleagues?

Was the teaching orthodox? Meaning, did it conform with the orthodoxy of the church, generally accepting teachings of Christianity?

Was it relevant to the church? And was there widespread and long -standing use of it in teachings and worship services in the church?

Again, the bet was to exclude things rather than include things in the canon. They wanted only things that they were certain were inspired, were orthodox, were being taught and were referenced as being authoritative and being scriptural.

So I'm going to run through, we're at 8 o 'clock, but I'm going to run through the, really quickly,

I'm going to go, we're going to save the Apocrypha for next time, we'll start with that, but I'm going to run through really quickly the, sort of the history of the canon and how it was eventually constructed and settled on.

So in the 4th and 5th century, lists were created, essentially, of which books were authoritative

Christian literature and were allowed to be read in church. So starting with Eusebius, in A .D.

320 to 330, Eusebius is recognized as one of the first church historians.

Around that time, he wrote his Ecclesiastical History. In that work, he said there were 22 books and letters that the church recognized as canon.

It was the four Gospels, Acts, the ten letters from Paul to the churches, the three letters that Paul wrote, so 1st and 2nd

Timothy and Titus, Hebrews, 1st John, 1st Peter and Revelation. There were five that were doubted at that time,

James, Jude, 2nd Peter, 2nd and 3rd John, and they were doubted because they weren't sure that they were written by James, Jude, and Peter, and John.

So at that time, they accepted 22 books and excluded the others.

Then in A .D. 350, Serial of Jerusalem said there were 27 books, but it actually differs from the 27 that we have today.

It was the four Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, and this is the only time that the Gospel of Thomas was included.

Acts, the ten letters of Paul to the churches, the three letters to Timothy and Titus, Hebrews, James, Jude, 1st and 2nd

Peter, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. He didn't include Revelation in his 27. He included the Gospel of Thomas, but not

Revelation because he didn't believe John wrote Revelation. He was the only one that ever wanted to include the

Gospel of Thomas. And then after that, we go to the Laodicea Synod in A .D.

363. They recognized 26 of the 27 books we have in the

New Testament. They rejected the Gospel of Thomas, and they didn't include Revelation. Then we have

Athanasius in A .D. 367. At this point, all 27 books that we have today were recognized for the first time.

So in A .D. 367 was the first time that the 27 books of Canon that we have today were recognized as the 27 books of the

New Testament. We have Gregory Nazanathus in A .D.

390. He recognized all 27 books. We have the African Canons in A .D. 393 -419 recognized all 27 books.

We have Jerome in A .D. 394 recognized all 27 books. We have Augustine in A .D.

395 -400 recognized all 27 books. Then the Carthage Synod in A .D.

397 threw out Revelation again. So they threw out Revelation, but then in A .D.

419 they brought it back. So in A .D. 397 they tossed it out, and in A .D. 419 they put it back.

Again, the tendency was to exclude books rather than include them in the Canon. But after A .D.

419 is when it was essentially settled. We have the 27 books that we have today until the

Catholics brought in the Apocrypha later, which we will cover next week.

So again, I apologize this was a bit more of a lecture than it was a discussion.

But again, I wanted to try and build a foundation. The sheer volume of manuscript evidence that we have for both the

Old and New Testament is staggering, especially when compared to other ancient historical documents, to the point that we have many multiple times the amount of information.

I think it was said that if you stacked Homer, the

Iliad, I think, if you stacked all the manuscript evidence we have, it would stand about four feet tall.

If you stacked all the manuscript evidence we have for the Old and New Testament, it would be about a mile high.

So the amount of evidence that we have for the original text of both the

Old and New Testament, it just dwarfs any other ancient document. The only explanation that I have for that is that God, through his will and purpose, has preserved his word throughout time for us, so that there could be no question that what we have is accurately translated, is accurate, is true to the original authors.

And we'll get into next time a little bit of the Apocrypha and why we don't include that, and we'll get into some of the textual criticism tests that are placed on these old documents to determine, since we now know that we have a tremendous amount of evidence, and we know that it was accurate and very close in time to the original autographs, so we can be certain of its relative accuracy, that we can then start talking about the contents of it, and whether we think what was written in there is truthful.

How do we know that the authors cared about truth? How do we know that it was interpreted correctly?

Any questions? No, I just want to add one piece to what you were talking about. Some of the early churches were fighting

Gnosticism terribly, and that was the reason why, to what

Matt was talking about, was they were trying to limit the amount of books coming in there because Gnosticism was plaguing the church at this point, and what they were using was the own personal inspiredness of the

Word of God instead of the inerrancy, and that was a real, real problem. And so they were trying to separate it, and it's not like it is now with the

Internet, but there was a sense of urgency to bring it down there because Gnosticism was all over the place.

It was rising as fast as Christianity was. It's a real shame we didn't have enough time to get to it.

I kind of figured we might not. It's a real shame we didn't get time to go through the Apocrypha tonight.

We will go through it next week, but there's good reason, when you read some of these books, some of them are pretty apparent that they're not inspired, that they shouldn't be included, and we'll talk about some specific examples of that and why the

Catholics have brought some of the books of the Apocrypha, they haven't brought all of the Apocrypha, but some of the books of the

Apocrypha into their canon as well. So we'll talk a bit about that, and then we'll launch into the

Textual Criticism. Any other questions? I just wanted to mention for manuscript evidences, evidence demands a verdict by Josh McDowell covering the law.

Yeah, actually the forefoot to mile high, I got from Sean McDowell, which is

Josh McDowell's son, who's an apologist at Biola University, and does a great job of talking about this stuff.

He actually edited the newest volume of Evidence that Demands a

Verdict, which was written by Josh McDowell, and then was augmented with a ton of new evidence, because Josh McDowell wrote that decades ago, and then so much evidence has been uncovered since then that was added to that book.

It's actually funny, I saw a video from Sean McDowell yesterday that a new tablet was found that is thought to be older than the oldest

Hebrew documents that we have. To this day, they just found it. It hasn't been peer -reviewed yet, but it's dated back maybe a thousand years earlier, if I remember correctly, dated back a thousand years earlier than the oldest thing that we have today.

And they just found it, and I guess are in the process of validating it.

But that just goes to show you that even to this day, we're still finding things. Last week I talked about, in 2015, that scroll that was so delicate they couldn't unroll it, that they were able, in 2015, to use imaging technology.

So technology has allowed us to actually discover things, even though the scroll was found much earlier, we weren't able to discover what was written on it until technology had advanced to the point where we could do that.

So even to this day, we're finding things, more and more and more evidence, which is pretty interesting.

But yeah, we've just got a ton of evidence. Drew, you had something? Yeah, Matt. The documents you have up there, we don't see any other religious, sacred texts, so to say.

The Koran, or the Upanishads, or the Bhagavad Gita. Are they even in the ballpark with any of these things?

Nope, they're not. The second place, the closest thing to the New Testament, and the