Lesson 9: Typos and Types, Part 2

Kootenai Church

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Lesson 11: Defining and Defending the Canon, Part 3

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All right, we're in chapter 9 of your notebook. All right, let's begin with a word of prayer.

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Our Father, we thank You for the confidence that we can have in Your Word, that it is true and that You have preserved it for us.

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We thank You that You have given us a history and a way by which we can see Your hand in history concerning how

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You have preserved Your Word. Help us to understand that and we pray that we would walk away from here with our faith strengthened and our confidence in Your Word bolstered, that You would be honored and glorified through what is taught through our meditation together.

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We pray in Christ's name, amen. All right, well, we are in chapter 9 on typos and types.

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And if you're just joining us here this morning for the first time, we've been looking at how it is that God has preserved His Word in giving us a book and giving us revelation of Himself.

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And we're not ignorant nor are we in denial of the fact that many manuscripts have different kinds of what they call variants, textual variants.

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So last week and this week, actually two weeks, for the last two weeks and today, we're looking at the kinds of variants that we find when we compare the ancient manuscripts of the

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New Testament particularly. And let me give you just a quick overview of where we're going here in the next couple of weeks.

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I'm teaching today and next week, and next week we should be finishing up lesson 10.

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And then I'm going to take a break and turn it back over to Jess and Cornel for a few weeks, probably until after the first of the year.

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And then after the first of the year, we'll pick back up again with God Wrote a Book. And I mentioned at the beginning when we started this series that this whole series of lessons really divides quite naturally into three groups.

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We talked about the doctrine at the beginning, inerrancy, infallibility, inspiration, et cetera, what that means.

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And then we've looked at the transmission of the text, dealing with textual variants and the writing of books and how writing has changed over the years and how manuscripts have come down to us.

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And the next section, the third major section, really deals with issues of canonicity. How do we know which books belong in the

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Bible? Who determined that? When did they determine it? How was it determined, et cetera? And so that's kind of the third major division of what we're looking at in this study.

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Before we start that, then I'm going to take a little bit of a break so that I don't have a double load all the way through the holidays.

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So next week, we'll finish up chapter 10, or verse, no, lesson 10, and then

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I'll take a break until after the first of the year. All right, last week we looked at two types of errors that are made in copying of manuscripts.

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And the fact that we know what kind of errors can be made and how human copyists make those errors helps us to identify when we see an error, what is an error in copying, and what the original probably should have been.

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We looked at unintentional errors, including errors of the eye, wrong division of words, and I'm just briefly giving an overview here so we can remember what we talked about.

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The wrong division of words, when you try and divide up a word, because remember the unseal form, the bookend, or the book script for transmitting documents had no spaces between words and no punctuation, etc.

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So there's sometimes the wrong division of words. There's homotelioton, which is the omission of a letter or a word or even a whole line when the eye of the copyist catches a part of the manuscript they're copying that was not where they left off.

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There's hypography, which is called a single writing, where you inadvertently leave out a letter or a phrase if something is repeated twice, and dittography is when your eye picks up the same word, letter, or phrase twice.

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And then transpositions is the reversal of the position of two words or two sounds in a text.

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These are easy to identify. We identify them all the time in documents that we copy. Then there were errors of the ear.

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This happens when manuscripts are copied by a scribe listening to a reader who's reading the manuscripts, and we gave a few examples of that.

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And then errors of memory, and then errors of judgment, typographical errors, and then errors in writing that are caused by poor style, indistinct letters, sloppy script, etc.

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So now we are in letter B, which should be on page 29 of your handbook.

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We're in letter B, and this is intentional errors. So everything we talked about so far were unintentional errors, and now we have intentional errors.

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And this is where the critic or the skeptic of the Bible, the New Testament, says, see I told you there was some intentional change that was made in the transmission of the documents.

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Let's see, according to Dan Brown and Bart Ehrman and others, there are people along the way who have intentionally altered the

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New Testament documents, the ancient manuscripts, so as to reflect a doctrine or a teaching or a perspective of Jesus that the early church never would have heard of and never would have even imagined.

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And so what are these intentional mistakes that are made? We can't assume and we shouldn't assume a foul motive in the changing of some manuscripts during the copying process, depending, of course, on the types of copying that we're talking about, the type of changes that we are talking about.

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The intention behind the intentional changes was always a good intention, trying to correct what they perceived to be an error in the document that they were copying.

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So I'm going to give you some examples of this. Number one is spelling changes under letter B, spelling changes. These changes included the spelling of certain names or places or the smoothing out of grammar.

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This happened in the ancient world when sometimes a city or a region was conquered and that region would be given a brand new name.

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So you see this all the time in ancient lands when an invading army or a king would come in and conquer a province or a region and they would rename that region or sometimes rename the city.

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So the city, what a city was named five years ago might not be the name of that city today, and then 50 years later it might be changed back to its previous name or something of that nature.

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You had this happening all over the ancient world. Well, if you are a scribe and you're copying a document that mentions a region or a place in scripture and you recognize, well, that's what it used to be called, but that's not what it's called anymore.

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That scribe might edit or change that document to reflect what that region or that place or that city was currently called as opposed to what it was called back when that original document was originally written.

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So we, as copyists, when we're copying things, sometimes we change the spelling of things.

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Sometimes we change the name of things. I lived on Fruitdale Lane and I lived on Whiskey Jack Road and I never changed houses because they changed the name of the street that I lived on.

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Now if somebody had written a biography of my life and said Jim grew up on Fruitdale Lane and 100 years from now somebody else was revising that or copying it and they said, well, we call it

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Fruitdale Lane, nobody's going to know where that's at. So we should probably call it Whiskey Jack Road because that's actually what it's called today.

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You would change the name to Whiskey Jack Road, right, that would count as a variant. Is that a deceptive change? It's not deceptive, it's actually an effort on the part of the copyist to be faithful to the intention of the author and that is to accurately record the place name.

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Or what about spellings? Spellings sometimes change. For some bizarre reason, Spurgeon, whenever he uses the word savior, always spelled it with a

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U. Well, when I quote Spurgeon, I always take the U out. No, I do.

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I -O -R, savior. I don't spell it with a U. No, do you spell it with a

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U? S -A -U -R. Yeah, he puts a U in there, color.

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He puts a U in the word color, too. Well, I always change that when I'm quoting Spurgeon. I take the U out.

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I edit the document to reflect current sane spelling conventions.

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Reschedule it. Thank you. Okay, so older authors did not necessarily, another example of this is older authors, we talked about this just briefly last week at the end of last week's lesson.

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Older writers didn't always capitalize pronouns that refer to God in the passage.

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They would use little h. I always capitalize those when I'm writing out my own manuscript unless I'm writing something for publication in which case

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I leave it as the original author would have intended it. But I change sometimes when I'm quoting or when

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I'm referencing something to reflect modern conventions, modern information. Alright, so that's an example of the type of changes we're talking about.

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A second one is difficult reading changes. This is number two. Difficult reading changes.

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There are phrases that the original authors would have used that maybe a generation or two later would have sounded very awkward to the ear of somebody copying a document that was 50 or 100 years old.

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An example of this is in John 7, 39 where it says, literally in the

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Greek, it reads, and the spirit was not yet. And the spirit was not yet. Well, that's a difficult reading and it could be understood that the spirit did not yet exist.

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But would we say that the spirit did not yet exist? No, because that's bad theology, right?

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The spirit is co -eternal with the Father and the Son. Well, when John says that Jesus was speaking of the

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Holy Spirit or the spirit who was not yet, what did John mean by that? A later copyist would read that and maybe think that whoever copied the document that he was copying might have left out a word.

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And so, the text might add or the variant might read, the spirit was not yet given in order to bring clarification to what the author originally intended.

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Well, what spirit was not yet given? A later copyist might have understood that that's still a little awkward.

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We should probably specify that it was the Holy Spirit who was not yet given. And so, you have textual variants at John 7, 39 where the older and more difficult readings are smoothed out.

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The grammar might be changed in order to make it easier to read, to communicate the sense. Or maybe a copyist, quite well -intentioned, thought this should read

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X and the original probably read X because this is really awkward and confusing and he might have added a clarification, maybe even a marginal note to help explain the difficult reading.

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So, you have changes where there are difficult readings. It could be noted, right, but like we talked about last week when you make a notation in the margin of a document, how is the next person who copies that able to tell whether that is something that is a notation or whether it is something that is added intentionally or unintentionally or whether that is an author or copyist exclamation or something or whether it belonged in the original.

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That was the dilemma that they faced. Okay, so this might sound horrible here for a bit because you're thinking, oh, this is all kinds of changes that are made.

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But wait until the end, there's a payoff here at the end. Alright, number three is factual changes. Occasionally a scribe thought he knew a little better than the manuscript.

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And so, we read in Matthew 19, verse 14 in one particular manuscript where it says that Jesus died about the sixth hour, it reads about the third hour.

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Well, there's a scribe or a copyist who made that change thinking he knew better than the manuscript. Sometimes the names of cities or places would change over time and they would change those in order to update them so that a manuscript might reflect what was actually true.

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Number four, there are harmonizational changes. These occur mostly in the gospel accounts when one account is brought into harmony with other accounts.

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People who copy documents are not necessarily the best ones to observe the context and resolve apparent contradictions in gospel accounts.

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And so, sometimes a scribe, if he is familiar with multiple gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, if he's familiar with all four of them, he might see something which to him he thought was a contradiction and maybe thought that the person who wrote the manuscript copied that manuscript, got it wrong, copied it wrong, and he might have altered that.

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Sometimes they did make a change in order to harmonize with other gospels so that there was no apparent contradiction there.

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And the tendency or the trend is always toward harmonization in those cases because people who were copying documents wanted them to be as easy to read as possible and to eliminate any possible objections.

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So, some of those harmonizations were intentional and some of them were not intentional.

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Like, for instance, sometimes when a scribe would memorize, having memorized a certain text, might insert a word or a phrase in a text of a different document.

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I'll give you an example of that. I'm going to have to scroll through the part of our slide show here that we covered last week.

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There we go. Okay, so here's an example of harmonizational changes which are unintentional. Colossians 1 .2

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says, Grace to you and peace from God our Father. Ephesians 1 .2 says, Grace to you and peace from God our

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Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Those are two similar phrases, right? Well, we have a textual variant that reads and the

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Lord Jesus Christ at Colossians 1 .2. Why? Because some copyists, having memorized and been very familiar with Ephesians 1 .2,

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may have thought that either Paul's greeting here was a standard greeting and so the previous copyist left out and the

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Lord Jesus Christ and so he would insert that at Colossians 1 .2 to bring harmony between Colossians 1 .2

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and Ephesians 1 .2. Or maybe he had memorized Ephesians 1 .2 and when he went to copy

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Colossians 1 .2, what he had memorized in his head came out of his pen as he was making the copy of Colossians 1 .2.

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So we have a textual variant at Colossians 1 .2 where the phrase and the Lord Jesus Christ is added into that manuscript.

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That constitutes one of the textual variants that we talk about. We have another one at Colossians 1 .14

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where we read, In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Well, Ephesians 1 .17 says,

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In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses. Two very similar passages, right? Well, if you are a scribe and you have memorized

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Ephesians 1 .7 and you are copying the book of Colossians, you might think to yourself, I wonder if the previous scribe left out through his blood.

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Because it is certainly through his blood that we have forgiveness of sins. It would surely read a lot more like Ephesians if we put,

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In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins through his blood. And so that constitutes a textual variant where we have a family of manuscripts or a group of manuscripts that have through his blood that is inserted at Colossians 1 .14.

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So by the way, the King James Version is translated from the group of manuscripts that contains in his blood or through his blood at Colossians 1 .14.

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And the modern translations like the ESV and the NASB are more faithful to what we would have as older manuscripts that don't contain the phrase through his blood at Colossians 1 .14.

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So guess what the translators of the modern translations are accused of doing? Removing the blood of Jesus from the passages of Scripture in the

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New Testament. Josh is not here, so he can't hear that right now.

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Yes? It is a fallacious argument because we might go back to older manuscripts and then we recognize the type of change that is made here, the type of variant that this is.

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And we say somebody inserted something from memory or something that they thought belonged there when making the copy of that. The King James translated from that document.

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But then we find earlier manuscripts or maybe a majority of the manuscripts that don't have through his blood. So the

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NASB and the ESV then translate it faithful to those manuscripts, recognizing through his blood at Colossians 1 .14

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as a textual variant that was inserted into the text. And then they get slanderously accused of trying to remove the blood of Christ from the

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New Testament. That's not how that works. Look at the NASB and the ESV were trying to remove the blood of Christ from the

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New Testament. They did a horrible job of it, a horrible job of it because it's all over the place, right?

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It's all the way through. What have we seen in the book of Hebrews? It's just they're rank incompetent at removing the blood of Jesus from the

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New Testament if that's what they set out to do. No, the NASB and the ESV are trying to be faithful to what they think would be the original text, what the original reading would have been, and it wouldn't have had through his blood at Colossians 1 .14.

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Now, I don't know about you, but when I memorize, I have this difficulty when

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I'm trying to memorize two passages of Scripture that are very similar where the language is similar, the subject matter is similar, right?

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So what happens when you're trying to memorize two passages that are very similar? I would give you a challenge if you're up for this.

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Memorize Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1 and see how easy that is. I mean, just get Ephesians 1 down and then go try and memorize

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Colossians 1 and tell me how easy that is to get it absolutely word perfect in both of those.

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It's very difficult. Why? Because once you've memorized a passage and you've got it word perfect, and then you try and memorize or read another passage, sometimes the language comes out in the way that you have memorized it and not necessarily as it is in the faithful text.

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I do this all the time, by the way. Well, not all the time, but more frequent than I like when I'm doing Scripture reading on a Sunday morning.

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In doing the Scripture reading for a Sunday morning when I'll be reading through the NASB, but guess what occasionally slips out?

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The King James and the New King James that I have memorized in times past. And so I'll be reading something and I think, okay, people are wondering, is

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Jim losing his mind or his eyesight or is he all of a sudden preaching out of a different translation than the NASB?

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Because what he's reading is not what I'm reading in front of me. Because as I'm reading, even though my eyes are reading that passage, the language from what

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I have memorized in another translation slips in. Sometimes the language from what I've memorized or heard in another similar passage slips in as I'm reading it.

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That's completely unintentional. Well, what if I'm doing that and I'm reading to a group of three or four people who are making copies of that and some of that language slips in as I'm reading that?

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That would create a textual variant, wouldn't it? Yeah, Brian? Yeah, there's an example of it.

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Yeah, slipping right in. Okay, any other questions? Okay, the fifth one under intentional changes is word order changes.

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Sometimes this happens without affecting the meaning. Changes would be made for the sake of reading, memorizing, or understanding, making those things easier.

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So a scribe might have assumed that a previous scribe mixed up the order of the words and he would have reordered those words so the word order would have been different.

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And by the way, keep in mind, remember that word order in Greek is not the same as word order in English. When we say the bob hit the ball, word order matters.

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Word order tells me what the subject of the sentence is and what the direct object of the sentence is, but if I say the ball hit

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Bob, that's an entirely different sentence, isn't it? Right? Bob hit the ball, the ball hit

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Bob. Those are two totally different sentences and those are all the same words, but the word order means everything in English.

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It's not that way in Greek. So you can change word order without affecting the sentence, the structure of the sentence, or the meaning of the sentence at all.

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You can make significant word order changes without affecting the meaning of the sentence because in Greek, direct object and subject and verb and all of those things are determined by word endings, the ending of a word, and not necessarily the order of the word.

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All right, any other questions? Yes, Jen? Yeah, good question.

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So the factual changes are those ones that we should be really concerned about. We would be really concerned about them if that factual change had crept into every manuscript copy that we have, but again, when we're identifying a textual variant, it's easy to identify the variant, what the change is, and to be able to look at and recognize what type of changes are sometimes made in the copying process.

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So every translation that I know of has Jesus dying about the sixth hour, not the third hour.

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Why? Because we recognize that that's a textual variant. So the scribe may have mixed up the six and the three, may have gotten it wrong, he may have intentionally changed it because he thought it was a three and the guy that wrote down six got it wrong, but when you have hundreds of other manuscript copies to compare that to, it's easy to identify that variant, and so even that intentional change doesn't cause us concern, because we have other manuscripts to compare that to, to identify that textual change.

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Yeah, yeah, at first glance it appears to be more than it should be, and recognize that even intentional changes like that are not done with malicious intent.

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Okay, now we've gone through all the kinds of textual variants that we find in the New Testament, and guess what we don't find in New Testament manuscripts?

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We don't find a textual variant that in one copy of Ephesians teaches the doctrine of reincarnation, and in another copy of Ephesians leaves reincarnation out.

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We don't find one copy of John's gospel from the first century that doesn't say anything about the deity of Christ, and then a bunch of copies of John's gospel from the year 300 that do teach the deity of Christ.

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Those are not the type of textual variants that we have. Does that make sense?

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What we're talking about are things that we can identify, things that are, for the most part, virtually insignificant. We're not talking about passages, or we're not talking about finding manuscripts where large passages were erased, all the details about Jesus having a wife and children and going to Spain or something.

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We don't find manuscripts where all of that has been erased, where you can still see the rubber marks and where it used to be written that way.

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That's not the type of textual variants that we find. All right, let's jump on to the conclusion, because this is going to be a long conclusion.

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Yes? Okay, eras five and six of letter

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B? A.

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Okay, that was last week. Oh, typos.

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Number five is typos, and we looked at 1 Timothy 3 .16. He who is manifest in the flesh and God manifest in the flesh, the unsealed form we looked at last week, and then errors in writing due to poor style.

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That's number six, errors in writing due to poor styles or indistinct letters or sloppy handwriting, etc.

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All right, I have some concluding thoughts here real quick. So, these variants that we've looked at, they are understandable and they are expected.

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These are common errors that we still make, which means that we can identify them, we can pick them out, we understand why they're made, we understand how they are made, and because we can anticipate them and because we can understand how they are made, they are easy to identify, just like with the chocolate chip cookie recipe.

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Man, I don't know why that was hard to say. The chocolate chip cookie recipe exercise that we did, uncreased and ungreased, we understand that's an error of the ear, right?

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We understand errors of abbreviation. We understand errors of spelling. We looked at that with those recipes as we examined those.

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We were able to identify that, and all of us did it quite naturally. Without even going through all of this, we found those kinds of errors in the chocolate chip cookie manuscript recipes when we were examining them together.

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We identified them. We kind of had some discussion about what would explain them, how these errors can be made, how the copying mistakes can be made, what might have been behind in the mind of the person making it, when he adds information or detail that might have been left out in the original or seemed odd in the original, or maybe adds information like Fahrenheit for clarification, because at a later time, that type of a clarification would be necessary to communicate the meaning of the text, etc.

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So, we can identify them. Now, the numbering of variants we talked about last week, we talked about 200 ,000 textual variants in all of the 26 ,000 copies of New Testament documents.

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We talked about there'd be 200 ,000 variants. It seems overwhelming at first until we consider how they are numbered, and they're numbered in this way.

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If a word is misspelled, if the same word is misspelled in multiple copies or multiple, yeah, multiple copies of multiple manuscripts at the same location, that is counted multiple times.

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So, for instance, on page, on that next page 31 of your notes, you can see how, is that in color in your document?

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Oh, perfect, okay. So, you can see how that, yeah, there we go.

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So, you can see how the word only is missing there from that third generation of copies. The word only from the only

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Son of God is missing. You can see how copies that are made from that copy would also contain that same textual variant, that same missing word.

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Okay, so all of those, that would be six, seven, eight, nine textual variants there in that one location, in that one space that would constitute or account for nine textual variants.

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So, 200 ,000 seems like a lot until you factor that in. Let me give you another piece of information.

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In the New Testament, there are actually only about 10 ,000 places where there are textual variants to be identified, and only about 1 ,200 of those rise above the level of trivial.

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By trivial, we're talking something more significant than Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ, those type of textual variants.

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We're talking about things that only 1 ,200 of them rise above the level of trivial. So, Philip Schaff, who is a church historian, estimates that there are 400 variants that affect the sense of a passage, and only 50 of those are actually important.

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So, Philip Schaff writes this, amongst those 50, not one of them affects an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages or by the whole tenor of scriptural teaching."

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So, basically what he's saying is, of all those variants that we're counting up and we're talking about, only 50 of them are actually important variances that affect, in some sense, the meaning of the passage, and those 50 passages do not deal with anything pertaining any essential

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Christian doctrine that is not adequately attested to in other passages. So, if you were to take all of the textual variants and throw all of them out, the bottom line is this, you wouldn't affect any

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Christian belief or doctrine or practice. You could take every textual variant, erase all of them, get rid of all of them, and our doctrine would still be identical to what it is today because none of these textual variants affect any

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Christian doctrine. So, can we accurately reconstruct the New Testament text? And the answer is yes, we can, because if I gave you a copy of the

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Gospel of John and asked you to make a handwritten copy of that, no two handwritten copies in this room would be identical.

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Remember we talked about this last week with Hamlet? No two copies in this room would be identical, but we could compare all of the copies and arrive at what we believed would be the original construction of the

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Gospel of John. Let me give you another illustration. I want you to imagine that we have five manuscripts here.

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Read these carefully. Which one of those is the original?

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Three? Christ Jesus as the Son of the living God would be the original. Well, somebody says four.

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Whoever said three, why would you choose three? Well, I'm not actually pulling this from any passage of Scripture.

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This is for illustrative purposes only. Okay, so which one would be the original?

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If you just had those six to compare with one another, which one would you guess would be the original? You probably wouldn't guess number three because it's got word order that is unique to only that manuscript.

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So what's more likely, that five guys got it wrong and number three got it right, or that number three transposed those?

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I mean, that's the type of error that we make. We transpose word orders. Somebody else said number what? Four? Somebody else said four.

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Why would you say that number four is it? Right.

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Manuscript six is missing a word, right? Yeah, it's missing.

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You missed that, right? You missed it. Reading it, you missed it. Okay, number five has a spelling error.

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Number three has a word transposition. Number two has a spelling error. Number one missed the letter

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O in God. So, you all read that the way you wanted to read it, right?

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Took you time to read through that. Now, my wife who's really good with proofreading probably thought

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I was losing my mind as she was reading this thinking, what in the world is that embarrassment husband of mine doing putting that out there?

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There was a point behind all of this, so she noticed it right away. But the rest of you read, probably the most noticeable change for you was number four, right?

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Because it was the word order was different. But as you're reading through that, you're reading what your eye is trained to see anyway, isn't it?

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Oh yeah, sorry, Christ Jesus, right? Number four is the original. The most noticeable change was the one in number three.

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But as you're reading through that, you're reading what you're most likely wanting to read or to see, what your mind is thinking should be there.

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You're filling in details of what you assume should be there, correct? Okay, can you see how sometimes those changes can be made just even in the reading of it?

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Would you bet your life that number four is the original? I would,

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I would. I would bet my life that number four is the original. I would bet my life and the life of all my loved ones on the fact that number four is the original.

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And, and I'll tell you why, because I can identify the textual variance in all the other manuscripts.

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Yeah, join the club. Okay, so the point of that is that we, even with those that many changes, we can be relatively certain of what the original is, right?

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Now, we're talking about New Testament documents. We're not talking about only having six copies where it's this messed up.

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You're talking about having maybe 40 or 50 copies where it all reads identical, and then you have one that leaves out the word the, or one where Christ Jesus is instead of Jesus Christ.

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That's the, that's the nature or the kind of textual variance that we're talking about, the frequency of textual variance that we're talking about.

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Now, I would bet my life that number four, let me check it again, that number four is the original one. Peter? Yeah, so the question had to do with the numbers that I gave you here just a moment ago.

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So, of the 200 ,000 textual variance, we're talking about 200 ,000 textual variance numbered in 24 ,000 or 26 ,000 copies or manuscripts of New Testament documents.

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If a word is misspelled in 3 ,000 manuscripts, it counts as 3 ,000 textual variance. That's the short way of understanding that.

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It is actually, those 200 ,000 textual variance actually account for 10 ,000 places in the New Testament where there is some, where there is some variant between manuscripts.

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And again, that might be every manuscript agreeing with, when you talk about 10 ,000 places, that might sound like a lot unless you think that, you realize that some of these textual variance might be one manuscript that reads a certain way that no other manuscript agrees with.

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So, you might have 70 copies of a manuscript or 70 different manuscripts that all read identical to one another, and then you have one that leaves out a word.

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So, the 10 ,000 places is the number of places in the New Testament that are affected or identified as having a textual variant, and only 1 ,200 of those rise above the level of being trivial.

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So, Philip Schaff says there are 400 variants, only 50 are actually important. Those are the numbers.

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Of those 50, they do not affect doctrine or Christian precept or moral command or anything else.

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If you eliminated all of them, we would still have the exact same Christian doctrine. So, even by the most liberal accounts of textual variance, the

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New Testament text is 99 .5 % certain. So, you could compare that with Homer's Iliad, and when we do so, we find that of the 20 ,000 lines in the

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New Testament, only 40 of them are in doubt. Only 40 of them are in doubt. 764 of the 15 ,000 lines of the

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Iliad are questioned. So, that means that 0 .5 % of the New Testament text, we wonder, should it read this way or should it read that way?

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And it's not, again, it's not 0 .5 % that says Jesus was reincarnated or Jesus wasn't reincarnated. Jesus was married or He wasn't married.

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Jesus was the Son of God or He was the Son of Satan. I'm not talking about those kinds of textual variants. I'm talking about textual variants that are mostly insignificant.

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So, of the 20 ,000 lines of the New Testament, only 40 of them are in doubt as to would the original have read this or would the original have read that?

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And it might be either way. But even that either way does not affect an issue of Christian doctrine. So, that means that 0 .5

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% of the New Testament is doubted or wondered over, and 5 % of Homer's Iliad is questioned because out of its 15 ,000 lines, 764 of them are in doubt.

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And that 0 .5%, that one -half of 1 % of the New Testament text does not put in doubt any

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Christian doctrine or practice. And as I said before, if you eliminated all of those textual variants, all 40 lines that are doubted, and by doubted we're not talking about doubted if it's original, we're doubting which one is the original reading.

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If you eliminated all 40 of them, you wouldn't be affecting Christian doctrine at all. Okay, any questions?

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Yes. Yeah, so the question is, does the presence of a variant in the text cast doubt on the entire manuscript, or do we just identify it as a variant?

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I would say that in most cases, I'm not aware of an exception to this, but we would just identify it as a variant. It wouldn't necessarily cast doubt on the entire manuscript.

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We don't expect, and this is the unreasonable standard that critics like Bart Ehrman put up, we don't expect that copies of New Testament documents and New Testament manuscripts are going to be perfect.

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Nobody creates a perfect handwritten copy, and if that's your standard, then you couldn't have transmitted anything accurately until the invention of the photocopier in 1940 -something.

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But that's not how documents were transmitted back then. They were hand copied, and so we are able to look at hand copies and recognize, okay, there's a textual variant.

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This is different than it is in all of these multitude of other places, so we understand the type of error that is made.

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This could explain why the scribe did this, or how the scribe did this. It might have been intentional. It might have been unintentional, but we can identify the textual variant, and having identified it, we can compare it with other places and then probably arrive, as we are here with this illustration, at what we would think would be the original reading.

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But there are places where it is truly in doubt if the original reading is X or if the original reading is this, where that really is in doubt.

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What was the original reading? Was it this word or that word? Was it this word order or that word order? That is genuinely in doubt, but as I said, you could cast that out, and it doesn't affect any

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Christian doctrine, because you can still go to other places in the New Testament and affirm the same thing that might be in doubt to that particular location.

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And the job of textual critics is to do that work of comparing documents one with another and figuring out what the original reading would have been.

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Let me see if I'm covering that here. Yeah, so Jenny, hold on to your question for just a second.

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Let me answer that. How do they determine that? Okay, so there are numbers of copies that are made, thousands of them.

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Those copies were all spread over vast land areas, and so when in doubt, they check the questionable against the thousands of manuscripts to see how that variant would stack up against other copies of the same passage.

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So keeping in mind the type of errors that we know can be made, we account for that, and we look at the date of the manuscript. Sometimes you look at the reliability of the manuscript, and then you factor in the age of the manuscript.

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And then we realize that changes in a textual tradition or textual line always tend toward harmonization, and they always tend toward adding detail rather than subtracting detail, and they always tend toward explaining the passage or sometimes smoothing out rough grammar or the difficulties in the passage.

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So we know that that's the tendency. So if we had only two passages, and one was a very difficult word order reading, and then you had one that was really superfluous that added a bunch of words, you would probably go with the most difficult text, if all other things considered, because the tendency is not to get rid of things to make things more difficult when you're copying out.

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The tendency is to try and add as much detail as you can or change word order in order to make it more understandable for the next generation.

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So what I'm trying to get across is we have the ability to recognize the kinds of variants that are made, the type of changes or mistakes that are made, and we can identify them.

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Yes, Jenny? Yeah. That's a good point.

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When we compare the Bible, the Scripture manuscript tradition to other manuscript traditions for other ancient works, like I've used

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Homer's Iliad or Caesar's Gaelic Wars or other ancient documents. I'm trying to think of some others off the top of my head, but I'm not going to.

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When you compare the two, the Bible fares way better. Far more manuscripts, far more diverse manuscripts spread over a large area of geographical land.

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We have more New Testament manuscripts with far more agreement between the manuscripts than we do with any other ancient document, and yet the only ancient document where people say we can't know what was written is the

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New Testament. That's Jenny's point. Nobody doubts Homer's Iliad.

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They don't fight over that, but they say you can't trust anything in the New Testament because there are textual variants, but that's an unreasonable standard that no historian holds to unless you're talking about New Testament documents.

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Then all of a sudden everything's up for grabs according to them. Yeah, Rick? Exactly, yeah.

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That's the point. Did everybody hear that? Even with those five mistakes, there's no doubt that Jesus Christ is the Son of the Living God. Yeah, so the question is, we all come to an argument or to a subject with a built -in set of presuppositions, and so given that that's the case, this study is really about something that encourages us and not necessarily something that's going to convince the unbeliever, and that's absolutely true because, as I've said a thousand times, unbelief is not due to a lack of evidence.

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It's due to a love for darkness. It's a love of darkness that is at the root of unbelief, which is why I've said that we are, in doing this,

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I'm not trying to prove to you that the Bible is the Word of God. I bring that assumption to the table. That's my presupposition coming to this.

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What I'm trying to show you is how God has preserved the Word that He has given to us. That's really what we're talking about. Yep, yes, oh yeah, good question.

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So we do have three very substantial textual variants in the New Testament. We have what's called the

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Kamiohonium in John chapter 7 verse 53 through 8 verse 12. It's the woman caught in adultery.

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We have the long ending of Mark's gospel, Mark 16 verses 9 through 20, and then we have the

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Kamiohonium in 1 John 2 that we looked at last week just briefly, and I do believe that in the future we have a lesson devoted to all three of those dealing with how do those fit in.

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I've used the illustration before that with the New Testament we don't have a puzzle with pieces missing that we're wondering what belongs there.

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What we have in looking at New Testament documents is actually a full picture, but we have a bunch of other puzzle pieces that we're kind of wondering how do these fit in and why do these float into the manuscript tradition from outside somewhere.

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Bart Ehrman would say that because of John 8 and 1 John 2 and Mark chapter 16, the long ending, we can't possibly know what the original, those textual variants show us that we can't possibly know what the original documents actually said.

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Well, if we can't know what the original said, then you can't identify a textual variant, can you? You don't know what's a textual variant.

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The fact that we can identify textual variants is evidence of the fact that we know what the original said because we can identify the variants.

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That make sense? You can't identify what's an error, what's wrong, or what's missing, or shouldn't be there, or what is at odds with everything else unless you know what it should be.

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So we all begin, even Bart Ehrman begins by assuming that we can have some understanding what the New Testament documents say. Therefore, Mark 16, 9 through 20 shouldn't be there.

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So even his argument proves our assumption going into it. All right, let me wrap this up because we're a couple minutes past here real quick.

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So the sheer number of manuscripts makes any changes to the New Testament by malicious intent simply impossible.

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And I just want to leave you with one final illustration of this. Imagine this morning that my name appeared in the police blotter of the

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Daily B for theft somewhere. I was arrested, Jim Osman arrested for theft.

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Now reading it since it's in the Daily B, you would read it and think, okay, it might be a typo, it might be Tim Bossman who was arrested for drunk driving and it wasn't in Jim's neighborhood, it was in some other neighborhood.

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They got all the details wrong and you would say typical Daily B. Does anybody here from the Daily B? I apologize for that, except not really.

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So you might assume that or you might, in reading my name in the police blotter, think that I had actually been arrested for theft.

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Now let's say that we showed up here on a Sunday and it was actually true. I had been arrested for theft the previous week and that is why my name was in the police blotter.

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But then let's say, well, we really need to erase that because we don't want anybody outside of our church to find this out.

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So we're all going to get together, we're all going to agree that we want to erase that from the public record. What would it take in order to change the public record with the police blotter of the

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Daily B for me to erase that so nobody would have access to it? So nobody in history from here on out would ever know that I had been arrested for theft.

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What would be necessary? I'd have to find every copy of the newspaper, right, to do that.

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I'd have to find the original. Burn the B down. That might be what

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I want to do, but that wouldn't be necessary to do that. Yeah, let's assume that there's no online.

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You guys are just great at picking out where every analogy limps. You guys find the limp and you're like, I'm going to camp on that.

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So what would be necessary? It would be necessary for me to gather up every single copy and to make a change in every one of those copies, right?

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How have we seen that God has preserved His Word? New Testament documents were copied early.

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They were copied rapidly, and they were copied prolifically, and they were spread widely, which means that no one, and I do mean no one, had access to change all of those documents.

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Nobody had access to it, okay? Our New Testament document is not, our New Testament manuscript family is not one document in the basement of a monastery where a monk runs down every once in a while, something becomes unpopular and erases it out of the passage of Scripture, and then makes a new copy and burns the old.

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That's not what the transmission of our New Testament text looks like. Those documents were written, they were spread widely, they were copied quickly, they were copied prolifically, they were spread prolifically, they were preserved, and all those copies were made.

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So in order to change any doctrine of Scripture, you would have to have access to every single copy that was made from all over the

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Roman Empire, and they didn't have that back then. Some of those people didn't even know that some of those documents existed for over a hundred years.

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People on one side of the empire wouldn't even have known of the book of Revelation from the other side of the empire, and people on that side of the empire wouldn't even have known that the book of Hebrews existed maybe for a generation or two.

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They wouldn't have had access to those documents to make those changes. So how has God preserved His Word for us?

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By rapid copying and rapid distribution of those manuscripts, so that now, thousands of years later, we can collect all of them, we can gather them all together, and we compare them with one another, and what do we find?

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We find a New Testament text that is 99 .5 % certain. There are a few lines that are in doubt, whether it reads this way or that way, and none of those lines that are in doubt affect any

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Christian doctrine or practice. That is how God has done it. Rapid copying, rapid distribution of His Word.

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All right? Okay, that is it for today. Let's bow our heads in prayer. Our Father, we are grateful to You for what

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You have done, the work that You have done in keeping Your Word for us, and we thank You for the work that You do in us and through us through Your Word.

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We are so grateful for such a treasure of truth and wisdom, and we just delight in seeing Your hand in history and how

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You have preserved it all for us, that we might know You and that we might know Your Word. We pray that You would conform us to the truth and to Your Son, and that You would continue to do