Objection 4: The Bible has been Rewritten and Changed

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Well, I want to pass this out.
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This is our handout.
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We're continuing in our study of apologetics this evening.
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If you don't mind, sir.
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Actually, that's a two-sided, but you can give each one one.
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Tonight, we are continuing on in our lesson on the subject of objections.
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And while he's passing those out, I'm just going to write down, as a reminder, the categories of objections.
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We have, for this particular lesson, we have been discussing the subject of the categories of One, two, three.
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One, the existence and nature of God.
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Two, the nature and reliability of Scripture.
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And three, the interpretation and application of Scripture.
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We have looked at the existence of God, the nature of God, and the nature of Scripture so far.
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But tonight, we are going to look at the reliability of Scripture.
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And as I said, this sort of follows a lot of conversations I've been in.
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And the reason why I'm doing it this way is it sort of follows the objections sort of as they come.
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The first thing is whether or not God even exists.
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And then if He does exist, what kind of God is He? And then how do we know what kind of God He is? Well, He's given us His Word.
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Well, what is His Word? It's the Bible.
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Well, we talk about the nature of the Bible.
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And then the question comes up very quickly and very often, Well, why do you trust the Bible? Why do you trust what the Bible says? How do you know that when you read Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, how do you know when you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that what you're reading is correct? We kind of dealt with that last week because we said, Well, we believe that it is God's Word and God does not err.
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God cannot err.
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So we say the Bible is inerrant, meaning it doesn't err.
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And it is infallible.
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It cannot err.
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And today we're going to go beyond that discussion of the nature of the Bible to the question of, well, how do you know that what you're reading is actually accurate to what was written in the first place? It's one thing to say that Peter, Paul, Matthew, and the rest wrote true things.
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It's another thing to say that what we're reading is what they actually wrote.
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How many of you have ever played the telephone game? The telephone game goes like this.
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I would start down at the end of the line, and I would whisper something into Miss Dottie's ear, and Miss Dottie would go over and whisper it into Dale's ear, and then him into Jackie's ear, and over to the Fraser's, and all the way around.
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And normally the way that it goes is that whatever starts with Dottie, by the time it gets to Dad at the back, it's something either grossly exaggerated or absolutely maligned from what was originally said.
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I remember in second grade our teacher making us do this exercise as a way of demonstrating why gossip was such a bad thing, because gossip tends to begin with somebody saying something that is their version of whatever happened, and then that person changes it to their version, and then the next, and the next, and the next, and the next.
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And so oftentimes when you're talking to someone, you'll hear them say that about the Bible.
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Well, the Bible has been translated many, many times, or the Bible has been changed many, many times.
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It was written 2,000 years ago.
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It's gone through so many hands, and so many brains, and so many people.
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How can we believe that we have anything, anything that resembles what was originally written? Well, these questions tend to fall into two categories, and this is not on your notes.
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I didn't put this on the notes, but you can write it off to the side if you'd like, because this question falls into two categories, the category of transmission and translation.
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Now, you know what transmission is.
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That's that thing that you have to use in your car to get you going.
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I know there's not a lot of you.
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That was a little funny.
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Transmission, not even a little? Okay, that's a bad joke.
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The transmission means how it is transmitted, or how it goes from one place or one person to the next person to transmit something.
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How the Bible has been copied, and how it has been passed from one generation to another, that is transmission.
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Translation is different, because translation is how the Bible is taken from one language to another language.
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That's different than transmission.
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Transmission is how the Bible goes from one generation to the next, how it goes from one person to the next.
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Transmission can include translation, but transmission is its own thing, because when we talk about the Bible, we do know what language it was written in, and we know that the language that it was written in, the Old Testament primarily was Hebrew, the New Testament primarily was Greek, there is a very little bit of Aramaic in there, but for the most part we can say the Bible is Hebrew and Greek.
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And we can read the Bible in the original languages.
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So we are not limited to translation.
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But we are limited to transmission, because we have to believe that the Greek that we have, and the Hebrew that we have, is accurate to the Hebrew and the Greek that was written, and that it has been transmitted to us accurately.
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So the question, the objection for tonight, that we are going to answer, is how can you trust the Bible when it has been rewritten and changed so many times.
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And I want to invite you to Isaiah chapter 40, our verse for the evening.
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Isaiah chapter 40 in verse 8.
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It's on your sheet.
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The Bible says, The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.
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The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.
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That is a beautiful and important promise from the scripture about God's word.
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And remember when we talk about the scripture, we are talking about God's word written down.
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And so God has provided a promise that His word, while the earth itself will change, and the flowers will fade, and the grass will wither, His word will not go away.
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It will stand forever.
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And so when we talk about the subject of transmission, we have to consider the fact that this is a theological issue first.
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Why is it a theological issue first? If we believe that God gave us His word, and we believe that His word is true, and we believe that His word is for us, not just for the generations that received it, but for all generations, then that would encourage us to believe that we have the word of God as it was intended for us to have.
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And so that becomes a theological issue mentally.
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Because some people don't believe that.
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Some people say, I'm a Christian, but I don't believe the Bible.
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I really don't know how you reconcile that mentally.
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I don't know how you reconcile that because what you're saying is, well, God gave His word, but He didn't do anything to preserve His word.
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And preservation is part of transmission.
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Preservation is a theological concept that God not only gave His word, but He ensured that His people would always have His word.
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And I think that we can base the theological assertion, at least in part, on Isaiah 40 verse 8, because he says the word of God will stand forever.
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And Jesus says later in the Gospels that not one jot or tittle will pass away from the word of God.
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And so Jesus gets down to the very smallest letters and He says this book, this word, and we know Jesus is talking about the written word because He mentions two very small Hebrew markings.
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And He says the jot and the tittle.
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He says even these two things, not one comma or one period will pass away if we were to put it into a modern vernacular.
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Yes, sir? Absolutely, and that's true.
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And I'm going to talk about that later.
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But Jesus does use the Septuagint.
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The Septuagint is a translation.
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And He quotes from this as it's the Scripture.
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And the apostles did too.
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They quoted from translations with the confidence that this is still God's word.
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Can I hold up an English Bible and say this is God's word? Yes.
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Is it translated? Yes, but it still bears witness to the word of God.
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So why do we believe that what we have in our hands is accurate to what was written 2,000 years ago? I remember a few years ago, I may have told this story before, but it's funny how things stick out in your mind.
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A few years ago, I was at dinner.
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I remember where I was.
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I was at Pizza Hut of all places.
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I was on Dunn Avenue, Pizza Hut.
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I don't know why it was in my mind, but I'm having dinner with my mother and one of her friends.
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And we're sitting there talking.
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And while we're having dinner, the subject of the Bible came up.
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And she said, you know what I wish? I wish I could have a copy of the original Bible before King James came along and changed it.
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And I remember being very overwhelmed.
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So much so that I think I kind of choked on my pizza.
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Because the statement demonstrated a lack of historical knowledge and a willingness to believe the most outlandish of falsehoods.
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And that's what we end up running up against when we talk to people about the transmission of the Bible.
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People don't know, but they hear things.
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And they repeat things that are just foolish.
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And so it behooves us to understand some things about how the Bible came to be the way it is.
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And I thought about this too.
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This apologetic series will end eventually.
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Probably going to end sometime before August.
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Because we're going to take August off.
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But when we come back, I may do a series on just how we got the Bible.
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Because what I'm doing tonight is such a small, such a small bit.
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And I think it's good for Christians to know things like, do you know the King James Bible wasn't even the first English Bible? The first English translation of the Bible was translated from the Latin by John Wycliffe 300 years before the King James Bible.
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And the most popular Bible before the King James Bible was the Bishop's Bible and the Geneva Bible.
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Not the King James.
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In fact, when the King James Bible came into existence, it was considered a state translation.
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And it was not widely accepted by many people because it had the state's handprint on it.
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Sort of like if you had the United States translation or, heaven forbid, the Barack Obama translation.
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You might have a little issue with it.
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Or the Donald Trump translation.
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You might have a little issue with that Bible.
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And this Bible was dedicated to the King.
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So there were some issues with its translation.
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The Geneva Bible had much more widely read and circulated than the King James at the time.
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So my point is, there's so much here in the half hour, 45 minutes we're going to spend on this.
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We're not going to drop in the bucket.
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But I do want to give you some things to put in your mind to go with this series.
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Number one.
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I want to tell you three things that Christians claim are true and are not.
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There are three things I hear Christians say that are just not true.
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And you should at least know that you shouldn't use false arguments.
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You know that, right? You shouldn't say things that are not true.
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But Christians do.
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Either because they don't know or because they're self-deceived.
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They've convinced themselves of something that's not true.
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The first thing that's not true.
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God has preserved His Word in English through a perfect translation called the King James Bible.
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Now I realize that what I just said would get me run off of many churches.
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And that's okay.
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I'm not vying for popularity anywhere.
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I just want to please God.
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It is believed by many that the King James Bible is the absolutely perfect English translation of the Bible.
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And I want to say this before I say anything else.
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The King James Version is a beautiful translation.
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And it has majestic language.
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And most of what we remember, we often remember from King James English.
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Because that's how we grew up hearing it.
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Words like thou and thee.
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Words like whosoever.
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These are not normal words in modern vernacular, but it's words we understand because they're in the King James Bible.
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But I want to make a point.
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If you have your Bibles, turn with me to 1 John.
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Does anyone have a King James Bible? Okay.
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Well, turn to 1 John 5.
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Not John, but 1 John.
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The little small letter in the back.
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Go to 1 John 5.
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And go to verse 6.
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Everyone there? It says in verse 6, This is He who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ.
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Not by water only, but by water and the blood.
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And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is truth.
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For there are three that testify.
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The Spirit, and the water, and the blood, and these things agree.
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Alright, now.
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Is that what everybody else says? Is there anyone who says There are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.
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New King James, okay.
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Does it say that in NAS? It doesn't say that in NAS, does it? Verse 7, read verse 7 for me.
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But it doesn't say There are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.
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It doesn't say that, right? Yours does? What do you have? New King James, okay.
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That one phrase is called the Kama Yohanim.
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It is one of the most argued passages in the Bible.
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Because it is true, but it ain't in there.
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What do I mean? What it says is true.
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There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.
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That is true.
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But that phrase, which is not found in the ASV, it's not in the NASB, it is in the New King James, but it's not in your Bible, is it? It's not in your Bible, is it? That whole phrase is not part of 1 John's original writing.
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That particular phrase is known as a textual variant.
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And the variant itself was not introduced that we know of in the Greek until several hundred years after the writing of the New Testament.
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And I believe that it was introduced through the Latin.
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I believe that it was a Latin marginal note.
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You know what a marginal note is? Well, the people who had Bibles translated, they made marginal notes.
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I think how it got introduced, I can't prove this, but I think how it got introduced was there's all this talk of these three bearing witness.
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I think a marginal note was introduced in the Latin translation, which later became part of the recognized Scripture and was added in.
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But, and we're going to talk about textual variation later, but, here's the deal.
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Why? Do we even know about it? We know about it because we have the manuscripts.
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We have the Greek language manuscripts.
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And so we can go back and we can see that this was not part of the original.
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Now some people argue that it was.
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Those who hold to King James only-ism will say it absolutely had to have been part of the only one.
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But what's their argument? Because it's in the King James.
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It had to be part of the original.
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That's anachronistic arguments.
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That's arguing backward.
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And that's not how you argue.
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The text that underlies the King James Version, I just want to read this quickly.
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The text that underlies the King James Version comes from an edition that was edited by a man named Desiderius Erasmus.
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And that text became known as the Textus Receptus.
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When compiling the manuscripts for his text, Erasmus could not find any Greek source for that reading.
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But it was one very important reading to the church because they felt like it underlied the doctrine of the Trinity.
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And it was in the Latin.
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And for a thousand years, the Latin was the foundational use Bible of the church.
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Erasmus did not include that reading in his first edition or his second edition.
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But he did include it in his third edition under pressure from the church.
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That reading does not belong in the Bible.
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Doesn't.
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And in my opinion, I will stand on that.
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I've had arguments and debates with men on this.
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If that reading belongs in the Bible, then we have no way of having any certainty of what was ever supposed to be in the Bible.
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Because that reading did not make its way into the Greek manuscripts until hundreds of years later.
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It is not supposed to be there.
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So if somebody says the King James Bible is perfect, I go first on 5.7, has a reading that wasn't in the original.
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That's one of my arguments.
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I have others about the King James, but that's a big matzah ball hanging out there.
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Yes, sir.
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And they will think that it will relate back to the 1611 printing of the original King James.
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Yeah, but they're not using that.
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But that is, in 1769, it was re-translated from the old English to the new English.
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And people who have the 1611 version cannot read it.
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I have a copy of the 1611, and it doesn't look anything like what most people say is the King James Bible.
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Because most people are carrying a 1769 Blaney revision of the King James Bible.
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So even the Bible they're carrying and saying, this is it, is a revision.
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It's not the 1611.
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The 1611 had an entirely different way of writing.
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The S's looked like F's.
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It looked different.
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The language looked different.
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Again, if you're a King James purist, a person who says King James is a pure word of God, we can have this conversation another time.
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But from my perspective, if that's the argument you're using, I think it's a bad argument.
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Because I don't think it stands the test of scrutiny.
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If you're going to say the Bible is perfect, and I can trust it because God gave us the King James Bible, and that's the argument some people use, I think you're using a bad argument.
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Now, hopefully we'll get to that maybe at another time, but that's number one.
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Number two, the second thing that Christians will say, scribes never made mistakes.
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Scribes never made mistakes.
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I remember this particularly.
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I remember it in a Sunday school class.
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A man in the Sunday school class who was going on and on about how meticulous the scribes were, and how absolutely certain they were about counting the numbers of letters and making sure that they would take a string, and they would take the string to the two corners, and the one letter in the middle of where those two strings met had to be the same, or they'd throw the entire document away.
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And while that is certainly the case in certain sections of history where there were scribes in scriptoriums, even then, there were mistakes of writing.
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And I didn't bring it tonight, but I have a copy, a photographed copy of Codex Sinaiticus, one of the three major codexes of the first 500 years of the church.
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And you see in the codex marginal fixes.
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You ever write something, you mess it up, you make a line, and you write the...
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They did that.
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And you can see it.
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So to say scribes never made mistakes is just mythical.
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It ain't true.
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Now, we don't have a lot of...
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Again, I hate that I don't have the time I need, but just remember this.
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Also, Christians particularly, the New Testament was not copied in the first few hundred years.
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It was not copied in scriptoriums by scribes.
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It was copied by Christians who were on the run in general or were living in situations where they were not in the best economic situations.
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The idea of Christian scriptoriums, that didn't come about in the first couple centuries of the church.
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Now, I say that to say this.
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When we look at a papyri manuscript, papyri is...
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They would take the reed of the papyrus plant, they would flatten them, and then they would cross-thatch them with other reeds, and they would make what we would call paper.
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And there would be a smooth side and a hard side, and the smooth side was used for writing.
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We have manuscripts that are papyri manuscripts still today.
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These things have lasted 2,000 years.
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Could you imagine this lasting 2,000 years? This won't last two weeks.
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Put it out in the sun.
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It will dry up, and it will be brittle and fall apart.
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Their papyri manuscripts go back 2,000 years.
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But you know what we found out about them? The Christians wrote on both sides of them.
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And that wasn't what you were supposed to do because one side was rough and one side was smooth.
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You know why they wrote on both sides? Because they were poor.
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And because they wanted to get the Bible copied.
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And because they didn't have a lot of papyri to go around.
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So we'll find manuscripts that are written on both sides of the papyri, and we see them, and we see here is a group of people that were desperate to get this word out.
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And did they make mistakes? Yeah.
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So don't use that argument.
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Don't say the scribes never made mistakes.
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It's not true.
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Third, if ever a question about a manuscript comes up, all we have to do is consult the original documents.
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I've heard this many times.
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And you might think that you've heard me say that.
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I've never said it.
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I've never said that all we have to do is consult the original documents.
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Do you know why? Because the original documents no longer exist.
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We do not have an original copy of Mark.
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We do not have an original copy of Matthew.
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We do not have an original copy of anything Paul wrote.
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We don't.
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In fact, I think if we did, it would be a bad thing.
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Could you imagine what people would do if they had the original copy of Romans? People will worship a piece of bread that's toasted to look like the Virgin Mary.
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Can you imagine what they would do if they had the original writing of Romans? They would break their necks to try to bow down to it.
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When somebody says all we have to do is go back to the original documents, that's not true.
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Now you have heard me say we consult the original manuscripts.
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That's different.
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Manuscripts are copies.
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They're not the original documents.
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That's different.
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The autographs are the originals.
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They no longer exist.
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Wherever they went, they no longer exist.
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We have manuscript copies.
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That is what we possess.
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We do not have the original Mark, the original Matthew, none of that.
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So if you tell somebody, we'll just go back to the original document, you're misleading them.
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Now you might say the original manuscripts, the copies of the originals, or you might say the original language.
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You might have heard me say that.
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Because Greek and Hebrew were the original languages.
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And that's important, because again it comes back to transmission versus translation.
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But don't say we're going to show you the original Paul or the original Mark.
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You don't have it.
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Now so far, I may have busted some bubbles, because you may have come in here tonight thinking, well, this is how I would argue for the tenacity of the text, and if so, sorry to disappoint, because that's not how you do it.
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But even in spite of that, I'm going to give you nine, or rather eight propositions as to why I believe the Bible, in the form that we have it today, can be trusted.
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And I didn't make you have to fill one blank in.
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I did it because I wanted to make sure you got it right.
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I wanted to make sure, because this is a lot of words, but I wanted to make sure you have it exactly as I'm saying it.
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Because there's eight reasons.
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If somebody says, why do you believe the Bible the way you have it today can be trusted? I would say eight reasons.
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Eight reasons why I believe the Bible can be trusted as it is today.
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Number one, the scriptures are without error in the original manuscripts.
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I believe with all my heart that God gave us the word of God through Paul, Peter, John, and the rest of those who wrote it.
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And I believe that when they wrote, they wrote without error.
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The Bible says, pas, ha, I'm sorry, I'm thinking of the wrong word, pas grafe theanustas.
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All scripture is God-breathed.
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I believe that.
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I believe that the Bible is perfect because God is perfect.
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And I believe it was given to the men, Paul, Mark, Matthew, and the others, that when they put the hand to paper, when they put the pen to paper, they were doing so under the superintending of Almighty God.
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That again is a theological argument, but it is my first argument.
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Why do you believe the Bible is true? Because I believe it's God's word.
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And the first thing is, I believe it came to us without error.
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That's one.
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Number two, we no longer have the original manuscripts.
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As I've already said, that's a good thing.
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What we do have is a text that represents the results of critical study of a vast manuscript tradition.
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Now I know a lot of times, us especially as non-Catholics, we tend to be, that word tradition gets us a little hot under the collar.
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I don't like that word tradition.
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Let me tell you something.
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When I say a vast manuscript tradition, I'm using it in the sense that we don't have one copy, but we have over 5,000 copies of the New Testament alone in its original language that span everywhere from the early 2nd century all the way into the 15th century.
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We have handwritten copies outweighing, the last number I have is 5,752, but that was in November 2008.
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That number has risen since then.
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That's almost 10 years ago.
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But just going back to that point, 5,752 manuscripts.
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We ain't got the original, but we sure enough got a lot of copies.
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And these manuscripts are broken up into various types, and time won't allow me to get into this too far, but I do want to mention this.
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The original manuscripts, the original Bible was written on papyrus, and papyrus manuscripts go until about the 2nd century, between the 2nd and the 3rd century.
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Then you have written on vellum.
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Do you know what vellum is? Vellum is animal skin.
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That tends to last longer.
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It holds up better than papyrus.
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And we have those dating from the 3rd century on.
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Well, actually 4th century.
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Say 4th century on, you have vellum manuscripts.
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And then from about the 9th century, we have what are called minuscules.
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I forget that.
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M-I-N-U-S-C-U-L-E-S.
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Minuscules.
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Minuscules is when the Greek language underwent a massive shift in how it was written.
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The Greek language, when it was written during the time of the apostles, was written in all capital letters.
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No spaces, no punctuation.
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All capital letters, no spaces, no punctuation.
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Now, they had a method for reading it, and then we know those methods today for how they read it and understood it.
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And if that's all we ever knew, then we'd know how to do it too.
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But most of us grew up with capital letters and lowercase letters, and spaces, and punctuation.
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Well, those things were introduced into the Greek in the 9th century.
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So if you look at a manuscript that has lowercase letters and uppercase letters, and has spaces, and you know that that comes after the 9th century.
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But if you're looking at a manuscript that is all capital letters, all runs together, there is no spaces, then you know that it possibly could go back as far as the 4th, even up to the 2nd century.
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So that's how they identify the dating of these manuscripts, and they know how old they are, also based on other factors, but that's one of the ways that they understand that.
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So even though we don't have the originals, we have thousands and thousands of copies, even family lines of copies.
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Like, if there's one that has a particular variant, they can trace the variant back to when it was introduced.
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You understand? Because you'll have thousands over here that won't have that variant.
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So you can take that one back and say, okay, well here's where the guy made a mistake, or here's where the scribe did something incorrect, and they can trace that back because they have family lines of manuscripts.
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Number three.
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Variants do exist in these manuscripts, yet because of the vast amount of copies, these variants are easily recognizable.
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I just said that, so I'm pretty much just reiterating.
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There are two kinds of variants.
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There's intentional and unintentional.
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What would be an unintentional variant? Well, there's something called homo eteluton.
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Homo eteluton is when you have the end of a sentence, and the next sentence ends the same way, or a similar way.
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Homo eteluton means similar endings.
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And whole lines are missing from certain manuscripts because the scribe read to the end, and he's copying, and he skips a line because the end of this sentence was the same as the end of this sentence, and so they find a missing line.
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And then guess what? The next one who copies off of him has a missing line, and they can follow that all the way back.
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They also have one guy, funny, you know how you have columns? Like a column here, that's column one and column two, and the words are like this and like this? Well, they had one guy who didn't realize there was a column break, and he literally didn't read the language, so he just literally just copied straight across.
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And so it makes no sense because he didn't read the language.
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He was copying letter for letter, and he missed the break, and his doesn't make any sense.
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But we can see where it came from.
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We can see, and anybody who copied off of him, it's easily recognizable that they didn't know either.
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But then there are intentional variants.
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Those are what we call unintentional.
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People did it ignorantly or didn't know, made a mistake, and that happens.
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But what's an intentional variant? I'll give you an example.
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I don't have time to go read it, but if you go to the model prayer, we say it every Sunday.
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Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
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Thy kingdom come.
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Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us of our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.
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We say trespasses, but King James says debts.
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Anyhow, you go to Luke.
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Luke has the model prayer also.
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In Luke chapter 11, the original Greek of Luke is shorter than Matthew's.
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It leaves out part of the prayer.
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Most of your modern translations have that shorter version.
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But the King James Bible, the one in Luke is the same as the one in Matthew.
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Why? Because at some point, a scribe balanced them.
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Because he saw, here's this prayer, has less than this.
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And so in an attempt to harmonize, he simply brought in what he felt was missing.
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But you see, you say, oh, that's scary to think somebody has the power to do that.
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He didn't do it without us knowing because he couldn't get all the thousands of copies and make all the changes.
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When he did that, we can see it.
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He ain't fooling nobody.
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We got you.
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That's the way this works.
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That's the beauty of the New Testament.
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There's never been a time where anyone could go out and collect all the manuscripts and say, okay, now we're going to change this.
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We'll make Jesus God.
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Oh, we're going to make Jesus born of a virgin.
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We're going to get all the manuscripts.
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There's never been a time in history where all the manuscripts could be collected.
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Not only do we have 5700 plus Greek manuscripts, we have Syriac, we have Coptic, we have Latin, all going back to the 2nd century, 3rd century, 4th century.
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There's no way you could collect all that and say, okay, now we're going to take out that part about hell or we're going to add something about that.
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It would have been absolutely impossible.
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You see, that's the way God preserved his word through the copious amount of writing.
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It could never be given a wholesale change that could not later be recognized and dealt with.
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Number four.
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Moving, moving, moving.
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The overwhelming majority of variants are either not viable or meaningless.
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Because you might hear somebody say, well, I know the Bible translations have variants.
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And I've even heard it said that there are more variants than there are words in the New Testament.
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That's actually true.
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There are more variants than there are words if you count all the variants and you count all the words.
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Here's the problem.
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Everything is a variant that's not the same as the one before.
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So if somebody writes Christ Jesus instead of Jesus Christ, it's a variant.
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If somebody misspells Christos and leaves out a letter, that's a variant.
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And you're talking about just the New Testament, 27 books times 5,700 manuscripts, some of varying degrees of how much of the New Testament they contain.
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Is it any real wonder why there would be so many variants? We're talking about things that are either meaningless or not viable.
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For instance, there's Mark 1, 41.
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There's a textual variant.
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The Bible says Jesus saw this man who came to him and he was moved with compassion.
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Okay? The word there for compassion is splotnestheis.
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A nice word for compassion.
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Splotnestheis.
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But there's another variant and the word is orgestheis.
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Orgestheis.
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Orgestheis means moved with anger.
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If you read it in context, this is someone Jesus loves, a person comes to him, and the text says he was moved with compassion.
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But one translation, one manuscript says orgestheis, moved with anger.
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And here's the funny thing.
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That one manuscript alone is considered to be one of the worst manuscripts because there's so many intentional errors in it.
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It actually by itself includes a commentary on the text and is by itself responsible for many, many manuscript variations.
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The guy who wrote it was a nut.
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We know he was a nut.
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It's a nut.
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Make it clear.
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He's a nut.
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It really is not hard to understand.
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This one manuscript by itself is responsible for several variations, intentional variations.
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Okay, we have it.
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We can compare it to all the others and say this guy was a nut.
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Okay, so we got it.
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Now, I mentioned earlier a meaningful and viable.
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Now, if I had time, I'd go into more, but very quickly, a viable, that's not viable because it's only in one copy and it doesn't affect any others and it's obvious that it was an intentional error.
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But a meaningful, it is meaningful because if it did, if it was the right reading, it would change the meaning.
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So it's meaningful but not viable.
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Some are viable but not meaningful.
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But the vast majority are neither viable nor meaningful.
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Somebody asked a question, well, how significant are textual variations in the grand scheme of things? Well, they're significant if you've never heard of them before.
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That's why I like to teach on them because if somebody comes up to you and says something to you about it, you should at least understand a little bit about it to be able to respond.
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But I want to just give you an idea from some scholars about how important these are.
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A.T.
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Robertson said he believed that only 1,000, a 1,000th part of the entire text was of any real concern and he said that would make the New Testament 99.9% free of any real concern for textual criticism.
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Are there texts that are concerns? Yes, but it's very, very, very few that we have to even discuss.
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The vast majority of textual variation is either meaningless or unviable or both.
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So when somebody comes up and says, well, there's more variations than there are words, say you heard somebody say that but you don't even know what it means.
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Tell me what it means and show me a variant that is meaningful and viable and we'll discuss its history.
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I have a book on my desk with every major variant and when I say every major, it's not even every major.
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Pretty much every variant in the New Testament, it's a commentary on every one of them that traces them back to where they were introduced and how they were introduced and where they came into play.
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I use it all the time just when I'm studying.
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If I come to a text where there's a variant, I want to know so that I can make commentary on it if I need to when I'm preaching.
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Philip Comfort's New Testament commentary.
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New Testament textual critical commentary.
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It's a very important book.
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Number five.
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And these last few are very short so I'll do them quickly.
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Number five.
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No one variant changes or distorts any doctrine as no doctrine is based upon any single text.
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If somebody says, well, 1 John 5.7 is a pretty meaningful variant because it takes out a reference to the Trinity.
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Well, guess what? The Trinity is not based on 1 John 5.7.
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In fact, if you read the first three centuries of the church and their arguments for the Trinity, they didn't use 1 John 5.7.
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They argued for the Trinity without that text.
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Now, in later creeds and confessions, they would make reference to that text because it was introduced in Latin.
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But it's not...
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You would think that would be the passage at Nicaea when they're arguing about the deity of Christ.
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Look here.
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1 John 5.7 wasn't the issue.
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Bart Ehrman is a textual critical scholar who doesn't believe the Bible.
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He actually is an agnostic.
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And I met him.
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And he is very intelligent, but he is an unbeliever.
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And he was asked one time on a radio show from an unbeliever.
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The guy said, hey, Bart, what do you think the Bible really said before all these textual variants? Because Bart has made his money and he has amassed a small fortune.
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On these textual variants, he writes books about them, misquoting Jesus and all these things.
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He writes books about these variants.
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And the guy asked him, point blank, what do you think the Bible really taught before all these variants were introduced? And Bart Ehrman, without missing a beat, he said the same thing it teaches today.
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The variants don't change it.
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We know what it said and we know what they meant.
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So when they start claiming, well, Bart Ehrman said this or Bart Ehrman said that, yeah, he said that the Bible says the same thing it said 2,000 years ago.
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It doesn't change it.
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Number six, the New Testament is the single best documented work of antiquity.
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Boy, how I wish I had time for this.
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Because I want you to turn your paper over.
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On the back of your sheet, I've put here two things for you.
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One is the number of manuscript copies.
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Because when you say there's 5,700 manuscript copies, somebody might say, well, that doesn't sound like very many.
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Do you know how many manuscript copies there are of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars? That's one of the writings that date back to the ancient times.
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Ten.
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Ten manuscripts exist.
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Do you know when those ten manuscripts, the earliest one that we have, 1,000 years after it was written.
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There are ten manuscripts and the earliest one we have is 1,000 years after it was written.
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Pliny the Younger's Natural History, we have seven manuscripts, they date back to 750 years after it was written.
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Plato, seven manuscripts, 1,300 years after it was written.
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Tacitus, 20 manuscripts, 1,000 years after it was written.
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Homer's Iliad, the most renowned book of ancient Greece, is the second best preserved work of history.
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Outside the Bible, it is the second best preserved work of history.
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It has 643 manuscripts with 764 disputed lines of text, compared to 40 lines in the New Testament by the way.
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And you see at the bottom, over 500 years after it was written, is the earliest copies we have.
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Now compare the Bible.
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The Bible has over 5,000 copies.
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And those copies date back to within one century of the first.
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Actually, some believe that they were written within a generation.
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We have copies of the Gospel of John, a copy of the Gospel of John, a manuscript of the Gospel of John.
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It's not the whole Gospel, the fragments of a copy of the manuscript of the Gospel of John that go back to the earliest part of the second century, possibly the late part of the first century, which would put the writer, the copyist, in the same time period as John himself, the writer, because he lived to the latter part of the first century.
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It's not even a close call.
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The greatest works of antiquity don't touch it by a mile.
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Bart Ehrman, in his debate with James White, James asked this question.
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He said, look, the Bible has all of this attestation and these other works.
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And he said, but it's a large span of time.
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It's enormous.
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20 years, 40 years.
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He said, that's an enormous amount of time.
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And he said, but what about Julius Caesar? What about Homer's Iliad? You're talking about hundreds of years, 500 years.
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And he said, well, that's ginormous.
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It's not even close.
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It borders, it has to be considered miraculous.
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The fact that we have so many, not even to be compared with anything else in the ancient world.
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We have more copies, and our copies are older.
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Number seven, the New Testament is the most open religious document in history, readily acknowledging the textual critical issues in its own footnotes.
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You will not open a copy of the Koran, and look at the bottom, and say, oh, here's where there's a variant reading.
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But you have your Bible.
52:07
Open it up to 1 John 5, 7.
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Look at the bottom, and you'll see that it says that there's a variant reading here.
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Open it to the end of Luke, chapter 7.
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You know that story of Jesus, where the woman came and was thrown at His feet? And He said, let the one who was without sin cast the first stone.
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That entire section of Luke is a textual variant.
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In fact, it is believed by many, including me, that it wasn't a part of what Luke wrote.
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You say, oh, now I'm really scared.
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Beloved, I believe it's true.
52:52
I just don't believe Luke wrote it.
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I believe it's the most beautiful story not in the Bible.
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I didn't say that, though.
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One of the great Greek scholars said that.
53:05
He said, it's a great story, it's a wonderful truth, but it's just not part of Luke's writing.
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And that's okay, because we can look back at the Greek manuscripts.
53:12
We see that.
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And I want you to do this.
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Go open your Bibles, and go to Luke, chapter 7, and verse 53, and you'll see brackets there, because your Bible tells you that it's there.
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I want to go there.
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I'll show you.
53:29
You go to Luke, chapter 7.
53:40
I'm sorry, am I in the wrong text? Yeah.
53:46
I'm sorry, Luke.
53:48
I have it in my notes here.
54:09
I'm sorry, John 7, 53.
54:11
I don't know why I kept saying Luke.
54:12
Oh, I know why I said Luke.
54:13
Because in one of the manuscripts, the story shows up in Luke.
54:17
But it's John 7, 53 through 8, 11.
54:20
John 7, 53 through 8, 11.
54:22
But it shows up in the Gospel of Luke.
54:26
It's a floating story.
54:27
It was a likely true story from the life of Jesus Christ, but it had to find a place to land.
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And it landed in John 7, verse 53.
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And what does it say in the ESV? Through 8, 11.
54:45
The earliest manuscripts do not include...
54:46
So what does your Bible have that other historic documents don't have? John 7, 53 through 8, 11.
54:57
John 7.
55:10
John 7.
55:11
You see, right below that, it should say, the early manuscripts do not include 7, 53 through 8, 11.
55:18
But the point that I'm making is your Bibles will tell you these things.
55:23
It tells you about the variations.
55:26
It tells you about where the questions are.
55:28
It tells you where you need to study if you have questions.
55:30
You won't find that in other works.
55:34
Like I said, and I'm not bashing on Muslims tonight.
55:42
Yeah, they have had a wholesale revision, the Uthmanic revision.
55:47
I wish I had time to go into it, but I don't.
55:48
But that's true.
55:51
Lastly, number 8, and we'll be done.
55:55
God's providential preservation of the New Testament differs from His preservation of the Old Testament, but both have been miraculously preserved.
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The Old Testament was written in the Jewish community, and it was kept within the Jewish community, and it was passed down through scriptoriums and scribes, and it was meticulously handled.
56:16
The New Testament did not have that in the early stages of the Christian community, but there were so many copies that were written, it would be impossible for it to ever be given a wholesale revision because so much had gone out into the world.
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So can we say that both Testaments were preserved differently? Yes.
56:36
But can we say that both Testaments were preserved faithfully? Also, yes.
56:45
Someone says, and this is the last thing, someone says, well, what do we do when we come to a question about a reading? You've been preaching tonight about textual variance.
56:54
Obviously you believe that variance exists, and obviously you believe that there are times when we're going to have to make a decision.
56:59
What do we do when we come to a textual variant? Well, as I said earlier, none of those textual variants can ever be used to refute or to disprove any single doctrine of Scripture, because there is no doctrine of Scripture which is based on one single text.
57:19
If you ever have somebody who tries to convince you of something from the Bible based on one single text, you can know that they are not telling you the truth because there is no doctrine that's based on one single text.
57:32
The reason for that is something called the Analogium Scriptorium.
57:36
The Analogium Scriptorium, the analogy of Scripture.
57:38
Scripture bears witness to itself.
57:42
And that's how you know if what you believe in Scripture is true, because it bears witness with all of the Bible, not just one verse.
57:50
What we have to realize is that there are going to be times where there will be variant readings, and we have to be honest, and we have to say sometimes we are going to have to make a decision.
57:59
Like I said, I've made a decision about the pericope adultery.
58:02
That's the story of the woman caught in adultery.
58:05
I believe in my heart that it's not part of the original.
58:07
I believe that based upon the studies that I have done.
58:10
Now, could somebody come along and convince me otherwise? Possibly.
58:14
But it doesn't change a thing about what I believe about Jesus or what I believe about the Word of God.
58:20
And if I didn't know it was there, some hot-shot theolog might come along one day and say, oh, you didn't even know about this.
58:29
No, I knew it was there.
58:30
I've read the literature.
58:32
I've read the arguments.
58:34
And I know what I believe.
58:38
Dr.
58:38
James White says this.
58:40
He says it's not as if we're dealing with a thousand-piece puzzle, and we only have 950 pieces.
58:47
He says what we have is a thousand-piece puzzle, and we have a thousand and fifty pieces.
58:53
We have some parts that have been included that shouldn't have been, and some parts that have been moved that shouldn't have been.
58:59
But the original is there.
59:01
Nothing has been lost.
59:03
Nothing has been removed.
59:05
We have a faithful text.
59:08
And part of what we do as Christians is we critically examine the text, not to put God on trial, but to know that what we are reading is in fact His Word.
59:18
The original is here.
59:20
God has preserved it in a vast manuscript tradition, and we can be confident and trust the Word.
59:25
And when I read the Word, I say, this is the Word of the Lord.
59:32
Let's pray.
59:33
Father, I thank You for Your Word tonight.
59:35
I pray that it's been helpful and fruitful for Your people, and that You'll use it to instruct and to encourage and to move us forward in our faith.
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In Jesus' name, amen.