God's Providential Preservation of His Word

God's Providential Preservation of the New Testament Text

Dr. White has been extraordinarily gracious to our congregation over the years. I was totaling it up. I think we've been working Somewhat together for over 22 years now. When did we do that first debate?

2001 2000. No, wait a minute. It was See the two old. Some of us are a little older than others. Well, I'll go into that well talk about fitness but at any rate, um, no it would have been 2000. Fall of 2000 is when we did the.

St. Martin Luther Debate. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, well, it's been a while. So.

Well, James has done numerous debates for a while. We had him doing debates not only we have Mormons one night and then we do a Catholic the next. Mm-hmm. He's accused me of trying to kill him before the last visit.

Well, you've accused me of trying to kill little old Mormon. No, I just pleaded with you. Yeah dr. Scharff's was Trembling like I've never seen anyone with Parkinson's tremble and it's like that was North High School.

Was that was uh, no mom hunter high school hunter hunter hunter high school. But. We have invited dr. White to come and address us on the reliability of the New Testament text. He's done that presentation many many different times many different ways.

I Asked him if he would be up to an interview because in spite of how clearly he has Expressed himself many times. I found that there are lots of folks who don't seem to actually understand what he's saying.

Or don't want to understand. Well, what? What they say is not what you say. So, you know a couple years ago. We had you here for the Lee Baker debate and. So I heard you say something there that I'd like everyone to hear.

Do you believe that one word? One letter of what the Apostles wrote in the New Testament has been lost to the church today.

In answering that question you can just do a simple answer and say no. I do not but that immediately goes. So, where are they? So let me just briefly lay out why I would take a position that many people involved in doing textual critical study Would find somewhat unusual though in reality in history.

I think most people were were definitely on the same side. I know the New Testament manuscripts Demonstrate something called tenacity. Tenacity that's that used to be a word we'd use, you know, that was you were supposed to be tenacious now no one says things like that because you don't want to hurt your feelings, but tenacity is stick-to-itiveness and The reality is that in the scholarly realm what that means is When a reading appears amongst the New Testament manuscripts, it stays there.

It's tenacious now you might say. Well, that doesn't sound good to me. You mean if a scribe makes a mistake, let me give you an example. There is one scribe. We know without a doubt exactly what happened in this situation.

Now my my Conjecture that he didn't get his coffee that morning. We can't prove perfectly but this manuscript when you read it in The genealogy of Luke everyone has the wrong father and When you start looking at it closely you can tell what this poor guy did.

Was he had like a two or three column manuscript he was copying from? But like I said, he didn't get his coffee that morning so instead of going down this column and then down this column and then down this column he went straight across and.

So everybody ends up with the wrong daddy. In in Luke's genealogy and the poor guy didn't even notice it now if you've been copying something like Sermon on the mount or something like that. It wouldn't have made any sense.

He would have caught it. We still have that manuscript. We didn't do what the Muslims did when they burned manuscripts of the Quran. To establish a particular text now you say well, but those are mistakes, right?

But if the mistakes were preserved, what does that mean? The original readings were preserved as well. And so we have in the manuscript tradition Everything that John or Paul or Luke ever wrote. But I see I'm getting a lot of stuff here, but that's because you have to give some of the background information.

But what we have to do is we have to study those manuscripts to be able to identify where for example There have been expansions. So it's very easy to take Manuscripts in the New Testament when we look at the oldest ones.

They'll say something like then Jesus said to the man and then One that's maybe 500 years later Would say then the Lord Jesus said to this man and you can put together an entire chart where the older manuscripts will have a shorter reading and Then the manuscripts later on will have a slightly expanded.

So he becomes Jesus. Jesus becomes the Lord Jesus the Lord Jesus becomes the Lord Jesus Christ there is an expansion of what I call piety involved in these later manuscripts and so our job is to In all of this in all of this.

I will defend this statement. I Want to know what the Apostles wrote? Not what a scribe 500 years or a thousand years or 1 ,200 years Thought the Apostles should have written and if that is your ultimate goal Then there is only one real direction you can go in the analysis of the manuscripts.

If you are willing to give that up You have to ask the question. What am I giving it up for? Because especially here in Utah You know that we deal with people who claim a particular religious text as well and It may not just be the Mormons.

It might be the Muslims now. You've got everybody here in Utah now and so We have to have equal scales. We have to stand firm in saying I want to know what the Apostles wrote. And I'm not simply going to say this text over here that's my standard because we know lots of other groups that do the exact same thing and if we're going to critically interact with their texts and Point out the history of their texts then we have to use the same standards with ours and It's obvious here.

We can talk about that with Mormonism, but the same with Islam the same with a lot of different groups and so I want to know what was originally written and therefore when we look at the manuscripts that we have today and we have far more manuscripts far earlier manuscripts and far higher quality manuscripts.

For the New Testament than any other work contemporaneous with the New Testament by a Longshot there is nothing that comes even close. And so we have a massive amount of information millions of pages of handwritten data that we're dealing with and the question that must guide our analysis of those is What did the original authors write now.

I brought with me tonight a critical edition of the Greek New Testament and while it's not exhaustive it Has far more information in this one volume than any New Testament scholar had access to before I would say 1950.

Which wasn't all that long ago, but to younger people seems like a long long time ago. There is more information in this one volume than almost any scholar had access to for 95 of the history of the Christian Church.

And so we have a tremendous amount of information we can draw from we are hiding nothing. It's not it's not like you have some priest group you have to go to to get your information. Anybody can buy this my Muslim friends buy this.

I know Mormons who look at stuff like this Jehovah's Witnesses and others we don't hide anything and we don't need to hide anything. Because we can openly lay out our here's how we're gonna do it. Here's the rules that we're gonna go by here's why we think this is the way to do things and we put it on the table and You end up with a Tremendous amount of consistency in an understanding of what the original text of the New Testament was.

One last thing I'll say because we have other questions to get to one last thing I'll say is This Historically The King James and the New King James are based upon what's called the textus receptus. The textus receptus is actually a number of different printed editions of the Greek New Testament the Historically the 1624 edition is Really the TR but today the Trinitarian Bible Society textus receptus has sort of Taken the place of that one.

And that was produced by a brilliant scholar by name of FHA Scribner in the the late 19th century and That's the that's what underlies the King James Version and the New King James translation of the New Testament if You have a New American Standard ESV and IV legacy standard Bible Christian standard Bible any of the modern translations they are based upon this Greek text, which is called the Netsy Allen text this text in its main readings because if I had a if you The the main text is above but then you'll see a number of notes down at the bottom a lot of notes down at the bottom of the page in The main text here if you compare that with the TR there is about a I think it's 2 difference in length and That represents those expansions that we were talking about all of those expansions are in the notes here.

So you have it right there. It's on the page. You can look at it. You can make your own decision as to whether you Accept that reading or not, but here's the point either in the main text or at the bottom of the page are all the original readings from the Apostles, they're still there and Robert Bowman, that's the name.

I couldn't remember earlier today Robert Bowman used I thought a brilliant Illustration Dan Wallace agreed. There was a brilliant illustration he said the situation we face is like having a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle and We have ten thousand one hundred pieces.

Now, I don't know if any of you have ever done a ten thousand who's done a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. The one young man down front who noticed he only went like this. It's not like I asked who here has hands solo jammies or something like that.

You know, I Wouldn't want to ask that question actually. Now, you know that having ten thousand one hundred pieces would complicate that process. Because you have to identify the extra pieces. But which would you rather have?

Ten thousand one hundred pieces and have to identify the extra pieces or 9 ,900 pieces and never be able to complete the puzzle. We don't have the nine thousand nine hundred. We have the ten thousand one hundred and So that is a to me is a tremendous Testimony to the preservation of the text of Scripture over time.

I believe that God has preserved the New Testament it's the method and methodology that he used that we have to understand and A lot of people a lot of people want to have the Indiana Jones method of New Testament preservation.

And I'm dating myself. You realize how many people don't even know who Indiana Jones is anymore. That is so sad. If you've not seen Raiders of the Lost Ark or this was search for the holy was what which one was it?

Was the last crusade, okay. Thank you. All is easy to identify the fans in the in the in the group in one of the Indiana Jones films they were looking for the Holy Grail and They find it in this cave with a really really really really old guy.

I mean like he doesn't die. Okay, and A lot of Christians wish that the original manuscripts in the New Testament were in some Cave someplace with a really really really old guy who doesn't die who's been watching over them and eating bugs for the past 2 ,000 years.

And that way we wouldn't have any questions. There wouldn't be any little notes at the bottom of the page. You've got the same notes at the bottom of the page in your Bible, too. And and people don't like that.

But here's the problem. Unless you have 2 ,000 years worth of video recordings. How do you know what that guy has been doing in that cave for 2 ,000 years? You have to trust that whoever has that one Untransmitted text hasn't tampered with it.

Now what's the best way to make sure someone doesn't tamper something? Have lots of copies made and spread all over the place and. And Then have some of them buried in the sands of Egypt and not dug up for 2 ,000 years because if you do bury some of them in the sands of Egypt someplace and they're found 2 ,000 years later and Someone has been messing with the text.

What are you gonna see? Well, you see the massive changes. It's gonna be obvious well in the 1930s. We discovered that the well we knew for a long time that the British had been stealing the Egyptians blind.

And had been stealing everything, you know when they when they ruled Egypt they stole all sorts of stuff and took it to London and Some of the stuff that they took. Were things like Egyptian funerary documents which help us here in Utah.

Which Michael a chandelier is running around showing people and that type of thing. But there were all sorts of papyri. Ancient papyri manuscripts and lo and behold in the 1930s. There's this guy. Can you imagine how smart this guy was?

He's looking through these papyri Fragments just some fragments in a cardboard box in a basement in London and he looks at one it's about the size of a credit card and Yet this guy and that means you don't even have a sentence.

You've just got fragments of words. You know how difficult that is to read. I mean, that's tough in English let alone ancient Korean Greek he recognizes that this is from the New Testament and Upon analysis what he had found is what we now call p52, which is arguably Anyway, is the earliest fragment in the New Testament we possess from around the year 125 ad and It's from the Gospel of John John chapter 18 verse 31 34 on one side 37 38 in the backside, which ironically is Jesus's conversation with Pilate.

What is truth? I've just always found that just fascinating that. That do you have any idea what that one little piece of papyrus had to survive for for 2 ,000 years? But we find all these papyri that we now have that no other generation of Christians had ever seen or had access to and They take our knowledge of the New Testament 200 years back from where it had been at that point closer to the originals and Do we find massive editing from that?

No, we don't. We don't so We have the ability at this very time where people like Bart Ehrman are running around sowing seeds of distrust and doubt we have more evidence of the antiquity and the accuracy of the preservation of the text in the New Testament than any Generation has ever had before us has ever had before us so I think the Lord has been taking care of things and so Because the tenacity of the New Testament text I believe God has preserved all of his word for us but just like every single person Who published a Greek New Testament that was then used by the Reformers?

Martin Luther. Martin Luther had to use someone else's work. He didn't have access to manuscripts. He wasn't a scholar in that field. So, what did he do? He read Erasmus's Greek New Testament. Well, Erasmus only had about a dozen texts To put that together with and he wasn't really all that concerned about The Greek he was much more concerned about the Latin translation.

He was providing because he knew it could get into a lot of trouble and so We've all had to utilize the works works of others and in that process We have produced translations down through the years and everything else, but Erasmus would have given his eye teeth to have this but he didn't and so We are blessed and I personally think that especially for homeschool parents.

This is a topic that you need to know. Because our kids when they leave our home the first thing that is attacked is the veracity and the transmission of the text of scripture and I think this just should be something that we All know about and know about it.

Well For ourselves and for our grandchildren as well. Sorry about that. I was that was a half-hour we done. Okay. Alrighty. We'll see y 'all later. Question two. I.

Let me give a little lead-in to this. You mentioned Bart Ehrman he Every opportunity he gets he says there are more textual variants in the New Testament than there are words, right? And You've explained in other venues He's stating fact.

Yes, there are Many more variants than there are words. The impression that he is giving Purposefully is that therefore we can't know what's in the New Testament with any certainty. You have people on the other extreme.

Who think that in order to respond to Bart Ehrman? they have to have a Text about which there is absolutely no question, but it's not as if there are Infinite number of possibilities of what things read right.

The the choices are between you use the example Jesus said to the man versus the Lord Jesus said to the man. It's not going to turn there's there's no chance of Digging something up in Egypt that's going to cast doubt on whether It was something completely different.

It's.

One of the two well, let me give the illustration of that that little straight really well. I remember listening years ago I wish I had kept the audio file. It probably is someplace on my 8 terabyte hard drive, but who can find anything on that?

I was listening to a webcast where Bart Ehrman was on and with an atheist. The atheist was the host and So you could just tell the atheist is just loving this and he he goes so dr. Irvin in light of all the changes What do you think the New Testament was originally all about?

Okay. So what's in his mind? His mind is that the New Testament was actually about Space gods from Kolob who knows. Weird wild wacky stuff like that. See and You can tell there's this hesitation and then Irvin goes Well, it was about Jesus as the Son of God coming to earth and dying on a cross to provide forgiveness of sins.

And you can just it's like as The as the balloon just goes flat because the guy was expecting some really cool thing and Irvin is a scholar. Okay. It's his conclusions that are off not as facts and He has admitted all we're doing is playing around with the text as far as what the original readings are.

He says we know what the New Testament was about. There are a couple of places when I asked him in our debate if for a single place Where he believed the original reading was lost he could only give me one and It was whether it was and or Enoch Somewhere in 2nd Peter.

That was it. No impact upon the meaning of the New Testament and he would admit There's really nothing He loves to talk about the variant in Mark 2 where Jesus instead of in compassion in anger healed the leper and in Hebrews chapter 2 where there are a few manuscripts that say by the grace of Apart from God rather than by the grace of God that that's it.

Those are his big examples. He knows that what the New Testament teaches is firmly established and it is interesting I'll just mention this in passing. Sorry to have jumped in on this but he knows That since he did his doctoral work back in the 70s under Metzger at Princeton Just over the past 10 12 years now we have developed something called CB GM the coherence-based genealogical method and To make a really complicated very very complicated subject very very simple we can now with computer precision demonstrate the amount of agreement amongst the text of the New Testament and We can demonstrate that the claims that there's this wild variation are themselves wild and This did not exist when when Ehrman was and Ehrman has admitted.

He's no longer in this field he does not claim to be work doing actual research work in the textual critical field any longer and so he's never dealt with CB GM and all the rest of that kind of stuff and So we can respond to even some of the things that he has said Was significantly more material than than he he ever he ever knew so Keep this keep that kind of stuff in mind.

There's Bart, you know go listen go watch the debate that we had you can stand toe-to-toe with with the best the other side has to offer and When he did make our debate available finally years after we gave it to him years after we gave it to him He posted it with one comment.

This wasn't my best debate Yeah, which is the greatest compliment you would ever ever ever get from from Bart Ehrman. There's absolutely no ways about Yeah, we actually.

Took some of that and added a few things. We did the Bible versus Bart Ehrman and I think that's really revealing his. Most of his facts are correct, but he'll bend the facts to depends on his audience.

Yeah, I mean you don't get on the New York Times bestseller list. Sorry running. That's right, Bruce Metzger kind of stuff. That's right Bruce Metzger said we have the Word of God. Mm-hmm. He said this is the Word of God.

We have it. The out of out of all these textual variants roughly what percent are actually even Have any effect. I Mean. I mean, let me preface it. What's the most common textual variant?

Okay, the most common textual variant is The same issue we have in English. With Southerners Midwesterners are not exempt. Well, this is true, but you're supposed to say may I have an apple? Not I have an apple and.

So I resemble that remark so there are many sexual variants created in Georgia, but anyway.

And Louisiana and parts of Oklahoma and so on and so forth but There was something called the movable new which in Greek functioned the exact same way. You didn't you don't want to pronounce two vowels in a row.

No language. Well, never mind that Western languages don't want to do that. There are some languages that think that's a lot of fun so the most common textual variant in the New Testament is whether you have a movable new which does not impact a Apple or an apple does not change what it means and so it does not impact the translation into another language there are by some estimates Between 400 ,000 and 500 ,000 variants in the New Testament and there are a hundred and thirty eight thousand 230 I think words in the main text of the Nessie Olympic, but the vast majority of those are movable news or they are Issues that cannot even be translated another language.

So in other words, they do not carry meaning of the let's say 400 ,000 variants there are about 1 ,500 that are Meaningful they actually can be translated into English and have a have a different meaning and what are called viable.

So if you find a manuscript from the well, I could give you an example in the King James of this. Well, well I will if you let's look at a text real quick in Philippians chapter 3. I'm flipping Ephesians chapter 3.

There is an interesting reading in verse 9 in Ephesians 3 9 in the New American Standard. It says and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery? Which were ages had been hidden in God who created all things.

Now if you have a King James or a New King James, it doesn't say administration. It says what? Anybody have one? It says fellowship. Fellowship now fellowship and administration are not the same thing.

Okay. There's there there one is quaint. Ania. Yeah, there's a kind of meal now. The we have found The one manuscript That is from around 12 to 1300 AD. That is responsible for the King James having fellowship here instead of administration and It just happens to be one of the very few manuscripts that destinaries Erasmus had access to When he created the first printed Greek New Testament printed and published Greek New Testament in 1516 and We don't have any manuscripts before that.

We don't have any early church fathers before that. Everybody who preached this text said administration all the all the papyri everything Said and we have we have for example in the Chester Beatty library in Dublin Ireland.

We have p46 Which is the earliest collection of Paul's major epistles? It's from around the year 200. Okay, so it's it's the earliest we have. And by the way for those interested in such things it also contains Hebrews.

Which means that somebody in the year 200 thought Paul wrote Hebrews? That's all it proves but anyway It says administration. So we can trace the text 1100 years before one manuscript and yet that one manuscript ends up being used by Erasmus and that's why it's in the King James and so.

The vast majority of scholars would say that reading is not viable. Because not only is it not found in any of the early manuscripts or any of the early church fathers. But remember we're not just talking about the Greek New Testament.

Because Christians want their scriptures to go to everybody. So you have early translations in the Latin Coptics a headache for Eric. And so on so forth and none of those translations. Have anything other than?

Administration none of them have fellowship, which means there weren't any other manuscripts back there in those ancient days that had that reading either so fundamentally. The reading of the textus receptus that Ephesians 3 9 is not viable.

It's it's impossible. It's an error in the TR and so when you cut down all the all the variants to what is actually Meaningful and viable there's about 1 ,500 out of The percentage is less than 1 of the of any of the text.

Erman loves to throw numbers around right statistics. Because he can confuse people he can overwhelm them. There are people who are advocates of The the TR that will also throw around statistics and They'll talk about you know, 5 ,000 differences between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus just in the Gospels things like this.

But in terms In terms of What the Bible teaches there are a few passages such as Ephesians 3 1st John 5 7 the Johannine comma things like this. Is there any doctrine that is in any way affected by these 1500?

Variants. Okay. Now we need to be really clear about this really really clear. Because I have said since 1994 That I would debate anyone on the assertion that the textual variations in the New Testament Fundamentally changed the message of the New Testament.

So I as I have said forever that if you apply the same method of hermeneutics and interpretation to the Texas Receptus and To the Nessie Alan 28th edition of the Greek New Testament. You will not come up with different beliefs.

Now the list of verses That you would put forth that would teach a particular topic might be slightly different. So in First Timothy 316 in the King James and New King James. It says God was manifested in the flesh.

That's pretty strong. The modern translations say he who was manifested in the flesh is it's the different it literally and this is. This is one point where it's very helpful to be able to project this on the wall but the difference is between Haas and they oz.

But as they were written in the ancient language you need to remember something for the first 900 years of the transmission of the text of the New Testament. It was transmitted By writing in all capital letters.

No spaces between words almost no punctuation. Can you imagine what that looks like? So it's a page filled with nothing but an unbroken line of capital letters and You would not even at the end of a line.

You would just break a word and start on the next line. That was How Greek was written at that time period and for the first? 900 years the transmission of text in the assessment. That's how it was done.

And then somebody woke up one morning and said you know if we use capital letters and small letters and spaces between words and punctuation this might be easier to read and Very quickly. That's what took over.

It's called minuscule text and you can just watch the numbers starting right at the turn of the millennium. All the old way of doing it disappeared and All the manuscripts after that are written in minuscule text, which is what you study in seminary and what's in the Greek New Testament today?

So in first in 316 the difference between Haas Omicron Sigma and say Haas Theta Sigma is Just two small horizontal lines. Very and you're writing a papyri papyri had lines in it. It'd be very easy to understand how someone could make a mistake one way or the other for in John 118 in John 118 in in the four earliest manuscripts of the New Testament of the Gospel of John John 118 says hominogeneous the us the unique God God the one and only has revealed him has revealed the father.

Here is a application the word they asked to Jesus. Later manuscripts say we asked son. So it's interesting a lot of people is did any of you ever see the interview I did with Steven Anderson. The really neat fun guy out in Tempe.

That was for a movie and I think 30 seconds of it got used in the movie but the big thing that they pushed in the movie is was for Timothy 316 and the idea that Modern translators are trying to deny the deity of Christ and stuff like that.

Well, you could turn that around and say on the basis of John 118 that the King James translators are trying to hide the deity Of Christ, but both are lies they were simply following the manuscripts and the the printed text that were before them and So you can you can do stuff like that.

You can you can find the variance and It's not just with King James only us or TR only us or modern critical text advocates Jehovah's Witnesses do this a lot, too. I remember you got to be careful with Jehovah's Witnesses.

Some of those some of those people are really well-trained. I Was I was driving home from teaching a systematic theology class or Golden Gate Theological Seminary years and years and years ago. And I was listening to my own radio broadcast, which was live at the time.

My friends were filling in for me and this Jehovah's Witness called in. I could I knew who it was so thankfully this was right as cell phones are starting and somehow I got in and He and I ended up doing a debate while I'm driving on a cell phone in the early days of cell phone coverage, which is sort of amazing and He hit me with a question we were talking about John 2028, there's no variant at John 2028, but John 2028 Jesus appears to Thomas and What is Thomas's response when he sees Jesus?

He says, huh? I'm Cody. Awesome. Ooh, Kai Hathaway. Awesome. Ooh, my lord and my god and Jehovah's Witnesses have to stand on their heads do handstands and and to do the splits and everything else to try to find a way around John 2028 because it's really rather clear and obvious and So he hits me with a question.

How Cody asked mu is in the nominative case and The Greek language there was a way to address someone directly which is called evocative. Now in the coin a period the vocative was passing away. It was being replaced by the nominative.

So he hit me with a question. He said Is there any other place in the New Testament? Where God is addressed in the nominative? That doesn't involve a textual variant. Because I knew there is one other but I also knew there was a minor textual variant there.

It's in Revelation chapter 4. So this Jehovah's Witness knew. Not only where it was but that there was a textual variant involved. That's how deeply these people will dive into the utilization of that type of information, so hey all information can be used for good or for evil and Sometimes the cults use it and we need to know it on the other side.

So really when you think about it, what's interesting? There are only two Multiverse variants in the New Testament that we end up always talking about and you need to know where they are and They are both of them are a block of 12 verses.

That's big. There's only two places and you probably know where they are the longer ending of Mark Mark 16 9 to 20 because there are multiple endings of Mark and the as Dan Dan Wallace has has expressed it his favorite story.

That's not in the Bible. The woman taken in adultery John 7 53 3 8 11. There Just isn't anything else. There are single verses. There's a commie Oh honey in the first John 5 7, which is not a viable reading either.

We can talk about that more if you if you want me to expand on that but generally people like ermine will use the woman taken adultery, which is called the Prick of a adultery as a means of unsettling Their young Christian students and stuff like that.

And so once you once you know the background of those two texts. They don't have much else to throw at you. So an educated Christian is an insulated Christian as far as that's concerned. Now of those two the long writing of Mark has much earlier manuscript evidence.

Then the woman taken in adultery does. As far as actually having a manuscript that reads that way the first manuscript that reads that way historically is Called codex Bessie Canterbury Jancis codex D now codex D.

I call the Living Bible of the early church. Which is not a compliment. Theodore Baza Calvin succeeds successor successor Successor at Geneva he was gifted this manuscript and Upon examining it He eventually donated to Cambridge University with a letter and the letter he said this manuscript is So unique in its readings that it is better stored than read.

So It is a highly unusual manuscript. In fact in the book of Acts when Peter is freed from the jail. For some reason this manuscript decided to tell us how many steps he went down to get to the street.

He's a 29 or 39. I've got to look that back up again. But it's a very very unusual manuscript and it's the first one to contain That particular text and what's fascinating is Those verses are found in three different places in John in the manuscripts of John and Interestingly enough in some other manuscripts.

They're not found in John at all they're found in two different places in Luke. Now when you have one set of verses found in five different places. That's a story that people really really liked trying to find a place to call home and it's the only example of it in the New Testament at all and so Those are your now.

There's all the stuff that could be said about the long writing of Mark. And you can listen to a debate I did in 2020 I believe it was on that particular subject I. And if you know what if you want to believe the long-ranging of Mark is canonical great fine.

Defend it. Here's the here's the issue just use the same arguments to defend it. That you would use to defend any other text that had contains a variant. That's that to me is the issue I have to be consistent in the arguments that I would use Against the Book of Mormon against the Quran.

I have to be consistent. So I have to be consistent in the arguments. I use for The readings that I believe should be adopted in the text of the New Testament the problem is that when you Look at the textus receptus.

Because of its history because it was not the work of just one person. Because it was the work of many people they use different standards and So you could never take the manuscript material that we have today and reproduce the TR using any set of standards at all.

It just can't be done. Let me give you a fascinating example. I only found out about About two and a half three years ago. I Had always wondered about this. It's well known that Erasmus struggled To produce now Erasmus just give you an idea Erasmus Dutch humanist scholar humanist did not mean the same thing back then that it means today Erasmus was.

Reading Erasmus is sort of fun. He he he could he could sling him with the best of them and He risked his life he risked his life to do the things that he did so you got to give him some credit. But Erasmus Was under a lot of pressure to finish Producing the first printed edition of Greek New Testament.

It was a die-glot. So it had the Greek on one one page and the Latin on the other. The dangerous thing he was doing is he was providing a fresh Latin translation. Why was that dangerous? Because Rome had said the Vulgate was the final edition.