Response to Liberal Theology

Liberal Theology’s Challenge to Biblical Reliability

Everybody's choosy about something.

It might be your favorite snack. Two scoops of Rocky Road, please. Your style.

Those earrings look amazing on you. Or the things you like to do with your best friend. Woof, woof, woof. You can be choosy when it comes to getting a COVID -19 vaccine, too. If you're thinking about getting an updated vaccine, there's more than one type available.

You can find out more at wedovaccines .com. This message was brought to you by Novavax.

Luckyland Casino, asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky? Lucky? In line at the deli, I guess. Ah, in my dentist's office.

More than once, actually. Do I have to say? Yes, you do. In the car before my kid's PTA meeting. Really?

Yes. Excuse me, what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky? I never win Intel. Well, there you have it. You could get lucky anywhere playing at luckylandslots .com. Play for free right now. Are you feeling lucky?

No purchase necessary. Void of record prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply.

See website for details. One, two, three. Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the Christian podcast community.

For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to The Wrap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rappaport. With my trusty sidekick, Bud, the wiser. How you doing, Bud? I'm doing well. How are you? I like that you got your Bud light on over your shoulder there with the library over it.

No, my wife is downstairs. I usually introduce myself as Bud, and this is my wife, Bud Light. Oh, you're talking about the neon. Okay, never mind.

Yeah, you got the neon light that says Bud, Library Bud. So, yeah, you know, we're recording again. We were here to answer questions that people have, and there was a discussion that came up online. And so we're going to deal with some of the liberal arguments that are made for scripture and trying to tackle some of this.

Now, some of these things that folks that you're going to hear today, you're going to go,. I never heard this before. Well, what we're going to give you is things they teach you in seminary, typically at, you know, liberal seminaries.

And it's things that you get taught. And, well, if you're in a good conservative church, you probably never heard it because any conservative pastor who was taught this in school knew it's hogwash. So, yes, right from the get-go, we're going to poison the well.

Not actually so because we're going to tell the truth about it. It is hogwash. The poisoning the well fallacy is when you say something to undermine someone's complete argument, you know, by saying something that's incorrect about something.

So it's poison before someone even starts. We're going to tell the truth about it. And so it's not technically a poisoning the well fallacy. But I know you're thrilled about this. You couldn't wait to record.

You know, you brought this up to me the other day. And because I have to pester you so I can prep. What are we going to do this week? What do we want to discuss? And you bring this up. And I'm like, what?

I mean, I was exposed to this in college. And I think that's probably the last time I encountered it. And that's what, 35 years ago, I guess. I'm familiar with it. And what was my response to you? Because I don't know what you're dealing with, except the.

What was my response to you when I said you were like.

You told me I need to evangelize more. Obviously, you're not evangelizing enough that you're not hearing some of these arguments. Apparently not within the circles you are.

Because because when you go out and evangelize and you deal with some of the folks that have been reading more of the liberal scholars, you are going to be coming across some of these things. And so that's why we're going to kind of cover these things so that you're better prepared when this comes up, when someone challenges you.

And this is going to be some things that we're going to deal with a document, supposed document called Q. And then we're going to talk later about this JEPD theory. If you don't know about that, we're going to explain these two to you and explain how they believe these things come about.

And so what we end up seeing, let's start with the first one, Q. Now let's be clear, as I mentioned this on Apologetics Live and someone informed me that Q is some character from Star Trek that pops in and out or something.

So Q is not some creature from Star Trek.

Okay. I thought it was a guy off the James Bond movies. Wasn't he the dude that invented stuff? I don't know. It very well could be. But you're not talking about Q Anon either. This is not about that.

No, yes, that's true. Yeah, there's that whole thing now too.

Yeah, no, we're not talking Q Anon. You know, okay, side note, rabbit trail, bud. Uh-oh. But so Anthony Silvestro and I were out having lunch with people we knew. We know them in our evangelism circles and we're talking with them, having a great lunch.

And just before we go, the wife starts mentioning something about how she's so glad that Trump is getting these children that are being human trafficked out of human trafficking. And I was just like, okay, yeah, I didn't Trump.

I mean, there is efforts to get children out of human trafficking. I was like, yeah, that's a good thing. And I kind of just blew it off and didn't think much more of the comment. Anthony, same thing.

And then just before we get ready to go, she starts mentioning like, well, you're following Q Anon, right? And we're like, what? And because we didn't know what it was, that was the mistake. We probably would have been better off just going, yes.

And walk away quickly, right? No. Did you get educated? No, yeah, 20 minutes. And then we walked around. We walked out with going like, our head hurts. Oh, like, I mean, just like the things people were, the things that we were hearing and it was like, this is just nonsense stuff.

But yeah, so we're not talking about that. Okay, yeah. Good, now we got that situated. I should mention last week, I was at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. Great time there. I did have a funny experience there as we're walking through.

And this is kind of funny. So as you know, we're planting a brand new church and we're working with another church. And it turns out that when we were at the Ark Encounter, the pastor of the other church, he was actually at the Ark Encounter the same time we were having lunch in the same area.

We didn't see each other. We didn't find out till this week when we were talking. He was like, oh, I was just at the Ark Encounter. I was like, I was there Tuesday too. It was really kind of funny. And so we were there at the same time, but he was saying, he goes, he was with a couple of guys and he was waiting to, he goes, we're gonna run into someone I know.

It's just that he was expecting it. And they didn't there, but finds out that, yeah, we were there together. And so I told him, I was like, yeah, it was really kind of funny. So my bride kind of says, we go places.

I mean, we even went on vacation once. We went to Williamsburg and I just mentioned on, somewhere that, I was in Williamsburg looking at, I mentioned on Facebook and there was a guy who, he was like, I thought I saw you in the hotel.

Like, I guess I got in the elevator and he, well, this happens a bunch. And so we're at the museum and I'm like, we're almost done with the museum. We're kind of almost at the last part of the museum.

And I actually was like, okay, I think I made it through the museum without anyone recognizing me. And all of a sudden, this guy that I know who works at the museum, his name's Lalo, great evangelist, great, great guy.

He's walking through with Alex Kendrick. And yeah, they're trying to, with a security kind of get them through where they were going into the, into the, there's like the employees only section. And we're sitting there and I turn around and I see Alex Kendrick and then real loud.

And Lalo has a good loud voice. He's like, Andrew Rappaport. Like everybody in that area is now staring at me. And he just goes, well, Alex, you know Andrew Rappaport, I'm sure, don't you? And so we shake hands.

We've never met before. And Alex is just giving me a look like, okay, who, I don't know who you are, but I guess I should. And they walk off. And then everybody in that area is just staring at me because the assumption that he made was like, Alex should know who I am.

And Alex just walked off into the private area and everyone's looking at me and I'm just like, okay, let's move, move along quickly.

Well, I mean, there is like, you know, that John MacArthur kind of profile, that platform. And then right beneath it is you. I mean, everybody knows you.

Yeah. Yeah, cause I was at his birthday party, right? Yeah. According to you. I mean, John MacArthur's that is, but yeah. No, I thought you were going to tell the arc story.

That you were going through where they stalled the animals, you know, where they put them in the stalls. There was one for like a rapoportimus or something.

They do have, yeah, it is, it is the arc. I mean, I was glad I hadn't been to the arc in, you know, they, since like four months after they opened it. So it's been some years and they've, they've added a whole lot more.

So it was really neat. When I first went there, it wasn't fully like, there wasn't stuff everywhere. So it's, it's really filled out. It is big. I mean, that's, and that's the purpose of it is to show you there's plenty of room for the, there would have been about 1300 types of animals.

And so there would have been about six, 7 ,000 animals. They go through, when you go through the arc, they go through the whole thing of the, you know, the waste system and the water system, the ventilation, all of that stuff, how they would have done things for that one year, which is really quite neat to think about.

I personally, I guess I like the museum more just because there's more you can learn there. And maybe it's because we go to the museum first and then the arc, when you go to the museum and then the arc, there's, there's a lot of duplication over at the arc then.

But I think that the, they did a better job, I would say, in presenting the gospel over at the arc than at the museum. The museum, they have their, you know, they're going through the corruption and, you know, their seven C's of history and they go through and they moved, they used to have gospel tracks and they moved them.

So now it's kind of disappointed. I almost wanted to physically move them myself because they used to be in the, just as you exited the room where it shares the gospel, they had a thing of tracks and it used to be, as you walked out, it was right there.

So you kind of had to walk around it and it says, take one free. And I noticed that this time it was kind of in the dark on the side. I don't know if someone kind of moved it accidentally because it had always been in the middle.

So I almost wanted to pick it up and move it back and see if I get in trouble or not. So, but yeah, we have, so the Ark Encounter was great. Museum was great. Just to give folks an update on that, if you haven't been out there, you should go check that out.

What Q Theory Claims About the Gospels

So let's get into talking about Q. What is Q? This is an interesting topic that many hold to. Let me give the idea of what, how this comes about, why people bring this up. The idea of Q, it is short for the German word Quellum.

This is the idea that there was a source document. Quellum means source. So there's this source document for the gospel accounts. The idea that they have is that Mark would have been the earliest gospel because it's the shortest gospel.

And that we would have Matthew and Luke that took Mark and embellished from that. And then John took a little bit of those three but really embellished more. And so there's this source document that's missing.

Now, the idea of this is that you have the source document, which is the truest of the gospels, supposedly, where they teach that Jesus is just a man. However, Mark embellished a little bit, just a little, and then supposedly you have the embellishment of Matthew and Luke, and then the complete embellishment that you have when it comes to John.

And by the time we get to John, Jesus Christ is God. So the argument that they end up trying to make is that Jesus Christ never really claimed to be God. It's just that they had embellished. And through that embellishment, you have the evolution of Jesus being God.

And so you have this core document. Now, first, let me deal with the embellishment of Jesus being God. I've actually gone through all the gospels, but you know this, but for the audience who may be listening, I've made reference to it through all different podcasts, but I'm working through the study of all the claims of Jesus Christ deity through the gospel accounts.

And as we do that, I'm looking at direct and indirect references to Jesus being God. So as I look at this, Matthew, 45 of the gospel of Matthew refers to Jesus as God. What do I mean by that? 482 verses out of the 1 ,071 verses of Matthew refer to Jesus as God directly or indirectly, okay?

When it comes to Mark, well, Mark is 46 to 47%. Luke is 39 and John is 66 .7%. So now why do I bring those percentages up? Well, if you look at those percentages, you realize that Mark is the one that has the least, not, sorry, Luke has the least, not Mark.

So they're saying Mark is the earliest and would refer to Jesus as man, and then Luke embellished. However, Luke has less. Luke is 39 compared to Mark, which is at 46, 47%. So if their theory was right, Luke should have been the first one.

But the way that they did it is because Mark is the shortest one. And that's the argument that they end up using because that's the shortest, that was first, it was then embellished from there, okay? Now, there's gonna be a couple things with this that we wanna address how we actually get information and pass it along because it's a problem here.

But what we end up seeing with it is I will actually make the case, I believe Matthew was the first of the gospels. Now, I don't know if I'm gonna get myself in trouble with you, bud. You might have to disfellowship over this.

I don't know. I don't think so. No, no, no. But there are people that have differing views with it. And we don't know the exact dating of the gospel being written. Why would I hold to Matthew? Well, I would say Matthew would be an earlier writing of the gospel because it was written specifically to Jewish people.

So each of the gospels has a different thing they focus on. With Matthew, the focus is on Jesus as king, the Jewish king, where Mark is the focus of a servant. Luke is the focus of him being human, which explains why it is only 39 of referencing the deity of Christ because the focus is on his humanity.

That's the focus. The gospel of John is the deity of Christ, which is why that one has the most references. So you see, that's why you'd have that. But Matthew, if written to Jewish people, would have to be an earlier writing if he's writing to Jewish Christians because by the later part of the first century, there weren't as many Jewish Christians.

There were mostly Gentile Christians. And so that wasn't as much of an issue. Now, that would be my argumentation for why I think Mark is not the first gospel, but Matthew is. The reason they take Mark as the earliest gospel is because of this Q theory.

The theory goes like this. Basically, that there had to have been a source document that Matthew, Mark, and Luke got their information from. And basically, the idea is that we can figure out what Q is by looking at those verses that appear in Matthew and Luke and see what they share in common with Mark.

So what they do is they say, we're going to infer, we look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These are the ones we call the synoptic gospels. And we call them that because they work together. There's a lot of overlay in them.

It's different than the gospel of John, which John mostly focuses on that last week of Christ's life. And John doesn't give as much of the account of those three years of ministry as much of half the book is focused on really the last week.

And so, when they focus on those first three gospel accounts and look at what they have in common and say, well, these all are in common, so we must get those from the same source, okay? So we'll give an argument against that in a moment.

But I've written about this in my book, What Do We Believe? And maybe you could give a quote from Reza Aslan's book, a New York Times bestseller, by the way, on his book, Zealot, but let me just let folks know.

I have right here in my trusty hands a hard copy of my book. There are only 25 of these made in hard copy. And Bud is the only person in the entire world with two hard copies, just for the record. I don't even have two hard copies of this book, but Bud does, so he is very special.

He is unique in that way. He can claim he is the only person in the world with two hard copies of this book. So for that

It's like an indulgence, though, right? I mean, when I show up, I'll get like... It's a, you have one in your

It's your special credit, right? It is, because that way you have one in your upstairs library, but then you have one in your collector's library, because people may not know you have two libraries.

So I actually have one down there. Yes.

So if you could read that paragraph from my book, What Do We Believe? Which, by the way, is available at strivingforeturning .org, if someone wants to get it. Available in paperback.

In paperback, yeah. Which is the volume I'm reading from. Okay.

Which means that you have three copies of the book. Actually, I have extra copies of this,.

Because I'm all set to give away, so. I don't actually, I don't know how many copies I've got. Which is a great idea, folks.

So I should mention that this book, it's a systematic theology that, you know, for those on Patreon looking, I mean, it's not that thick, even in hardcover, but it tries to go through everything. And one of the things that it does uniquely out of most systematic theologies, most systematic theologies I know, they don't cover textual criticism.

You cover that in seminary. And this is, there's people who are writing to debunk the Bible that a lot of atheists and Muslims will use, even some Mormons, to use writings of Bart Ehrman and folks like that to try to debunk scripture as being divine.

And there's not really anyone at a lay level answering it. And so, What Do We Believe tries to do that in one of the chapters.

And that's the chapter you're reading from. It is a great book. The foreword, just so folks know, Phil Johnson. Yeah, I'm familiar with the name. But if you open it up, actually, there is an endorsement that I was privileged to give.

That's right, the first endorsement is from him.

I have like a whole page in this. It's like a claim to fame.

Yeah, you realize that you and Chris Honholds are, you know, write a lot longer than everybody else. Yes.

So, here is what you have written, Andrew. And this is from biblical, the chapter on biblical reliability, which I think is chapter two. Yes. Okay, in his book, Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Reza Aslan tries to make the same case.

And yet you can throw out all his work before the first chapter begins. In the introduction, he states that he is basing his research, he is basing his research, on a document called, quote, Q, unquote, the German Quella, meaning source.

Then he states, quote, although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, we can infer its contents by compiling those verses that Matthew and Luke share in common, but that do not appear in Mark, end quote.

So, the neat thing with this is what Reza Aslan is doing. It's kind of funny because here he is, this is the introduction to his book, New York Times bestseller. And he is admitting, although we don't have any physical copies, wait, just stop right there.

How do we judge evidence? He's admitting, we don't have any evidence for this. So, there's no physical copies for Q. There's not even any references to this source document in any other books. So, before, you know, 50 to 100 years ago, you never heard about some source document where Mark got his information from.

So, when we look at this, and this is the funny, because the people who use these arguments are people who would counter our views of creation, saying we have to look at evidence. And online this week, I've been dealing in my Christian apologetics group with a gentleman who shares the same first name with me.

And he's asking, who is the author of Q? And my response was, well, there wouldn't be an author since the document never existed. And he's arguing it exists. And I said, where's your evidence? He says the same thing Reza says, that we can infer it from what the three Asanoptic Gospels share in common.

And I remember, Bud, where I had been evangelizing. This is the first time I heard about Q outside of seminary. I was at the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, standing and doing my weekly preaching that I would do there.

And I had a woman who was really receptive to the gospel. And I think that's what got this one young fella upset. He read some things for Bart Ehrman. And so he thought he was ready to tackle me, which was a mistake.

Oh, and I'll have to explain why it was a mistake, not because I'm so brilliant. But basically, he took over the conversation because this woman was very receptive. Now, I was glad that at the end of the conversation, I got back to talking with her.

She didn't leave. And she was willing to pray to receive Christ. But this gentleman came up and he's arguing, and he's arguing the same argument here, that there's this document, Q, that they got this from.

And you may have heard this before, that the way we got the Bible is the telephone game. That it's one person shares to another person to shares to another person. Now, one of the things we know, Bud, about the telephone game, I know this wasn't you, but I have to admit, if I'm going to be honest, it was me, that when you play the telephone game, the fun of it is that you have some long sentence in the beginning, or a couple of sentences, like a paragraph, that by the time it gets the end, you want to see how messed up it gets.

That's the whole fun of the game, is seeing how messed up it is at the end. And so you have people like me that either don't care to pay attention to the sentence that's whispered in their ear, or just want to have fun and mischievous.

And so either way, whichever one it is, whatever you hear is very different than what you say. And you know that each person is going to pass it along. So yes, there are times where, you know, in school, I remember we played this game and someone said something, and of course, I ended up twisting it into something about the teacher, which everyone remembered that part, and that part came out, of which case, that was nothing that was in there, not even close, just something I interjected.

And of course, now, where did that change occur? Nobody knows. So that's the fun of that game, is to purposely mess things up. And people say, well Did they have time out in your day? Is that what they called it?

Yeah, no, I was just glad that You get sent to time out. I was just glad I was after the, you know, swatting of the hands with the rulers type of behavior. Good thing I wasn't Catholic in a Catholic school.

Right? But the thing though is that people think that's how we got the Bible, that one person wrote, another person takes that and moves on and moves on and moves on, and they're all copying from one source.

Now, in the telephone game, there is a difference between that and written and what we have with the Bible. The telephone game is audible. And so, Bud, if you're telling me something, I'm hearing it from one source, and once I hear it and repeat it, we can't go back to you as the source because you may not even remember what you heard.

So you don't have a way of comparing those two. However, if you were to take the copy that you have of what do we believe, hardcover, because this was the first printing, and you were to look at Actually, no, this was the second printing.

If you were to look, say, at some of the pages, you'd see immediately a difference. See, right here, I'm holding up, you would see page 26 here is on the outside. But if you look on your version, go look on your version, because you might've got one of the early print versions, is the page number on the inside?

No, it's the same. It's the same? Okay, so you got the second printing. So we had some in the first printing where the page numbers were on the inside. Now, what can we do? If we had a copy of the first printing, what could we do with this second printing one?

We can compare them. We can open both of them up and look at them and do a side-by-side comparison and see the differences. So you'd be able to see that in the first printing, all the page numbers were on the inside of the spine, and on the second printing, they went to the outside.

So it was something we had fixed and corrected. You would see on my book, What Do They Believe? It didn't have, in the very first printing, it didn't have the, on the top and the heading, it didn't have the, in each chapter, it gave the book name rather than the chapter name.

That changed after the first printing. So we can go back and compare those two. In other words, when we have a written document, unlike an Audible thing, we can go back and do a side-by-side comparison.

So that's one thing that we know different than the telephone game when it comes to the writing of the Bible. It wasn't from Audible sources. This is different than what you would see in, say, the Quran.

The Quran was memorized audibly, okay? And when their soldiers started dying off, the third caliph, Uthman, realized we need to write this down because we're gonna lose it because all the soldiers that had it memorized from Muhammad word for word, they had it memorized and they were afraid they would lose it if all the soldiers die off.

So they wanted to write it down. Now, here's an interesting thing of Islamic history, which most people don't realize, the irony. The Muslims will say they only have one copy of the Quran in Arabic and that it's perfectly preserved.

However, when Uthman had all the soldiers write it down, he put a decree to burn the abhorrent texts. Now, what do you have? You have one copy of each of them. Each of these soldiers wrote down what they had memorized word for word, supposedly from Muhammad.

They wrote, there was one copy from each of them. And Uthman says, burn the abhorrent texts. In other words, this is a time where you actually could change what's in the Quran. Why? Because when you look at them, yes, now they're all written down, but he burned all but one copy and that became the copy.

That right off the bat tells you that these guys memorized it and it was different. That was sort of a telephone game or it's whatever they could remember, but they remembered it differently. How do we know that?

Because Uthman himself says, burn the abhorrent texts, which means there was different versions of it. Once he burned all of those and said this one is the right one, there should not be any more, right, any variances.

Turns out that there are in the Arabic texts, but there shouldn't be according to them. But that actually would be the telephone game. That's not how we have the Bible. It was a written document. So you can do comparisons.

And when it comes to Q, the argument is that there had to have been an original source. So let me get back to the case with this young man at the boardwalk. He's arguing there has to be a source for Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

And he says that there was a source for Mark that Matthew and Luke had that source. They had Mark and they embellished a little bit. So the idea being that Mark embellished from Q and Matthew and Luke embellished from Mark and Q.

So in other words, they had Q, they had Mark, they saw those two, they embellished a little bit more. So the idea is that you can look at where all three of them, what Matthew, Mark, and Luke say, and where they agree that is Q because they all got it from that document.

Okay, let's see if this works in reality. And this is what I said to this young man. This was back when Barack Obama was running the second time for president. It was right after the Democrat National Convention.

Barack Obama had spoken on Thursday night. I was out on the boardwalk on Friday night. And I asked this man, I said, did you hear or read about the speech that Barack Obama gave last night? And he said, yes.

I said, did the New York Times report it? And he said, well, yes. I said, did the Washington Post report it? He said, yes. I said, what about the Boston Chronicle? He said, I'm sure. I said, how about the San Francisco Chronicle?

Sure. I said, what was the original source that they all got it? Did they all get it from the AP? Did they all wait to write their articles until the AP came out with it and then they all got it from there?

And he went, no, that's foolish. They all were there. I went, wait, you're telling me they're eyewitness accounts? But they have so many things that are similar and different because this is the argument that they make with Q.

That there's things that they got that are similar so that has to come from the same source but then they all have a different take on things. And those differences show where they embellished. I said, so the fact that we have all these differences, the only thing we can look at is look at all the papers across the United States and look at what they have in common and that's what we have in that original source.

We can infer the original source from there. Now, was that the AP or was it something else? And he goes, you're being so silly. They were there. They were eyewitness accounts. And I looked at him and said, oh, you mean exactly like the gospel writers claim they were.

Yeah. Right? And he just looked there. It's always fun to have that look on someone's face where his jaw opens but no words come out because he just realizes, duh. I just I don't have an argument anymore.

Yeah. I just called my own argument stupid. He just took my argument, applied it to something else where I said it was really stupid and that's the argument I was making for something else, right? So it's kind of fun to do.

One of the things I had asked him, I said, well, you obviously have studied textual criticism, right? And he goes, what? And I said, well, textual criticism. It's a branch of higher criticism and you've done a lot of background there, haven't you?

And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I said, well, let's assume one of us has done some research in textual criticism, which is the study that we're discussing of how we get back to the original words of the Bible.

One of us has a master's degree where we've done work in this area. Is that you? And he's like, no, I'm still in high school. I said, okay, then I'm gonna trust my actual study to your non-study, right?

He's like, well, I read a book. I read those books too, but here's the difference. I've read the scholarly work from Bart Ehrman as well. And I could tell you that Bart Ehrman's scholarly work compared to the works that you read that's written to the public are very different.

Whenever, you know, here's an interesting thing with Bart Ehrman, when he references his work, he's actually saying things that are scholarly and correct. But then when he writes for the masses, he'll say things that are correct and put them in the wrong order or make conclusions that aren't always accurate.

For example, he'll say the gospel copiers, the people trying to copy the gospel accounts were in such a rush, or the New Testament really, they were in such a rush that they didn't have, they were sloppy and they would make mistakes.

Well, that is true. They were in a rush because the message was so important. They wanted to get it copied and out there. That's true. Were they sloppy for that reason? That's not necessarily true, but we do see evidence that because they were in a rush, they made mistakes.

Does that mean, so he says, because of that, we can't know what the original meaning is. That's a leap that he just makes because we actually have so many manuscripts and I cover this in chapter two of my book, What Do We Believe?

We have so many manuscripts. We can go back and do that comparison. We have about 9 ,000 manuscripts now of the Greek. And as we look at all those, we kind of know where people made those copying errors because when they copy the copying error, copy it over and over, we know where almost all of them are now and we can compare them and guess what?

Not a single one of them affects any doctrine. Even Bart Ehrman said that in the second, in the first printing of his paperback version of misquoting Jesus, he says, because they wanted, it was a New York Times bestselling hardcover, so they want him to do a paperback.

So add something to it, add an epilogue. So people that have the first one will buy the second and he did that. The first edition, he actually says in the epilogue that not a single Christian doctrine is affected by any of these variances.