Reliability of the New Testament-Session 1

And, there we go, and so, so far on this trip already

I have experienced temperatures significantly lower than Phoenix has ever experienced in its entire recorded history.

And two days ago I woke up in Oklahoma, someplace outside of Oklahoma City, I don't fly anymore,

I am driving in a, I have a fifth wheel, and my truck is right outside here, and so that's how

I get around these days. And I woke up with snow everywhere, and I have never, any

RVers, anybody who's done some RVing? A couple, wow, all the rest of you are like, nope, have no interest in it, we prefer hotels and stuff like that, okay, fine.

Well, you have to break down, you have to disconnect all your stuff and put all your stuff away, and so that was the first time

I had ever done that in the snow before, and then I'm parked out next to a lake out here in St.

Peter's, and the wind is whipping off this huge ice cube, and so it's, and that just cuts straight through you,

I'm going to tell you something, that's great. So I'm really thankful, those of you who have been here before know that I like to bring my coogies with me, this time they are functional, very functional, and this is a cashmere coogie, everyone in a cashmere sweater?

It is incredibly warm, I may melt before we get done tonight, but you put this under a nice jacket like that, and at least from here to here,

I'll live, the rest of me is going to just freeze up and fall off. So I got an email from the seminary, since I was here last, we missed 2021, just barely, sort of.

I was supposed to be here the first week in December, we had to follow wisdom and delay that for a little bit, but since I was here last,

I have now taken a position as the professor of Church History and Apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary down in Conway.

You may have heard of Jeffrey Johnson, Owen Strand, Scott Anial, are some of the people on staff down there in Conway now, and so I'm going to be heading down there, and the seminary sent me an email this morning, that they know that I'm driving in, and I'm staying in my unit, in my fifth wheel, and they sent me a thing and said, we're sure you're following the weather developments, which in the middle of the

United States is, well, that'll change in five minutes, how can you even predict it?

But it said, we're expecting single digits in Conway for the low on Thursday when you get here.

Are you going to be okay? It's like, well, actually, the

Lord was really good to us, we had no idea what we were doing when we started getting into this, and somehow, we ended up getting a unit that has the

Arctic four insulation package on it, and so it's actually working pretty well for me.

And so, it's good to be with you, hey, Van, how you doing there, bro? All right, good to see you, good to see you, we missed a year, but we're just going to consider this for December of 2021, is that all right?

I don't want to mess everything up, and I keep telling Ken, I said, look, I can even get you a new speaker,

I mean, he's brilliant, you need something, I mean, you are such a creature of habit, but we need to break this habit, you need to find a younger man,

I'm getting old, okay, I'm going to hook you up with Jason Lyle for December, and you'll see, there you go, a lot of you are going, yeah, let's do it, and I can do that,

Jason's a good friend. You both can come. I'm sorry? You both can come. Well, no, no, no, no,

Jason Lyle is probably the most intelligent man I've ever met, his

IQ is so far beyond mine that it would make me look really stupid, so no, we don't, I don't want to be on the same stage, because then

I'll look really bad, so anyways, no, seriously, it's good to be back here. This is sort of the first weekend of an extended trip, like I said,

I'll be teaching in Conway next week, and the weekend after that, I'm debating a subject that I'm sure all of you are going to be driving all the way down to Houston to attend the debate on middle knowledge,

I mean, because everyone's talking about middle knowledge, right? I mean, I'm sure most of you over dinner were having discussions about middle knowledge, and you were?

Yeah, see, there you go, and yeah, there are a few people that are really interested in that subject, but not too many, but we're going to be having a debate down there the weekend after that, and I don't get home until the 15th of February, and my wife was probably, she was probably looking,

I think my wife probably is enjoying that I'm gone right now, but we're moving her mother into a new home two days later, so she wants me home, so that's sort of my deadline to get back.

So prayers for traveling mercies in the cold would be great, I appreciate that, so far so good.

So this evening, when you look at the subject of the

Windows splash screen, that's nice, I don't know if I can handle that personally, because I'm a

Mac guy, so that just sort of feels, besides that, Bill Gates is behind this, which means he's probably listening to everything that we're saying right now, so we'll have to throw the splash screen back up there for the conference.

I have presented on the subject of New Testament reliability, the transmission of the text of Scripture for decades, literally, and it's fascinating for me,

I was thinking about this before we came here, it's fascinating to think about the fact that what has happened over the past couple of years has provided us, in a sense, a new perspective, it's forcing us to approach this subject, it's not like the subject itself has changed, but its importance for us as Christian people, it has changed.

How so? Well, even before COVID hit, and even before all the lockdowns and the fundamental change of society, there were things happening that were demonstrating to many of us that there were many

Christians who spoke of, would even use terms like inerrancy, which outside the

United States, in places like Europe, is almost a sign of your backwoods hickiness, in essence, to believe something like that.

But there were people who would, back in, you know, I'd speak at conferences,

I'm thinking of one man, I spoke at a conference with him in 2008, and there would have been no thought in my mind about major differences between us on key fundamental issues.

But starting in about 2018, I began seeing, and I was a little bit slow, I was slow to get to it, many other people saw it long before I did,

I started seeing major movements, not only on the part of individuals, but entire organizations, and of course, some organizations like the

Southern Baptist Convention are in grave danger of major splits, there are people, there are churches already leaving over many of these issues, and they reflected on the nature of Scripture, its normative place in Christian theology, not so much its transmission over time, but whether it has ever intended, was ever intended by God to be sufficient as the source for the church to go to to understand

God's purposes for the church at all. And it was becoming very clear that there were many people who were adopting the idea that while Scripture can provide an external normative framework, that when it comes to the actual application, the idea of Scriptural sufficiency was being sacrificed.

Now, thinking through sufficiency is vital for every single generation.

I don't care if you were living in the days of, well, let's think about it this way, what if you were living, okay, let's do a quick church history quiz here, how many of you feel very, very, very, very confident that you would be able to answer the one question that I always say will be on the final exam of any church history test that I give, and that is the date, only to the year, the date of the

Council of Nicaea. How many of you know when the Council of Nicaea was? You are very confident.

Okay, alright. That was about a quarter to a third of our audience.

So, one more time. Impatient, aren't we? That's about a quarter or a third of the audience.

And so, when the time comes for the final, just remember, write it down, that the

Council of Nicaea was in AD 325, 325 AD is when the

Council, oh, you had said you knew? Oh, see, some of you were putting your hands up, you were sort of guessing, but I should have called on a few people to see how that worked.

Let's say you lived in 325, and the Council of Nicaea is the, is one of the greatest turning points in Christian history.

Why? Because only 12 years earlier, Christian persecution ended in the

Roman Empire. And so, from 303 to 313 was the period of the most severe persecution of Christians by the

Roman Empire. It was full out, all out, from one end to the other, track the

Christians down, and if they will not sacrifice the Emperor, you kill them. It was a very, very bloody and difficult 10 years.

Many, many, many people died. So, only 12 years, well, we'll take questions later on.

So, only 12 years later, the Emperor calls a

Council of the Church. That's fast. 12 years earlier, the

Emperor was the greatest enemy of the Church. 12 years earlier, you were willing to die to not say,

Kaiser Kurios, Caesar is Lord. Because you say, Jesus Kurios, Jesus is

Lord. And many have died before you. And so, the

Caesar was considered to be the, the Antichrist, the very person opposing the

Christian faith. And now, in only 12 years, not only does he call this

Council, but he's in attendance. And he's claiming to be a

Christian. Now why call a Council? Why would you even call the very first, what's called

Ecumenical Council, worldwide Council of the Christian Church? Because there was a great debate raging.

And the debate was, is Jesus truly God? Or is he like God, but a creature?

Now, immediately, the question that I would have for all of you to think about is, is the

Bible sufficient to answer that question? And there were obviously some in that day that made the argument that no, it really isn't, that wasn't its intention.

And if you're familiar with the solution of the Church at that time, the terminology that was adopted by the

Council of Nicaea was not Biblical terminology. Because the

Arians, the people who were following Arius, who said that Jesus, there was a time when the

Son did not exist. The Son is an exalted creature. The Son is the greatest of all of God's creations, but He is not truly

God in and of Himself. Arius could come up with a way of explaining any text of Scripture.

And if you've ever met with a sharp Jehovah's Witness, you know that that's pretty much what they can do too.

And so that makes you think about the sufficiency of Scripture, because the only way to detect an

Arian was to use a term that was not derived from Scripture, but the defenders of this approach would say it is necessitated by Scripture.

And so if you're familiar with the history of this particular council, you know that the term was homoousios, of the same substance, confessing that you can't divide up the substance of God and you can't have

Jesus being a God, or a sort of God, or heteroousios, of a different substance than the

Father, or even homoousios, of a similar substance. No, the only way to actually be able to go, ah, you're an

Arian, was to use a term that they simply could not affirm, and that was homoousios.

And so we immediately have to start thinking, okay, so if we believe in sola

Scriptura, Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith of the Church, it's because it's the only thing that we have that's

God -breathed. It's what God has breathed out and revealed. And we believe in tota

Scriptura, all of Scripture, you don't get to just do the red letters, or the books you happen to like, and you have to skip over the genealogies, and a couple of the judges and stuff, that's some creepy stuff in there, see?

And so, the way that most people handle the Bible, if you believe that it's sola Scriptura and tota

Scriptura, then you have to take everything that the Scripture teaches, and when you do that, you realize that the

Scriptures are teaching that Jesus is identified as Yahweh, He is

Yahweh come in human flesh, He is the creator of all things, He's eternal, and that is the foundation, then, of using non -biblical terminology, such as homoousios, to detect people who are fundamentally denying certain elements of biblical revelation.

So, the Scriptures remain sufficient, but you have to apply them when challenges come up to the

Church, and that's really been what a lot of the history of the Church has been about. And that is, when you bring the

Gospel out into the world, it's one thing to bring that Gospel into the Jewish world in the first century, but very quickly, you're now having to,

Paul is going to Athens and meeting with the Greek philosophers, and they're going to be asking very different questions than the people in the synagogue in Capernaum were asking about who

Jesus was. And so, there is a need to take that Scripture and that Scriptural truth, and to express that in a way that people will be able to understand what it is that is revealed in Scripture itself.

Now, obviously, in the process of that, as early as the second century, immediately questions about, well, what was originally written, came to the fore.

So, if you've read any of the early Church Proverbs, and I encourage you to look into, you don't have to read everything.

We obviously don't have a large portion of what was written in the ancient world.

We have fragments of what has come down to us, certainly we have complete works from certain people, but in almost any of the early

Church Fathers, there's things they wrote that we don't have, and sometimes all we have is fragmentary records of what they did.

But it's always good to know where we came from, and I think there are some people, I was certainly raised in a range of Evangelical Christianity that did not have a great respect for the people that came before us.

But when you do read some of them, you read someone like Justin Martyr. And Justin Martyr, of course, that was not the name his mom gave him.

Just think that one through a second, you'll get it. It's late in the evening, he just had something to eat.

But that's the name that history would give him, because he was a martyr for the faith. But he was a philosopher who was converted to Christ.

Throughout his entire life, he continued to wear the pallium, the cloak of the philosopher, even as a

Christian. And he had an extensive dialogue with a Jewish man by the name of Trifo, Trifo the

Jew. And when Justin would seek to show

Trifo where the scriptures prophesied the coming of Jesus, this is where we start running into Trifo saying, you

Christians have changed that. That's not what we have in our Hebrew. And immediately you start seeing that the early church was primarily using the

Greek translation of the Old Testament. And there are numerous differences between the Greek translation and the

Hebrew text of the scriptures. And so this has always been an issue that every generation has struggled with.

And up until the modern period, that was viewed very differently than we view it today.

Because you see, you can be born and raised in a Christian church today, and there are certain churches where everybody uses the same

English translation of the Bible. And so you've never encountered a difference. Now today, everybody's got one of these things, and there's 47 different English translations on here.

And so it's sort of hard to avoid that. But for a long time, a lot of us were just like, well, this is just the

Bible, this is simply what I've been given. And up until this modern period, the vast majority of Christians, A, never owned a

Bible. I mean, you look at some of the full Bibles that we've found,

Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, those things would have cost, in modern money, thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to produce.

So the vast majority of Christians didn't have that kind of money. And so their exposure to the

Scriptures was in church, was hearing the Scriptures read. And so the freedom you have to access the

Scriptures and to read the Scriptures in that way is a relatively modern thing. And then to have such uniformity.

Because up until Gutenberg prints the Bible in 1453, and of course even then it's going to take hundreds of years before you start getting really mass -produced

Bibles available to a large number of people, you would have manuscripts, and they would be handwritten, and they would only be of a certain part of the

Bible. And that's how everybody got along. And so, all of that to shine some light on the fact that as we approach this subject in 2022, we are coming into a time period where there are many

Christians who are saying that the Bible is insufficient outside of adopting a particular interpretive matrix that will allow it to speak to a hyper -secularized society.

And others are saying that matrix of interpretation needs to be derived from certain sources outside of Scripture.

Now, we've done twice, I think now, over the past number of years when I've come here, we have addressed critical theory and issues along those lines.

And I'm not getting into that this time around. But it is an important thing to realize that the debates that we had only a few years ago would sound very incomplete in 2022, because we wouldn't be addressing all this new stuff.

And I think for a lot of Christians, that makes us feel a little imbalanced.

It's like, how could things have changed so quickly? And now, I was just sort of starting to feel comfortable with that,

I had some idea of how we got the New Testament, but now there's all these new questions that are being asked about whether we should reject, for example, the formation of the canon, because there were inappropriate authority structures, power structures.

Everything's power and oppression today, right? There were inappropriate power structures that were involved in the selection of the books of the canon, and maybe that should be reopened, and all sorts of stuff like this.

And when we encounter that kind of stuff, it leaves us probably a little bit hesitant to be as bold in raising the witness of Scripture as we should be.

And we all know, in most situations, there's a small opening that'll happen in a conversation, and the thought crosses your mind, you know,

I could go through that door. He's just said something, and without twisting his words or anything like that,

I could really move into a presentation of the Gospel and Christ's authority in this situation, and so on and so forth.

But if there's a hesitation on our part, very frequently that door slams shut. And my concern would be that we hesitate because there are just so many voices saying, that's not enough, that book's not enough, you need to have all these other things going along with it.

And so, you combine that with the fact that we now live in such a massively secular age.

For me, as, you know, I was just thinking, I was in my late thirties the first time

I came here, and that seems like a very, very long time ago now, especially since my youngest child just turned thirty -three, so it has been a long time, and I feel this massive gap between me and what's called the

Z -Gen, or whatever you call it, the eighteen to twenty -four year olds, because I was raised in a very, very, very, very different time, with very different assumptions and presuppositions.

And when it came to the text of Scripture, there was a general respect for the

Bible in the 1960s, and if you weren't around, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Sure there were many people who were already rejecting it and weren't living in light of it, but it wasn't the kind of wholesale embracing of a secular worldview that we now have, which would literally put us in the situation today where you have a man who competes in swimming on the collegiate level, and then decides he's a woman, and starts competing with the women, and the culture goes, that's a good thing, and it's wonderful that she is winning all of these races, and this is great, and if her teammates don't like it, and someone from my era is going, what is going on here?

How can this be? And yet there are people in that generation that that's just what they've been raised with, that's the whole worldview.

And a part of that worldview is a fundamental skepticism, a fundamental skepticism about any claim to supernatural revelation, and any claim to objective truth.

Everything is subjective truth now. I mean, if that guy who thinks he's a gal experiences that feeling, well that becomes that person's truth, and we are all supposed to somehow adopt ourselves, and adapt ourselves to that person's truth.

I'm not sure how any of that works, to be perfectly honest with you, but that's where they're coming from.

And so when we come to someone and say, well there's actually this truth from God, and it has been passed down from generation to generation, and it goes all the way back to the time of Christ, many in the secular mind, that actually instead of being a good thing, is a negative thing.

It's rooted in the bad times, in the times of darkness.

And you see, now we've had the Enlightenment, even if they don't know what that actually involved, now we've had the

Enlightenment, and that's why you see people who are willing to fundamentally destroy our own history, and get rid of what actually happened in our own nation, on the idea that we don't want to offend anybody, as if what happened in history didn't happen in history.

I don't know that I've ever seen a generation that has less desire to be connected to the generations that came before it, than the young generation now.

And what's frightening about that, I think most of you who have become adults and started thinking these things through, having your first child helps you start thinking about this, believe you me, having grandchildren really makes you think about this.

When you don't look back and see yourself in light of all those that have come before you and realize they were just like you, and hence seek to judge them with some type of grace that you'd want to have extended toward yourself, those same people do not look forward to the next generations and feel any responsibility to work toward the betterment of their own grandchildren and great -grandchildren.

And when you think about it, I don't care what your politics are, over the past two years your great -grandchildren have been indebted and turned into indentured servants, and most people don't give a slightest care, because we don't think about anything other than our own 401k, our own retirement, and our own feelings of accomplishment.

And a society that falls into that trap is in grave, grave danger, but what it reflects is an attitude that Christians should not have.

Speaking to Christians, have you read our Bibles? How often does the

Bible direct us to think back to God's faithfulness in the past, point us to those who experienced

God's faithfulness? I mentioned today, I did a dividing line from the unit, and what does

Joseph do? What do a number of the patriarchs do?

They put up piles of stones, and we all sing the hymn, and I've made sure you all know, the second stanza, here

I raise my, can someone say it right? Evan Eitzer, Evan Eitzer, it's a

Hebrew phrase, Evan is stone, Eitzer help, stone of help, it's a memorial that you put up, here

I raise my Evan Eitzer, hither by thy help I'm come, right?

So that was referring back to that practice where you'd put up a pillar, and this is where God met me, this is where God met my need, and it's something that's real, and it's there in history, and you can come back to it and remember what

God did for you, and then your future generations have that same testimony, see?

And that's, we see that in Scripture all the time, even when Paul writes to the Corinthians, he starts warning them, don't be like the

Israelites who did this, this, and this, right? And he says, these things were written for our benefit, this is why this is recorded in Scripture, look back and learn, and be warned, because very often they really, really messed up.

So we're supposed to be recognizing that we are in, we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves, and we're living in a day where you are the biggest thing there is.

You are autonomous, what happens between here and here is all that matters. And everybody else is even supposed to learn, this is the most arrogant, childish thing

I've ever seen, but everyone else is supposed to learn your pronouns. What?

What? I can see a four year old doing that, seriously, but I, I, I, you're being mean, no

I'm not, I'm simply telling you the truth, there is no society that can survive when you basically freeze everybody at the mental and emotional maturity of a four year old.

That's what we've got in universities today. If you need a safe space because somebody offended you, that's not maturity, that's immaturity.

And four year olds are fairly easy to control, that's the whole point. And they are not thinking about their futures.

Four year olds are not planning for their university education, and that's because you get focused solely upon yourself.

So, that sermon was for anybody who needed it. The point being that when you talk to this generation, and you start talking about the claims of Christ, and they start asking you, well, why should

I believe that? Well, we have this revelation from God.

Where did that come from? Well, in its youngest parts, it's 2 ,000 years old, almost 2 ,000 years old.

And its oldest parts, a good 3 ,400 years old.

For them, that's an automatic, automatic disqualifier. For my generation, that was like, wow.

Wow, that goes back. That means people have believed these things, and have honored these things.

Yeah, that's value. Now, it's like, you mean it wasn't written on an iPad?

Who cares? I mean, so some

Neolithic people wrote something down on a rock someplace.

Why should I care? If they didn't know about DNA, what does it matter? And why should it matter to me?

That's really where many people are today, because they really believe they are in a position to judge whatever is presented to them, as if they are the very center of all of human knowledge.

And so that massive change in epistemology, we used to call it postmodernism, but really it's the embracing of the secular worldview that says there is no transcendent, there is nothing beyond the material.

Now, a lot of people are rebelling against that. That's why you've got all the New Age stuff and stuff like that.

But most people recognize that even that is not being asserted as being seriously true.

It's just, I don't like the cold, sterile scientism out there, and so I'm going to do something spiritual in the process.

That's where that's coming from. But secularism, and I've been saying this a lot recently, and I've had no one dispute this.

They may not like it, but they don't dispute it. Secularism is the greatest denial of everything

Christ taught, everything Christ said, everything Christ lived and died for, that has ever appeared amongst the children of men.

Even the pagan religions had gods. Even they recognized some kind of transcendent value to something.

But secularism is a fundamental evacuation of everything that makes humanity special.

What's special about humanity in a secular worldview? Nothing. You're made up of DNA, and so are chimps and dogs and shrimps and snails and everything else.

You're not special. You just happen to be a certain spectrum, and that's why you can't be a speciesist.

I remember the first time I heard someone say speciesist. I was like, what? But now it's all over the place.

You can't think your species is better than another species, you see, as they're munching on their

McDonald's cheeseburger. But that secular worldview evacuates all meaning out of not only the human world, but the human existence, but also any reason for you to be concerned about what came before and what will come after.

And as we try to seek to honor Christ by proclaiming

His truth, every generation has been called to express that truth in such a way that it communicates.

Now don't get me wrong. Some of you are sitting there saying, wow, that sounds like we don't really have any way of, we don't have a point of connection with someone who has been thoroughly secularized.

They have been, you know, when I was younger, we were still running on the momentum of a

Christian worldview, and it would still be in even the public education system.

And when I graduated in 1981, I got to give a talk when

I graduated, and I remember even then some discomfort about the fact that I wanted to make reference to my

Christian faith in my valedictorian address at my high school. And that was 1981.

Today, the resistance to saying the things that I said would be overwhelming.

I simply wouldn't be allowed to say those types of things, at least in a secular context. So there's been a transition over time, and so there were still people who were influenced by the

Christian worldview. We now have a generation coming up that is thoroughly secular. Their parents were secular, they are secular, and so they are acting as secular man.

And secular man is in fundamental rebellion against his creator.

His entire way of thinking is an act of rebellion against his creator. And so you no longer have any kind of latent respect for the

Christian scriptures. The vast majority of the people graduating from public education institutions, they have no earthly idea how central this was to the founding of this nation, and to the entire concept of law in the

West. They have no idea. Sadly, most Christians don't realize.

Are you thankful for the American legal principle, when it's actually followed? Innocent until proven guilty?

You know where that comes from? The Bible. Are you thankful that you have the opportunity of cross -examining witnesses against you in a court of law?

Where did that come from? In the Bible. Our legal system was based upon the view of man as God's creature, and the legal foundations came straight from the page of scripture.

And you can go back to the early, I can guarantee you President Biden's selection for the

Supreme Court will not do this, but you can go back to the early Supreme Court decisions, and you know one of the sources that they would cite very frequently in their

Supreme Court decisions? It's called the Bible. That would be enough to get a decision overthrown today.

A violation of church and state. They didn't think so, and they wrote the thing. But that's where we are today.

So bring all that back to where we're supposed to be. Alright, so I have here my, for those of you who don't know who he is, my

Jeffrey Rice rebind. See those are, the people that are chuckling are the people who wish they had one.

Are there any other Jeffrey Rice rebinds in the room? Anyone? None? Really?

That's so sad. I have two of them. And those are just a couple of them that I've got.

I didn't want to bring the others and just make you feel really bad. What are you talking about?

Jeffrey Rice does some of the most awesome Bible rebinding. I mean the leather and, that's a smell that just makes you smile and makes all the problems in the world go away.

This is actually a 1977 New American Standard Bible that I bought, probably about 81 or so.

And it's a nice large print. That's why I like it, because I can still read it. But I had him,

I sent it to him, and he rebounded it for me. And this is my Tyndale House Greek New Testament that he did for me as well, which is a very, very interesting

Greek New Testament. We'll talk a little bit more about this particular edition later on. But you open this to someone today, and aside from all the worldview issues that we were just talking about, if they have come through the public educational system, there is a very, very, very large chance that they have been told that this book has been fundamentally altered since it was originally written, and no one could possibly know what it originally said.

So 40 years ago, the default would be,

I will accept what it says as being an accurate representation of what the Bible has always said. Now today, you're going to have to prove to me that it has not been changed over time.

And even then, then you're going to have to overcome my prejudice against something that is ancient, because if it's ancient, then it's not following the science, and therefore should not really be given much in the way of authority.

Whenever that happens, the funny thing is, if you were like sitting there watching

TV, you just reach over, but when you're in a room like this, you hit every button but the button you want to hit.

Isn't that right? Isn't that right? It's because your heart rate has gone up 80 beats per minute, and every button is the wrong button.

That's a volume increase. Oh no! It's okay.

But the worst thing is when you're sitting on the front row. That's the rough part. But I've done the exact same thing.

I've been up here preaching and going, okay, we forgot to turn that one off. All right, sorry about that.

So there you go. We live with these things. I've always wondered, what would Spurgeon have done?

How would Spurgeon? Because I have actually preached in the

Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. That was quite an experience. And by the way, just in passing, there is,

I guess, I never found it, but Spurgeon taught that you should never preach more than 40 minutes.

Now, when I was at Phoenix Performing Baptist Church, I would normally do about 45 minutes. Now that I am a pastor at Apologia Church, I have been ruined by my fellow pastor,

Jeff Durbin, and I can, an hour five is fast for me now. Okay, that's just all there is to it.

But if you preach at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, embedded in the pulpit is a 40 minute clock.

It's a 40 minute clock. It's right there. And Dr. Masters, who I believe is still there, when he introduces you and you step forward as he leaves, he turns it on.

And so the first time that I did that, I honestly, I sort of stood there and sort of went,

I don't feel a trap door down there. It feels pretty solid. I think

I'm okay. I don't know. But you got done. I actually attended once when

I wasn't speaking, and he was at the end of the book of Acts, and about 38 minutes in, he apologized and said, we only have two verses left.

I need to, you know, we can't do a whole nother sermon, you know, for the last two verses. I think he went 42 and a half minutes, and Spurgeon rolled over in his grave, and that was the end of that.

So how did I get on to the Metropolitan Tabernacle? I have no earthly idea. So anyway, oh, see what you did?

I lost five minutes right there because I was going, I wonder what Spurgeon would do if right in the middle of one of those awesome points he was making,

Dixie started playing or something like that. Something tells me he would have had very large bearded men at the gates, at the doors, taking everyone with them, every phone out, and that's probably what would have happened at the

Met Tab. Anyway, so we have more hurdles to overcome than my grandparents did, because my grandparents could simply quote from the

Bible, and for the vast majority of people in our society, that was considered to be an authoritative word, and there you go.

So we now have multiple barriers. It's not just any longer, well,

I read a book by Bart Ehrman that said that this has been edited and changed, and we really don't know what it originally said.

That's one big barrier that for a lot of Christians is the end of the conversation, because we admit that we either grew up in the faith or we entered into the faith without really getting the whole story as to where the

Bible came from and why we can trust it. But now beyond that, we now have, and even if it is accurate, why should

I care about it? Because it came from generations and generations and generations and generations ago, and those people didn't know the things that we know.

So we have a number of challenges, and one other thing.

Now there are people in this room that are more advanced in age than I am.

I have to point to the g -ster over here. I know exactly how old he is, and he likes to say that I'm actually a young person, which

I'm really not, but I appreciate the kindness. And there are a few others in here that I think have had a few more snows on the roof than even

Kenny has. But the reality is, when you think about your approach to the scriptures and issues like this, how are you going to speak to people today, and how are you going to communicate to them the value of the

Christian message, when they are beginning with the assumption that the greatest value that could be given to them would only be something that would make them happy.

The idea of, see I was thankful I got to meet my Uncle Don and talk with him a little bit about his service in World War II.

And when you think about what that generation did, when you think about what those young men did, normally they talk about storming the beaches of Normandy, but the 101st

Airborne at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, and the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the

Pacific, just all of those things, which I guess they don't teach in school anymore, unfortunately.

Because we can't honor those people anymore because they had the wrong ideas. When you think about what they were willing to do for others, and to see themselves in the midst of a much bigger picture, when you see yourself as the central hub of everything, then it all has to be right relevant to you.

And you get to define all of it. I don't think most people understand the vast difference between the

Christian worldview and the secular worldview in one issue. In the way that people are being taught to think today, they are in the center.

And so they have to learn about all these other fields of human knowledge.

And man, listening to some of the interviews, I think, did you, yeah, you sent me a video a couple days ago that said, we're doomed, remember?

And it was a guy going around interviewing people. Remember the old jaywalking videos, Jay Leno?

Yeah, a few of you do. This guy was going around asking people basic questions and then giving them the wrong answer.

I mean, not even close to being right. I mean, silly wrong, about geography and basic facts of history and stuff like that.

And all these people are just like, yeah. Or like he'd say, what nation is

Paris? And they would go, that's in Asia.

Right, right, yeah, yeah, right. And the scary part is whenever they run into someone who's a teacher, and they are utterly and completely clueless about basic, basic, basic things.

We're not doing a very good job if we do think we're in the center and we need to learn everything around us. But we can never know everything around us.

I can never have sufficient knowledge of history. I can never have sufficient knowledge of all the fields of science.

And so we're left being agnostics. Well, I don't know. Could be. Might not. Don't know. In the

Christian worldview, we are not in the center. We are not in the center.

We're out here because we're a creature. We've been made. We've been created. We are dependent upon someone else.

In the center is God, who made all of these things, knows all of these things, and therefore as I relate to Him, I can have true but not exhaustive knowledge of all of these other areas.

But it's true knowledge. When we're in the center, we can never know whether it's true knowledge or not.

And so there's a fundamental agnosticism that exists among so many.

And so the only way to deal with that is to go, well, I can't learn all that stuff, so the only thing that's really important is what?

Is that which is relevant to me. Me, my happiness, my fulfillment of my desires.

You can see that some smart people have figured out how important this is. Remember the

Soviet Union? How many of you were around when the Berlin Wall fell? All right, see?

Well, all right, good. The Soviet Union collapsed because the

Soviet it could not take care of its people. Everybody back then, everybody in the

Soviet Union had plenty of money. They just didn't have anything to buy. Seriously. I used to get to go and, like Van, get to go to Ukraine fairly regularly.

In fact, Van and I ran into each other in Ukraine once. That was interesting. Well, not ran into each other.

It's not like we're, hey, Van, how you doing? He was doing a concert over there.

And so I was teaching at a school over there and came over and attended the concert and had fun.

And that was great. I'm not sure I'm ever going to get back there. And the way things are going in Ukraine, I'm not sure there's going to be

Ukraine to go back to in the not too distant future either, for that matter. But anyway, we would get to go to all these different places.

And I remember going to all these different places. And I'm just thinking about that about that concert.

And now I'm going, where was I going with that? Where was I going with that? Somebody what?

Didn't have anything to buy. That's right. In those days, you could, you could order your, you could want to buy a car.

Great. It'll be ready in about two and a half years. You know, seriously. And, and so they had everything.

They had all the money, just didn't have anything to buy. And so I, I learned to eat the same things you learned to eat over there.

The same Soviet style, potato soup type stuff, because that's just all you can get.

And it collapsed because the people were unhappy with this. And they're going to rebel when they can't have the, have food.

You know who learned from that? China. China. So you look at, you look at the

Chinese system today and what they're making sure to do is to fulfill the lusts of the flesh of their people.

Give them their game boys and their game systems and their computers and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Make sure that they are distracted. Make sure they've got plenty of food. They don't do this in North Korea, but they have other ways of controlling things.

But in China, this is how they're doing things because they learned if you will fulfill the lusts of the flesh of people because they're focused upon themselves, then they will remain docile and you can take their freedoms from them.

You can completely control them. You can tell them what to think, what to wear, how to act, and they'll put up with it as long as their stuff is being fulfilled.

And that's my concern. That's my concern for our society as well, is appealing to the fulfillment of the lusts of the flesh as a means of controlling the unregenerate person.

I think we see that happening all around us. So with all of that said, I was all meant as somewhat of an introduction to you as individuals.

This is where I was going when I was talking about the age issue. I want to challenge you.

I don't care how old you are. I don't care how young you are. There are probably people in your life, close family, extended family, whatever it might be.

You may be the only person who will be able to communicate to your children, your grandchildren, young people in your fellowship, wherever that might be.

You may be the only person to be able to communicate to them the solid foundation that they need to believe that the scriptures are the inspired and preserved

Word of God. If we do not have that foundation, what happens?

Just look at a place like Union Theological Seminary. Oh my goodness. The place is more

Buddhist than it is Christian now. It really is. That was once one of the great Protestant institutions.

But long ago it went apostate. And you see what the result of that is. We see right now the people in our society who want to pass laws identifying the

Gospel of Jesus Christ as a hate crime. They just did it in Canada.

You all know that, right? You all know about C4. A couple of weeks ago,

January 16th, many of us in solidarity with our Canadian brothers preached on God's law concerning human sexuality.

I did at Apologia. Many people, John MacArthur picked it up and so many of the Masters folks picked it up as well.

And that was a technical violation of Canadian law in Canada.

How many would doubt that there are many people in our government today that want the same law that is in Canada in the

United States? Do you think Jen Psaki would probably think that would be a good law to have?

Yeah, I think so too. So why did we do it?

Because this is a higher authority than the unanimous vote.

Did you know it was unanimous in Canada? Not a single person voted against that law. Not one.

It was unanimous. This law is unanimous.

It's higher than those people in the Canadian legislature. Why do you believe that?

How do you...the attack, it's already happening, but the attack is going to be very, very clear.

If these laws come into existence, you have to have thought through, well what is the basis of law?

Where does law come from? How does man's law relate to God's law? And if you are going to say, if I...there

is more than sufficient documentation on my part of my violation of the spirit of C4, of that law.

I've written books on homosexuality, I've done debates, they would be able to...there's going to be no argument as to what my position was.

Right? And so what's the only thing I can say? I say to the magistrate,

I say to the judge, you are saying that what

I have done is hate speech and is to be criminalized. What I'm saying to you is,

I am repeating the message of Jesus of Nazareth, who prophesied his own death, burial, and resurrection, and rose from the dead.

There is an empty grave in Jerusalem. You, sir, will someday die, and you will stand before Him to be judged.

And so I must submit to His ultimate authority, not your derivative authority, and if you condemn me, you are condemning

Him. And the response will be, but how do you know that's what

He said? How do you know that's what He said? What I'm saying to all of us is that we not only have to have a firm conviction about how

God has transmitted and preserved His word, but you, you

Mr. truck driver, you Mr. doctor or nurse, you

Mr. insurance agent, you Mr. IT guy, you might be the only source of information to communicate these very truths to someone in the next generation or the generation thereafter.

So what I'm saying is, it's not just enough for you to go, yeah, I think I'll listen to what this guy has to say and take a few notes, but what if the massive, wonderful freedom that we have had for years now to put this stuff out,

I've been astonished at the places I've gone around this world when

I got to travel around the world through 2019, at the places I've gone around the world where studies

I did in one part of the world were listened to and beneficial to people on the other side of the globe.

Mankind had never experienced this freedom of the exchange of information. What if that ends?

What if we can't do things like this anymore? How does this information get transmitted to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation after that?

You are going to be the people who need to do that. I'm saying to parents, you need to communicate this to your children.

Oh, I don't think I can. No, God put you in that position, he will give you the capacity to do so. You need to be able to communicate to your children why you would be willing, if you would be willing, to lose your earthly possessions and your freedom to be faithful to the words written in this book.

Are we willing to do that? Yeah, it should be quiet because it's real easy for us to say, yeah, man, yeah, you bet.

And then you start going, yeah, that's what Peter did, I'm not really, hmm. Maybe I'll just seriously contemplate this and try to put down a firm foundation rather than pull the

Peter thing. But foundationally, when you look back historically at what the communists did to try to break

Christians, if you visit for example the Stasi prison in East Germany, which

I've visited, which is one of those things in life you don't forget, they would isolate people.

That's why they don't want us meeting, because there's great strength to be derived from being together in the

Christian fellowship. And so you isolate people, you make it so they never see another human being other than the person who's trying to break them and their guard, basically.

So you don't have any human contact, it's just you alone. And then they start hammering on you and on you.

Are you sure about this? Do you really know about this? What about this fact? What about these scholars that say this?

Start hammering on what you believe and what the foundations are. How firm is that foundation that you have?

That's the question that each one of us should be asking just simply on the personal level of how would

I bear up? And then secondly, how can

I be used to edify and encourage others in this field? And for parents and grandparents,

I will just straight up say to you, you have a God -given duty to raise your children, your grandchildren to fear and admonition of the

Lord, and if this is where they're going to be attacked, then they need to know these things. My generation,

I was doing stuff as a young person. My parents would tell you I was pretty weird, and most people can understand that and would agree with them.

So I was having to think about some of these things earlier, but most people didn't have to do that stuff.

Now there is no way around it for any of us. There's no way around it for any of us. So, simple question.

How many ESVs do we have in the audience?

How many of you use the ESV as your normal Bible translation?

How about New American Standard in many of its… How about the New Legacy Standard Edition?

There you go. Alright. Is the whole thing out now? Okay, good. If anyone's wondering what that is,

John, the Master's Seminary, has produced… Basically John used the

NASB during his entire ministry, and then they did a 1977 edition, 1995 edition, and then when they did the 2020, he felt the direction they were going was not the direction he could keep going.

And so he worked with them and basically they came up with the Legacy Standard Bible, is that what it's called?

LSB. That's the 1995, but slightly changed, for example, in the

Old Testament, instead of Lord it says Yahweh, which when I read the Old Testament, that's how I read it. So that's sort of nice, but that's out there.

So you got ESV, NASB. It used to be called the Holman Christian Standard, now it's just the

Christian Standard Bible, right? CSB, how many CSB? Wow, you're sort of in a small group over there.

I thought that was becoming real popular. Oh, wait a minute. Let's see how many children of the 70s there are.

NIV? See, there they are. We found them. Oh, all the way in the back, okay.

Alright, let's see how many of you say thee and thou. King James? Uh -oh, the guy with the big beard, that's scary in the back.

And new King James? There's some new King Jameses. Okay, good. Best translation of an old

Greek manuscript. Translation of a translation. Anyway, alright, so we have different translations, and if you have any others,

I'm not going to ask you about them because I don't want to embarrass you. Someone's in the back going, what about the

Living Bible? No, you don't want to know. No, no. Don't tell anybody.

How about the New Living Translation? It's not a translation. That's the problem. Yeah, so anyways, the point is we have a lot of different translations that are represented even here this evening.

How many of you feel confident that you would be able to explain why those translations differ from one another when they have what would be considered to be major differences between them?

So, for example, I always ask somebody to do this, and if you've done this before, please don't.

I always have those few people in the congregation that want to go, oh, oh,

I know, I know, because I've watched you do this 27 times. It's like, oh, great, my stalker's here, yay.

So, I saw a bunch of people put your hands up about the ESV. Okay, so who's got an

ESV in your lap right now? You've got an ESV in your lap right now? Now, do you know what

I'm going to ask you to do? Good. And you all saw me in Springfield, right? Ah, there you go.

So, these four folks saw me preach Wednesday night wearing a

Coogee cardigan and a Rush Limbaugh bow tie. That was a color combination that should never have happened,

I can assure you of that. And both pastors were wearing a suit and tie.

I looked horrible, it was terrible, but it was embarrassing. But they came anyway, so it couldn't have been that bad. So, and who has a, does anybody have a

New King James? With you? Okay, so you're right next to each other.

I want you both to look up the Gospel, everybody look up the Gospel of John, Chapter 5,

Verse 4. Gospel of John, Chapter 5, Verse 4. While they're doing that, if one of the brothers could provide me with some liquid refreshment called water, please.

We didn't do that and I'm dying. So, Gospel of John, Chapter 5,

Verse 4. Okay, so from the

ESV. Okay, how about from the

New King James Version? Gospel of John, Chapter 5,

Verse 4. You don't have a

John 5 -4 in the ESV, do you? It goes from 5 -3 to 5 -5. Yeah, it's at the bottom of your page.

In super, super, super, super small font. There's a little note at the end of Verse 3, you follow it down to the bottom of your page and you'll find what you just read down at the bottom of your page.

Now, some translations will use double brackets. I think that's what the NESV does, if I recall correctly.

So, it's still in the text, but it's in double brackets and there will be a note that says, the earliest and best manuscripts do not contain this verse.

We did have an NIV. Does the NIV go from 5 -3 to 5 -5? Okay, the

NIV skips it as well. Thank you, sir. If you left this out in my truck, it'd be frozen by now.

Man, I'll tell you. That is cold out there. I love it.

The King James and the New King James will have it as a part of the text. And your modern translations will either have double brackets or will completely freak you out as you try to find

Verse 4. And you'll probably never forgive me for doing that to you, but hey, you know, what can I say? Alright, so, the question is, you are, now, see,

I've done this in the past. Back before YouTube made it impossible for me to do this anymore,

I used to roleplay back in the 90s early 2000s.

And I had a student, I was teaching at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, and I had a student who was like a youth minister at a large

Assemblies of God church in Phoenix. And so he had me come in, and I pretended to be a

Mormon missionary. I even had a little name badge, and I was Elder Lucas, because Lucas is white in Greek, so Elder Lucas.

And so for half the class,

I played a Mormon missionary. And I'm going to tell you something, that's one way of getting people to listen.

You know, if you say, I'm going to bring my professor in, that's one thing. But if they think that their leader is getting run around the gum stump by an actual

Mormon, they are listening to everything that's being said. It was, used to be, extremely efficient to do that.

It doesn't work as well anymore. Anyways, so that's what I did, is we started off, and I was going, well, you know, we need a prophet, and we need the

Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Fulbright Price, because there's so many changes in the Bible. And they're like, what changes in the

Bible? And so I did John 5, 4, because I knew they'd be using the NIV. And so I just asked one of the kids, could you read me

John 5, verse 4, and they're doing exactly what you did. I'm missing a verse, what's going on?

And then I read it from the King James Version, and they're all just like, so what do you do with something like that?

That's, that is a textual difference.

That goes to the manuscripts that are being translated by all, well, all

English translations, obviously, are translations of either, like the

Douay -Rheims, the Roman Catholic Bible, is a translation from the

Latin Vulgate. But Protestant Bibles and modern

Roman Catholic Bibles are translations from Koine Greek in the

New Testament, and Hebrew in the Old Testament, primarily. But the

King James, for example, was not a translation of handwritten manuscripts.

It was a translation of printed Greek texts that had been printed in the 16th century, starting in 1516 or so, and going all the way up to 1611.

So they had Erasmus' five editions, and Stephanos in the 1550s, and Beza in the 1590s.

So they weren't comparing manuscripts, but they were comparing printed editions of the Greek New Testament, and that's how they translated the

New Testament in the King James. So obviously, the point is that the printed editions of the

Greek New Testament that the King James used, and then the New King James in the 1980s, chose to use the same

Greek text that the King James used. So the King James and New King James are based upon a

Greek text called the Textus Receptus. There isn't just one Textus Receptus, but that's generally the terminology that's used for it.

And that comes from the 16th century, and that was based on really less than 20 manuscripts. There were about 20

Greek manuscripts, grand total, that were used as the foundation of the Textus Receptus. Now it represents a majority of Greek text, but it's actually somewhat unique.

It's about ... if you take all ... and we're going to put this stuff up on the screen. Well, hopefully we're going to put this stuff up on the screen.

I couldn't get my computer to work tonight. But if you take all of the

Greek manuscripts, and you come up with what's called the majority text. So what would the majority text be?

Well, in John 5, 4, the majority of Greek manuscripts have what you have in the

New King James. But the earliest manuscripts, that are closest to the originals, do not have that verse.

And so if you just did a majority where you just count noses, then you'd have John 5, 4 in the text. So the majority text is what you would get if you count noses.

The Textus Receptus varies from the majority text 1 ,800 times. There are 1 ,800 places in the

New Testament where it's different from the majority. Now modern translations are not based on a majority text.

Modern translations are like the Tyndale -House Creek New Testament. They're based upon what's called the

UBS, the United Bible Society's text, the Nessie -Allen text, or now what is being called the

ECM, the Editio Critico Mayor. And that is a collation of approximately 5 ,800 portions of the

New Testament in Greek. Not all those manuscripts contain Matthew to Revelation. The older you get, obviously, the less full it's going to be.

Old books tend to fall apart. And then also a reference to the

New Testament, 20 ,000 Latin manuscripts, and Coptic, Boheric, Syriac, etc., etc.,

etc. There are thousands and thousands of manuscripts. And you need to understand, in the 1600s, there was no microfiche, there was no internet, there was no way of making a catalog of all the manuscripts.

And so people wouldn't know what one manuscript read over another manuscript unless you happened to have personal access to it.

Only in my lifetime have we started to have access to basically all of the available and known

Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In fact, only over the past 20 years, really past 10 years,

I can remember in 2008, 2010, 2010,

I was doing street witnessing in London, and I was talking to all these

Muslims, and I was going, man, I wish I could have the information that I have in my

Greek New Testament on a digital device. And I remember trying to figure out a way to do that.

Now, on my iPhone, I've got everything that's available to me. In that period of time.

And in many of the manuscripts now, you can actually go online and you can, there's the manuscript. Now, how many people can read, and not just read

Greek, I'll show you tomorrow, Lord willing, I'll show you tomorrow, that it's not just a matter of reading

Greek. The vast majority of seminary graduates who have taken, say, two, three years of Greek in seminary, cannot read an ancient

Greek manuscript, because it's not written in the same script. One of the things

I'll show you is that in the ancient manuscripts, in the earliest papyri manuscripts in the

New Testament, well, for the first 900 years after Christ, the

Greek New Testament was written in all capital letters, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.

Just a long line of letters. And you would not even break at the end of the line at a logical place in the word.

It's just a long line of capital letters. And that's not what we read in our

Greek New Testaments today. And so, there have been, there's many a seminary graduate who, the first time they looked at Codex Sinaiticus, is going, what language is that?

Because it looks completely different. So, those manuscripts are collated, and now, we are now having complete computer access to all of that.

And so, the resultant Greek New Testament, where scholars have examined this, and instead of going, well, we're just going to go with the majority, the idea is you give more weight to the manuscripts that are closest to the original.

Now, that makes sense. Think about it. If I were to hand -write a section out of Hosea, something that not everyone's gotten memorized, if it was

John 3, then that would sort of mess things up. But, if I were to hand -write a section from Hosea, and then

I was to give a copy to everybody in the first two rows, because there's only two people on the front row, so.

And you have to take that, and you have to make a copy of it yourself, hand -written copy.

And then you pass your hand -written copy, or what I gave you, but you don't tell them which one it is, to the next row.

And they have to make a hand -written copy, and then they do the same thing, to the next row, and to the next row, and to the next row, and to the next row.

Now, leaving out the fact that nobody uses hand -writing anymore, you know, leaving that out, when it gets to the back, are there going to be differences between what we get from everybody in the back row?

Oh yeah. Which ones, which copies would you like to have access to, to correct the ones in the back?

The ones in the front row. So, John 5 -4 is not found in any of the earliest manuscripts of the

Gospel of John. So where did it come from? Most scholars believe that it was a marginal note.

Because think about it. You are making a copy of the Gospel of John, and you are doing it in the early church on papyri.

Now, papyri wasn't as expensive as parchment or vellum. Parchment or vellum is animal skin that's been sliced very, very thin.

It's amazing how well they were, in the ancient world, able to make beautiful vellum manuscripts.

That would be very expensive. Most people don't have extra cows sitting in the backyard. Oh, I made a mistake. Go kill

Bessie. So, the vast majority of the early manuscripts were on papyri.

And papyri, you take the leaves of the papyrus plant, you place them at 90 degree angles, and you press them together.

And it would make, on the one side, a very smooth writing surface. But on the back side, you had the veins of the leaf.

And so it would be a much rougher writing surface. Now what's weird, and we do not know why this is, there are books written theorizing as to why this is.

What was the most popular form of a book in the days of Jesus? A scroll.

A scroll. And that's certainly how the, we know that in the synagogues, you would have, you know, we have the

Isaiah scroll, for example, from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And you'd have some of the minor prophets, and they'd be toward the end of the scroll, and things like that.

And so scrolls were the way to do it. Though, they were really a bummer when you did the thing with the kids where you're trying to get to the biblical reference fastest.

You know, the Bible drills that you have, who can get to Acts 5, 4 the fastest, with scrolls. And they ended up with forearms like Popeye.

And it really slowed everything down, you know. It really took a lot longer to do that. Anyway, we have found six

Christian scrolls. Six. Out of 5 ,800 manuscripts.

Christians did not use scrolls. Christians used the Codex. You are reading a

Codex if you have a Bible in your lap right now. Where you take paper, and you fold it over, and you bind it at the back, so you have pages.

That's a Codex form. It was not popular. It was not popular in that day.

But it's all Christians would use. And so when they made them out of papyri, that meant they were using both sides of the papyri, including the rough side.

And so all of our papyri manuscripts, that's, you can tell, recto -verso, which is the smooth side, which is the rough side.

But they used all of it. We're not exactly sure why. We don't know. There wasn't a discussion of it in any church fathers that we found that is relevant.

And so, when you're making, you're copying the Gospel of John, and you're copying from another manuscript.

This used to be something that I could come up with some good illustrations from, because when

I was in school, that's the only way you could quote something in a term paper, is you had a book, and you put the book over here, and then you start piling stuff on the book to keep it open.

Because it didn't want to stay open. But you couldn't break the binding, because it was like a library book, and they make you pay for it.

So you're trying to find some ingenious way to hold the thing open, and then you were sitting at your typewriter.

IBM Selectric for the win. Yes. Remember? Any IBM Selectric fans here? Oh, weren't they beautiful?

Man, they were awesome. The big green machine, that nice hum. Oh, it was great.

Whiteout. Correction tape. You young people, you all need to respect those of us.

Oh, carbon paper. Oh yes, yes, you bet. Oh, that was great stuff.

Mimeograph machines. Oh, they smelled so bad. It was wonderful. Anyways, and now you're sitting here, and there is no such thing as copy and paste.

It's just copy. And so you are sitting there, and you're going back and forth, and back and forth, and making mistakes and corrections, and back and forth.

Well, okay, I'm using a typewriter. That's pretty easy. What if you're handwriting? All right?

So when you're handwriting, you're writing on your papyrus, which you've had to purchase, and it's not free.

It's fairly expensive. And let's say you get done copying John chapter 5, and you blow it off, and you're admiring your handiwork, and you're reading some of it, and you skipped an entire verse.

So what are you going to do? Start all over again? No. What they would do is they would, normally in smaller font, do what we would do.

You wrote it in, in the margin. So I can show you manuscripts, where probably on the second reading, so in other words, that you had the original writing, and then somebody corrected it, and they go, oh, he skipped a whole verse.

And they've written it in, in the margin. So that's one explanation as to why there would be something in the margin of a manuscript.

But what if you were listening to a sermon on John chapter 5? And you're listening to this story.

There's all these sick people laying around this pool. Why are they laying around this pool?

You're not from Jerusalem. You don't know what the pool of Bethesda was about. Who would?

Right? And so this preacher happens to have done his homework, and maybe he knew some apostles.

And so he mentions in the sermon, this is why they were all laying around, because angel would come down, stir the water, and the first one in would be healed of whatever ailment they had.

And you go, oh, man, that really makes it all make sense. I'm going to make a note of that.

Okay, so now you've got a manuscript, and you've put the note in the margin. But unfortunately, you run into a

Roman soldier that's persecuting Christians, and you get your head cut off. And so 20 years later, someone has the manuscript you copied, and they want to make a copy of it.

They can't come back to ask you, did you skip this and put it in later, or is this an explanation?

Who's to know? What's a good thing is that Christian scribes tended to be extremely conservative.

They didn't want to lose anything. And so if it was in the margin, they would include it.

And that's how John 5 -4 ends up in the later manuscripts, but not the earlier manuscripts.

There's no reason why it wouldn't be in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John, but it's easy to understand how it would have been added later.

There are two major variants, major in the sense of having two major variants of the

Bible, a lot of text in them, in the New Testament. There's two. Now, tomorrow we'll talk about how many total variations there are.

But when we talk about a big block of text, there are two. Most people know about the first one, and that's the longer ending of Mark.

Mark 16, 9 -20, it's 12 verses long. Go ahead and look at your

Bible, and you'll see that there it's either in italics, or in double brackets, or even the new

King James will have a note that will say, this is not found in the earliest manuscripts, and so on and so forth.

And so 12 verses, they're interesting verses. You know, that's where the drinking poison, and snake biting, and they're very popular verses in West Virginia.

They are. And Jesus appearing in a different form, and there's some weird stuff in Mark 16, 9 -20.

And that has very early manuscript evidence, but there are very early manuscripts that do not contain it.

Then there are other manuscripts that contain it with little asterisks next to it, like later edition, so there were scribes early on that recognized that in Mark 16, 9 -20.

The other 12 verse section, they're both 12 verses for some strange reason, realize verses, verses were first inserted in the

New Testament in 1550. Alright, so they're not ancient, they don't go back to the apostles, all that numerology stuff you read about at that book at the

Christian bookstore is bunch of bunk, sorry. And if you bought it, just don't tell me you did it.

You can, you know, get it recycled, please do not send it to a used bookstore, just get rid of it. Because the verses, the chapters were inserted in the medieval period, and the verses were done by a man by the name of Stephanos.

I have a 1550 Stephanos Greek text, it's the real 1550, it was printed in 1550.

It was donated to the ministry a number of years ago, and that was the last Greek New Testament published before the same guy who did that one inserted the verse numbers in, and then after that the verse numbers are there.

And so it just happens to be that they're both 12 verses, that's not relevant really. But the second large variant is going to disappoint some of you, because it's the story that as Dan Wallace of Dallas Seminary has put it, it's his favorite

Bible story that's not actually in the Bible. And it's so popular that it ends up in every

Jesus movie ever made. And it ended up in Mel Gibson's Passion of the

Christ, though it had nothing to do whatsoever with the movie. He just threw it in there because he liked it so much.

But it's the story of the woman taken in adultery, John 7 .53 through 8 .11. John 7 .53

through 8 .11, where the woman's brought to Jesus, and she's been caught in the act of adultery, and the law of Moses says she should be stoned, and Jesus reached down, he starts writing in the sand and the dirt with his finger, and slowly everybody who's accusing her disappears until they're all gone.

And where'd your accusers go? They've all gone. You know, neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. Wonderful story.

Great story. Only reference to Jesus writing in the

Bible. But somehow Christians got along without it for the first 400 years of Christian history.

Because it first appears in a manuscript that I call the

Living Bible of the Early Church. It's called

Codex D, Codex Cantabrigiensis, Bézé Cantabrigiensis.

I don't even know how to describe it. Almost all scholars agree that when that manuscript is the first manuscript to have a reading, it's not reliable.

This was a scribe who wasn't trying to copy, he was trying to edit. So for example in the

Book of Acts, when Peter is freed by the angel from prison,

Codex Bézé Cantabrigiensis tells you exactly how many steps he descended to get to the street. It's either 29 or 39,

I forget which one it was. It's got a bunch of weird readings in it. And the worst part is, it's the first manuscript to contain that story.

But the evidence against the reading is stronger than that.

And that is, in certain manuscripts, in one family of manuscripts, that section is found in John 21.

In other manuscripts it's found at the end of John. So it's found in three different places in the Gospel of John itself.

And in some manuscripts, it's found two different places in Luke. Now if you have a body of text that doesn't appear for almost half a millennium, and when it does appear, it looks like it's trying to find a place to land.

You know, can I get a room here? It's sort of like trying to find a room at the end. You know, can I have John? Can I do

Luke? And some scholars have pointed out that the grammar of the text is more like Luke than it is

John. Which is interesting. The point is, it comes along much later, it's in unreliable manuscripts, and it's found in five different places.

And so for the vast majority of scholars, that's been enough to go, yeah, that's not originally a part of the

Gospel of John. In fact, when you read John 752, and then read

John 812, it flows perfectly. So, those are the only two large blocks of text that are variants in the manuscripts.

The problem is, when we send our kids off to university, and we've never talked about stuff like this in the church, their unbelieving professors are more than glad to show them these pieces of information.

And you can't blame them for going, why didn't we talk about this in Sunday school?

Well, because you wanted to watch movies and have pizza. And we thought that was good.

And it was actually dumb. So there are, once you know, once you've heard about it, and you've heard about what the evidence actually is, all of a sudden it's not nearly the, ooh, gotcha thing, that the professor wants it to be.

And so that's why we have to discuss these things ahead of time. And that's where we need to be preparing to speak to our young people, and to help them to understand these things.

Okay? Alright, so in the last few minutes we've got, if you'd like me to clarify something that I've said,

I will be happy to do so. Yes, sir? There's no early church father attestation, like Augustine never did anything on the woman caught...

Oh yes, he did. What was the... Yes, he did. ...church father to mention at first? I think the earliest is around that time period, which is contemporaneous with Codex Bezekandibrigensis.

But remember something, the question was, were there any early church fathers who made reference to the woman taken to adultery, and there were.

And in fact Augustine's idea was that it had been taken out by people that thought that that softened

God's law against adultery. The problem with that is,

Augustine was a brilliant thinker and all those things, but Augustine primarily worked with Latin.

He was very weak in Greek and knew no Hebrew at all. So for example,

Augustine and Jerome argue over the canon of scripture because the

Greek septuagint that Augustine has contains the apocryphal books.

Jerome goes to Israel, learns from Jewish rabbis, and discovers they've never accepted these books as canon scripture at all.

And so they argue about stuff like that. But the thing to remember about early church fathers, and our critical

Greek texts today will tell you exactly that. They will tell you, this father did or did not contain this text, or this is how he read it, and stuff like that.

It's amazing the amount of information we've got. But here's the problem. Their manuscripts had to be copied over time too.

And we don't have nearly as critical a text of their works as we have of the

New Testament. So they can't be finally determinative.

From my perspective, you need to have a manuscript from somebody who was purposely trying to copy a manuscript to have evidence of it actually being in the text and being read in the church.

Yes sir? Yes, there is higher textual criticism and lower textual criticism.

What I'm talking about is lower textual criticism. And that is, you actually have to have facts.

Yes, and we never had to worry about it until people like Bart Ehrman started making it something that the person you're witnessing to at the coffee shop now knows about.

And that's why we need to know about it ourselves now. The fact of the matter is, you have it on the bottom of every page of your

Bible. It's been there all along, most of us just ignored it. Some of us because we couldn't read it because our eyes had gone bad.

But it's been there the whole time. And I do need to differentiate between what

I was saying, lower textual criticism, which is what we're talking about, which is dealing with the manuscripts, dealing with the readings.

You have facts. You've got things that you can consistently handle. Higher textual criticism is all theoretical.

And so it's, when I debate Shabir Ali in London on whether Muhammad is prophesied in the

New Testament, he used higher textual criticism to theorize that the

Gospel of John was actually written in different parts. And so he used that to tear apart John 14, 15, and 16.

Because I had demonstrated that, I'm not sure how many people realize this, but Islam believes that the

Holy Spirit, well most Muslims believe, that the Holy Spirit in John 14, 15, and 16 is

Muhammad. And that instead of parakletas, which means comforter, it was originally periklutas, which means blessed one.

And so I just pointed out that if you just read John 14, 15, and 16, this cannot possibly be

Muhammad. So he used higher textual criticism where you've got these liberal scholars that theorize that parts of John were written by somebody else and all the rest of it.

But you have no manuscripts. It's just all theory. It's just, well before our earliest manuscripts, maybe this happened or maybe that happened.

So higher textual criticism I find to be worthless, but lower textual criticism you actually have manuscripts and you actually have facts to deal with.

And that's what we're talking about. And I believe that the way to short circuit the most virulent attacks upon our faith is to know the history of our text.

And yes, that means I'll be showing you manuscripts. But see that's just it.

My daughter, her first year in college ran into a rabid, vile, anti -Christian professor.

And when I say rabid and vile, I bought her an MP3 recorder and she would bring home recordings. I didn't know that you could use that language in public schools.

Okay, but profane, nasty, just oof. And of course when

I challenged him to debate, he ran for the hills. But anyway, he went after her, and he said, one day, you know, my daughter's attended my debates and she was, you know, eight years old.

And so he made some wild, insane statement about the original languages of the New Testament.

She had tried to be quiet, but she couldn't. Put your hand up and challenges him. And the response he gave was, he's never examined any of these things.

He's just heard about it from his professors that he had when he was doing his work. But he couldn't, he couldn't examine a

Greek manuscript if his life depended on it. And so, but that gets, this gets repeated over and over and over and over until it becomes accepted as a, well, follow the science, right?

Doesn't take long for lies to become truth, does it? No, it doesn't. So, yeah, anyway.

Yes, sir? A little background for this question. So, I was going to school, raised in a

Christian home, went to a Christian college. Oh, you creep. Something that's very popular with people

I grew up with, people in college right now, is faith deconstruction. Yes, that's also called apostasy.

Yeah. What he said was, was very popular today. You're hearing, faith deconstruction.

I'm deconstructing my faith, which is another way of saying, I am going into apostasy. I mean, that's what it is.

Yeah, well, I guess my question, and I'm sure the answer will be bad, but, when you're talking about the criticisms that are received at Bible schools, it sounds an awful lot like faith deconstruction where they say, well,

I believe in God, I believe Jesus existed, but I don't believe all the texts in the

Bible. For example, I can believe in the story of Noah without, or Jonah, without actually believing.

That's your advice in interaction, because they say that they believe, but they really don't.

Yeah, well, that's very, very, very different than going, there are

X number of manuscripts that read this, and X number of manuscripts that read that, and this is why that happens.

That's very different than saying, I am going to adopt a worldview completely contradictory to that of the

Biblical writers, and then as a result, I'm going to pick apart the Bible, and pick and choose what

I want to accept based upon some arbitrary standard that I've come up with, even though I really don't know much about what the historical backgrounds were, the consistency of Scripture, things like that.

And so, yeah, one of the ways to help our young people not fall into that trap is to deal with that stuff in the context of faith.

So, for example, for about nine years, I taught through the Synoptic Gospels at the

Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, and that meant I was dealing with some of the most common objections to the

New Testament that are out there. I mean, when you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke parallel to each other, you find all sorts of differences between them, and they can be very challenging differences.

And my Muslim friends, they love to bring those things up, and so do agnostics, non -believers, things like that.

So we dealt with those things in the context of faith.

And that allows me to explain what the Synoptic Gospels are, the different audiences each have, how

Matthew telescopes things, and Mark gives you full discussions, but he's not doing all the teaching stuff that you find in Matthew and Luke, and you get to provide the context and the background that way.

If you don't do that, if you skip over that stuff, because that's not easy to do.

That takes a lot of work, that's not necessarily entertaining, and maybe the Sunday school class across the way gets to watch more videos and stuff like that, and so yours doesn't end up being attended.

But I'll never forget, there was one young man who attended my class for years, and then he went off to a

Christian college, and I kept telling everybody I would stop.

I went to Fuller Theological Seminary. Okay, now in the 1980s, Fuller wasn't nearly as leftist as it is today.

But even back then, I was their token fundamentalist. I mean, it was way off to my left. And so I read all the liberals, and I was exposed to all that stuff in seminary, and at the time,

I did not enjoy it, but in hindsight, I know why the Lord did all that. And so I would warn my class, and I would say,

Now, by the way, at this particular text, they're going to point to this, and people are going to say this is a contradiction, and this is how you respond to that.

And this young man went off to Christian college and comes back after about two years, and he says,

I just want to tell you, I sort of wondered why you would waste so much of our time in Sunday school talking about this stuff over and over and over again.

And I went to a Christian college. I didn't expect to run into this stuff, but I did. And I was one of the few students that was prepared to deal with it at the

Christian college. And so I want to thank you for having done that. That's what we need to be doing.

And that ties in with what I said earlier. For all of you, parents, grandparents, friends of people, whatever it might be, you've got to get this stuff down and then be the source to communicate these things to other people.

We can do this right now, and I can talk to lots and lots of people, and we can have the camera going, and we can put it on the internet, and all the rest of that stuff.

I hope and pray that the Lord continues to give us that freedom for many, many years to come.

But if he doesn't, somebody's got to be the ones to continue to sow that truth into the next generation and the next generation and the next generation, and it may be you.

So take good notes. Take good notes. We will have more questions in the future.

We've got time tomorrow together. But at 59 years of age,

I do not torture any of my other fellow 59 -year -old men by making them sit for more than two hours.

It's just the reality of life is how that works. And so let's close our time with a word of prayer and then look forward to getting together again tomorrow morning.

And I believe we are starting at 10 a .m., Ken? Thank you very much, sir. Let's pray together.

Father, we do thank you for the opportunity to gather this evening in comfort without distraction.

We thank you for granting traveling mercies to myself and to others who have come here to St.

Charles. Thank you for 21 years of being able to come here and to be in this pulpit and to speak to these issues.

But, Lord, we also recognize that in those 21 years, many, many things have changed.

We could not have imagined the first time we addressed these issues that someday we would do so in the context we do now.

And so we would ask that you would impress upon our hearts the importance of this subject, that we would come to understand it for ourselves, for our own faith, but also that we then would be able to communicate this to others and to do so for a long time in the future.

So write upon our hearts your truth. Increase our love and our faith in your word.