Continuing the Textual Criticism Series

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.
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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. Hey, good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning, a cool and rainy morning.
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Well, the sun's out now, but it's been raining a little bit here in the Phoenix area. We can obviously use that.
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We continue with the series on textual criticism today.
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I know that there are a number of folks who have some questions. We'll be getting to phone calls in a future program where we can look at some textual critical issues.
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And we will be limiting phone calls at that point to textual critical issues. And I had someone last night asking if they could call in about some sort of odd emergent church thing.
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I said, nope, probably wouldn't fit. So won't be doing that. Before we get to the texts themselves,
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I would like to – why doesn't Microsoft Word open a document when we double -click on it?
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It's just driving me nuts. I've found a document that I wish to open. And so I double -click on it and Microsoft Word opens up and then it sits there and stares at me.
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I just love it. Maybe it does not like that OpenOffice is installed in this unit too. Anyways, before we get into some of the specific issues of the textual critical application, we start looking at some issues.
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Oh, I don't know. Last time we were together, I'm looking at a thing about six to the fifth here because it has to do with what
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I want to mention right now. I want to address an issue.
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I have in the past – in fact, if you just do a search for Credenda Agenda on my blog, you'll be able to find the
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URL where I did a – it's not a debate. I certainly don't list it as a debate.
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But Credenda Agenda has had for many years these things they called a disputatio, a disputation.
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And I was asked – man, I don't remember what year it was now. It was quite some time ago – to do a disputatio with Douglas Wilson on the subject of what's called the ecclesiastical text.
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And this goes right at that particular point in time.
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The folks up in Moscow, Idaho were being influenced by a fellow who has since passed away by the name of Ted Liedis, Theodore Liedis, and his ecclesiastical text theories.
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That in essence continue on and in various forms.
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Some of you may have noticed that one of the primary writers at the
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Oxymoronic blog recently indicated that now that he's become an
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Anglo -Catholic, he's looking at these things. And he's changing his textual critical viewpoints and is embracing the
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Byzantine textual platform as the canonical platform of the church. Now, people hear that and they go, what are these folks talking about?
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I mean, let's face it. Most folks don't know what the Byzantine platform is or the Alexandrian or what an eclectic text is.
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And we talk about some odd things on this webcast to be certain. But there are those who start reading and maybe they start reading some
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Reformed writings and things like that. And for some reason, there are a number of Reformed folks.
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There are King James -only Reformed folks. There are TR -only Reformed folks. And I've always found that to be a little bit odd.
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From my perspective, it would seem that the very same critical thinking abilities that would lead a person to recognize
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Reformed theology as the teaching of scripture would also allow one to see through some of the rather circular argumentation as used in these areas.
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But be that as it may, I understand that many people don't like the idea of having textual reference notes.
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There are many people who do not like that the New King James, for example, lists what the
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UBS text says or what the majority text says or when the majority text splits.
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You're sowing discord. You're sowing disbelief when you make reference to these facts, which makes me wonder a little bit about what you think facts are.
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But anyway, there is a real desire for certainty.
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I want one text, no questions, black and white all the way. I don't want any textual variants.
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I want just one text. And I've been playing the Shabir Ali debate in the
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Bible study at Phoenix Reformed. Actually, I was gone for a week, and so we started then. And all they got to hear was
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Shabir's opening statement. I didn't think it was fair to do that. I wanted to get a chance to respond.
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So we've been watching the entire day. We'll finish up this week. And, you know, you hear the
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Muslims saying, oh, so you have all these textual problems. You have all these textual variants. And they can, you know, spend an entire debate just talking about textual variants.
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And it takes longer, obviously, in a meaningful fashion to explain a textual variant than it does to throw out just the bald assertion that – well, and I gave an example.
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Shabir was talking about how – I remember riding South Mountain, and I was hearing him talking about how in Luke 1 that later scribes had inserted into Luke's writings that it seemed good to me and to the
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Holy Spirit to do this research and to write this gospel and so on and so forth. And I looked it up, and there was one
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Latin manuscript. I mean, there's no possible reality at all that this is the original, but he throws it out there and says it doesn't tell his audience that.
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It's meant to inculcate in people's minds, you know, this massive amount of corruption. No one really knows the original said.
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And so I fully understand when people say, man, it would just be a whole lot easier if we didn't have any textual variation in the
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New Testament. I mean, Bart Ehrman, that's his whole thing. If this is God's word, there would be no textual variants. I guess
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God would just strike any scribe dead who was about to make a mistake. You're getting tired toward the end of a book, and it's the end of a long day, and your eyes are weary, and you're just about to misspell a word, and boom!
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Lightning comes out of the sky and turns you into a crispy critter, and that way you never get any textual variants. Of course, I don't think you'd actually have anybody copy any manuscripts either.
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If the last 14 scribes that tried to copy John got turned into toast, I don't think nobody would have the
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New Testament around. But anyway, or I know you could have automatic writing, and he could superintend it and all the rest of this stuff.
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But it's silly. No ancient text, unless it was chiseled in stone, can be passed down in handwriting without textual variation.
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That's the nature of that means of communication. So I understand when people want to embrace this concept.
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There's two things I want to address. First of all, back in 1995,
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I forget what month it was, but I went back to Tennessee. I believe it was
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Nashville. Was it Nashville? Where was the Ankerberg program at that time? That was
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Nashville. It's been a while. Anyway, flew back someplace back there. I remember visiting relatives, so I thought it was
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Nashville. No, it couldn't have been Nashville. Where's Tennessee Temple at? No, where's Tennessee Temple University?
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Where is that located? Wherever Tennessee Temple University is, that's where I went. We didn't go there, but I just happen to know that that's...
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Not Memphis? No. No. No, I don't think it was. Anyway, we did the...
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I only thought there was two towns in Tennessee. That was Nashville and Memphis. The opinions expressed by Rich Pierce on this program are not the opinions of the management or the rest of the staff.
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The other 50 % of the ministry do not want to have...
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That's not even getting there. Anyways, we did the John Ankerberg show. If you've ever seen them, we ought to track down...
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I think I've got the video... Hey, videotapes. I can digitize videotapes now. If you've ever seen them,
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I really should. Remind me. I've got to put this on the list for the YouTube parade.
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Some of the great questions. There was this one time... Chattanooga. Thank you. Thank you.
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Nana came through for us. I went to Chattanooga. That's where the Ankerberg show was being... Is that the other city in Tennessee, Rich?
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Chattanooga and Memphis? Those are the only two you can remember. Don't even go there. Forget it. Anyway, I need to put some of the exchanges that took place during that on the blog and comment on it.
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Because they were fascinating. Especially with the Ruckman representative,
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Sam Gipp. There were some great ones there. But I would suggest that you get the series.
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It's well worth watching. But for eight half -hour programs, it's like 90 bucks. It's always been outrageously expensive.
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But I got one because I was on the program. Anyway, in that particular encounter,
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Dan Wallace and I tag -teamed some of these King James only guys. We really did. I mean we had not met prior to that.
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But Dan and I really kicked it off. And we've always kicked it off. I've mentioned a couple of times that I only have two positive memories of the first time
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I attended ETS in 1998 in Orlando. And one of them is standing at the
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NET Bible display, having about a half -hour conversation with Dan about our differences in understanding of the grammar and syntax of the
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Kermit and Christy of Philippians 2, 5 through 11. And neither one of us had a Greek text anywhere around, but we both had it memorized. And it was so much fun.
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And the other happy memory I think I have mentioned before was David King and I listening to Dr.
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Nicole talking about the founding of ETS. And when somebody asked him, why did you say the
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Bible alone? This big, big man just sort of shuffles up to the microphone and says, because we didn't want any
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Roman Catholics in the group. He sat there. And David King and I are in the back. Yay! And we realized we were the only people who were clapping.
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And everybody was looking at us like we were freaks. But anyway, those were the two happy moments in 1998.
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And so I haven't a clue what that means. I just got a
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PM from someone who will remain nameless that has absolutely positively nothing to do with anything
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I'm saying. It's just like the most random thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and I haven't a clue what anything is about.
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So I'm going to try to continue on here. Dan Wallace and I were tag teaming the
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King James only fellow. And one of the things that Dan said, I'm finally getting to my point here.
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It must be early in the morning, but I get my point. Dan, Dan said, you have traded truth for certainty.
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You have traded truth for certainty. And what does that mean?
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Well, ever talked to a Mormon missionary who was absolutely positively certain that the
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Book of Mormon was true? I have. I mean, I've talked with people with tears in their eyes.
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They just they just know they are certain that the
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Book of Mormon is word of God. There are a lot of people who are very certain that the
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Koran is the word of Allah. They're so certain they'll strap explosives to their body and blow themselves to smithereens along with everybody else.
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They're certain that make it true. There are people who can be very, very, very, very certain about things that are not true at all.
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And Christians can do the same thing. They shouldn't inconsistent, indefensible, but they do it.
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They do it. Absolutely certain. And what you have with with a
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King James only person is a person who, you know, let's let's let's look at the best way of thinking about this.
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OK, the most just the best way we can look at it would be something along these lines.
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They want to know for certain what God says.
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And if you say some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that my certainty is destroyed.
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And so I believe God has spoken. And so he must have spoken in this form. And then all these arguments.
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And at that point, honestly. Almost any translation can be defended on that basis.
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I mean, the King James is defended. Well, look at all the great preachers have used the King James. Well, there were great preachers before the
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King James. There were translations before the King James. There are people who gave their lives to make translations before the
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King James. And the time is going to come where there's going to be a whole generation that's known nothing but the
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NIV. Will there be an NIV only movement once that becomes the way that people have always heard the word of God in their particular tradition?
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You know, that that whole mindset, you know, can be very powerful.
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But it doesn't mean that what you are certain of is actually true. And that's a very dangerous path to start going down.
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It's indefensible. First of all, it's an apologetic standpoint. It can't stand up against the challenges made from other perspectives.
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You end up having to use inconsistent arguments. And is that not the argument that I used against Shabir Ali?
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He has to use one entire worldview, one entire spectrum of scholarship against Christianity.
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And then abandon all of that, reject all of that, grab a completely different worldview, a completely different spectrum of scholarship of theology to defend the
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Quran. That's what he has to do. And so that means you're wrong.
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No matter how else you put it, if you use one set of arguments to attack and another set of arguments to defend, if you're not consistent, then you're wrong.
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That's the only way that you can express it. And so that kind of of of emphasis,
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I know it's there and it impacts people. And so in a in a gross way, you see the
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King James only movement. And I want to have certainty. And you see people like D .A. Wade attacking the new King James version for putting textual notes in the margins, even though the original
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King James had textual notes itself. They sort of forget that. But, you know, when you're the head of the
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Dean Bergen Society and Dean Bergen could never have been a member of your society, that in and of itself should tell you all is not well on the consistency level.
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And that is, to me, by the way, the greatest evidence. The King James only movement is completely fraudulent and false is the fact that it is grossly inconsistent.
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It cannot give a consistent defense of its own perspective. It has to flip flop back and forth.
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It has to engage in equivocation, all the rest of that stuff. And that proves it's wrong.
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I mean, for any any person who is concerned about truth now, of course, the problem is you have to find people who are actually concerned about truth.
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Now, taking a step back, though, the ecclesiastical text folks like like Doug Wilson.
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And I don't know what Doug Wilson's viewpoint on this is today. I haven't had a contact with him on this particular subject since we did that disputatio in Credenda Agenda, which, again, like I said, if you just Google it or it's on the blog,
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I've linked to at least twice. It's been a while, so I don't know exactly where he stands on it now.
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But at the time, during the course of the of the disputatio, I asked him, all right, you want to talk about how the church has decided the text of Scripture.
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And let's again, then that sound wonderful. I mean, I can I can spin this. Just as well, if not better than some of these folks,
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I mean, come on, we don't want the text, the word of God determined by a bunch of secular scholars.
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We want the text, the word of God determined by godly men, by elders in the church.
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Right. Well, yeah, who's going to argue with that? I mean, it's really easy to to demonize secular scholarship and and say, oh, unbelievers are handling the holy things.
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And, you know, you can spin all sorts of stuff and make it sound really bad. But here's the problem.
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It's one thing to attack secular scholarship or even just scholarship in general. And sometimes there's a good reason to do that certainly is in these days when scholarship has become primarily a political thing rather than something you do.
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It's something you buy. It's a club you join rather than something you actually do in your life. But anyway, that's one thing.
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But just simply attacking another position doesn't mean you're actually affirming your own. And so if someone wants to say, well, the church has determined the text of scripture, the canon of scripture, the the actual readings of variant text.
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One of the things I asked was when, who? When when did people actually sit down and actually sit down with variant readings and they actually had all the information.
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And make these decisions, when did that happen? Who did it? Can we examine their their deliberations?
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Well, exactly what information did they have accessible to since we have the papyri today and things like that that were only discovered over the past 80 years?
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Has it happened since then? If it happened before then, then you're making certain assumptions that, well, you know,
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I guess if manuscripts go out of circulation, like in all those areas where Islam takes over, then that means that the text that was read there is irrelevant anyways.
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And that God so superintended history that he basically wiped everybody out that was using the wrong
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Greek text. I guess there would be some people might argue that way, I suppose. I don't know. But who made these decisions?
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And I asked Douglas Wilson, I said, let's let's look at an example. Let's look at Luke 222. And Luke 222 contains a reading in the
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King James Version and in the TR that is that was basically unknown to any
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Christians for at least the first thousand years of the Christian church and really is based upon a conjecture by Beza as to what the actual reading should be.
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And he wasn't the first one to make that conjecture, but that's basically where it came from. And it's there's just no possibility of it being the original.
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And once you brought it down to the nitty gritty, down to the where the rubber meets the road, then the wheels fell off because it sounded really good to talk about the church determining the text.
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OK, how does that work? Let's apply it to a particular text and see how that works.
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And the fact is, you can't you can't make it work because it's never happened. It sounds all pious and, you know, it's sort of like Kevin Johnson's exegesis by the mind of the church thing.
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It sounds so warm and fuzzy and and spiritual, but it doesn't work.
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It doesn't help you to exegete anything. That's why I challenged him to exegete a single passage and show us how this differs from the grammatical historical method of hermeneutics.
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And I'm going to attempt to do so because he can't. It's impossible. It's it's like saying coming up with some nice fluffy phrase about how you fix a carburetor, but it then requires you not to use any physical tools.
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Well, let's see how you fix it. You know what you do? Lay your hands on it and pray over it. You know,
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I guess there are some people who do that, but I don't want I'm not going to pay the money to fix in my car. So that's what you have with this ecclesiastical text stuff.
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And I'm wondering, since Paul Owen is presenting a paper on the longer ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 through 20.
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I'm wondering if this Anglo Catholic thing and this ecclesiastical text thing that takes the
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Byzantine text as well, since it's the majority text, that's the text of the church. It wasn't majority text in the seventh century.
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So why does that why is that irrelevant? It wasn't the majority text prior to Islam spreading all over the place.
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So why is why? Why can the text change from century to century? If your if your methodology results in in that kind of of evolving text, then it's probably not really good methodology.
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But that's the type of thing that's being expressed out there. And again, I understand the motivation and I understand why certain reform people, for example, might hear that and go, oh, that sounds good.
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You know, the church and the authority, the church and the elders. Yeah. But but when did the church get together and actually determine these things?
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It didn't. It's just it simply didn't. And to just take the the facts of history.
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That the West. Started speaking Latin and in the east where Greek was still being spoken, you had a great shrinking of that area due to the
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Islamic expansion to take all that and say, ah, this determines text, the Bible makes absolutely positively no sense to me at all.
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Now, don't get me wrong. There have been lots of people in history who have done things like this, who have said, ah, this is the text.
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But nobody today actually thinks they were right. In other words, you know,
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I've told the story in the King James only controversy when Jerome translated the Latin Vulgate. He did not slavishly follow what
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Christians were accustomed to at that point, which is the Greek Septuagint. Or Latin renderings of the
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Greek Septuagint, in essence, and in the West. And so so the you know, the first time that that's
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Augustine's translation was read. In Carthage, there was a near riot.
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They nearly rioted. And as I recall, it was over the fact that that Jerome had a better rendering of the castor oil plant in the book of Jonah, if I'm recalling correctly.
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And most right did there you had a traditional text that had already been set up.
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It was what people were accustomed to. And when you changed it, people didn't like it. But then ironically, it becomes the
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Latin Vulgate, which at first was resisted when it first came out. That becomes the standard so much so that the time of the
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Reformation. You've got you've got Sixtus V coming up with his inspired version of the
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Latin Vulgate. This is the infallible Vulgate. I is the successor of Peter and the
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Pope and blah, blah, blah, blah. And everybody knows it was filled with errors. His successor had to sort of hide it in an embarrassed fashion, make mistakes.
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And it was delivered to the printer with with pieces of paper taped to certain pages of corrections. And that was a mess.
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But again, there was the mindset we need to have an absolute text. And the
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Vulgate is it. And the Latin is it. And that wasn't even the original language. Ah, but it was a language that God had blessed.
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And it's for a thousand years. God has used a lot. It's the text of the church.
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Well, OK, if you're going to start going down the ecclesiastical text direction, you better start dealing with those questions.
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You better start dealing with those arguments, because I don't know that you really have any solid basis for saying, no, no, no.
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We're going to go with the Greek because for for half of church history and from Rome's perspective, more than that,
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Latin has been the language. It was used to the Greeks, language of the heretics. That's what they said to Erasmus.
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And so you see, these things aren't new. This is not new argumentation. These these issues have come up before.
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But unfortunately, the vast majority of of conservative Christians are ignorant of their history and ignorant of issues like this from the past.
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And so as a result, we go back over it again and again and again, as we seem to be doing now.
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Now, having addressed all of those issues, having gone through the UBS, let's look at.
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And I just just before the program started, I reposted the
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PDF links, the PDFs. I also, by the way, almost tried to do this.
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I also posted. And for those of you listening down the road. I posted this on scroll up here today on the 13th of November.
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I posted a graphic. It's not really big. You can't really read it all that well. I've only got 400 pixels to play with.
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So that's sort of how that works. But a quick shot that I took just a few moments ago from the
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Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible S .E .S .B. for Libronics that I have on my system.
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And the S .E .S .B., though it is in German, allows you to have on your computer the textual data for the
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Nessie Olin 27th edition of the Greek New Testament. And you can't barely see this as I'm looking at it on my screen and looking at a 17 inch laptop with very high resolution now.
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But if you look at the graphic, you will see I put Ephesians one up here, which is quite interesting.
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We ought to talk about sometime. Maybe somebody will remind me to do that, because there's an interesting variant here that I think is theologically relevant, somewhat historically relevant.
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Definitely. Anyway, you can't really see it, but the textual data on the right hand side, you can see the
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Greek text on the left side. The right side is a variant of Ephesians 1 .1. The manuscripts are in green.
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The manuscript illustrations are are in green. I suppose
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I can just bring up the original. I took it off of as much as you see. And when you put the cursor on any one of these manuscripts in the listing, it will give you its its designation, its unseal number, where it is located, what century it is from, what it contains.
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It's it's it's really a really neat thing to have. And I also have in my library most of the papyri that have been transcribed available to examine as well.
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And so you can do a lot of this stuff now. I mean, it used to be the books you had to buy were exceptionally expensive and big and cumbersome and not easy to use.
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But it's getting easier and easier and easier to do a lot of this stuff textually, this textual stuff on a computer.
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Of course, you are having to trust that the source is completely reliable in what's recording and nothing's available on that level.
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And so. You know, it's still good to cross reference things and double check things because there are sometimes differences of opinion on certain of those things.
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But, for example, I just put my cursor on P46 because it's relevant to this variant in Ephesians one one and it gives me the name circa 200.
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It's one of the Chester Beatty library papyri. It's up in Ann Arbor, University of Michigan. And then it gives me its contents and I can see that it contains
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Romans 5, 17 through 6, 3, and then verses 5 through 14, then chapter 8, verses 15 to 25, verse 27 to 35.
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I mean, I've got the whole listing of everything that it contains right here on my screen. So it is nice.
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It's not not overly cheap. But there are a lot of things that aren't overly cheap for for libraries, but the price haven't coming down.
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You got to admit that they're not as bad as they used to be. And if you have the libraries library system, you can get a lot of stuff for that, primarily from Logos.
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And so anyways, that that is available to you as well. If you're looking at and there is one other advantages, by the way, this is something
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I wouldn't have thought of only a few years ago. But there is one major advantage to electronic textual study over paper textual study.
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It's called presbyopia. And for those of you who don't know what that is, that means you're under 40.
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Because if you're over 40, you know what presbyopia is. The first time your ophthalmologist mentioned it to you, you said, no,
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I'm a Baptist. But he then said, no, no, no, no. Unless, of course, you're a
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Presbyterian, which you would say, yes, but I'm not with the O .P. Yeah, I'm with the O .P .C. That's a joke.
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And it's very little. But I'm doomed. Yeah. Where's the rimshot when you need it? Anyway, that was pretty bad.
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Anyway, that's what you get when you're when you're on guard duty for 10 straight days. Your humor just went down the right down the tubes.
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Anyway, presbyopia, of course, is the fact that my arms are getting shorter as I get older and I have to hold things farther and farther away.
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Actually, it has to do with with the hardness of the lens of your eye and the muscles in your eye and their inability to cause the lens to do what it needs to do to focus upon nearby objects.
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And the nice thing about electronic textual study is a thing called changing the size of the stinking font, because like the
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N .A. N .A. 27, if you get it in its normal size, it ain't easy to read, folks. At least 27 is better than than 26 or 26 was tiny.
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I mean, it hurt. I remember even in college doing a textual study, a grammatical study.
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Actually, I called it Project Eye Strain because it was not easy on the eyes. And at least 27 is a little bit larger than 26 was.
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You can get them in large print versions, but they tend to be a little bit more expensive. But the nice thing is with the electronic stuff, you can change the font, blow that baby up to 200 percent and actually read what is there.
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I've mentioned that to my fellow elder in regards to Hebrew. The Hebrew vowel signs can be exceptionally frustrating, especially when you develop floaters in your eyes.
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Now, especially since Hebrew vowel signs are sometimes just one dot, then it's three dots.
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And how did that become four dots? What in the world does that mean? You know, oh, it just floated away. Never mind. It helps if your font is larger in that situation.
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Yeah, but the problem there is a computer is involved. I recognize that for certain people, the utilization of electronic methodology is inherently non -spiritual.
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I do realize that that is the case, but it isn't for me. And so there's no problem there.
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All right. Where in the world are we? With all of that said, in regards to the electronic versions and things like that, let's go back to UBS2 .pdf
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that I want to look at here. Just very briefly, if you didn't take a look at it, in UBS2 .pdf,
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there is the variant of Colossians 114. Remember, we discussed that, where the modern text, modern in the sense of the eclectic text,
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I would argue the most ancient text by far, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins is found.
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And I pointed out that since that's a parallel to Ephesians 1 .7, later manuscripts, much later manuscripts, contain redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins.
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And that becomes the basis of King James. You can see that there. I was mentioning this before I put up the PDF. I've put it up since then.
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That is the second variant on that page. And you can see the addition at the end of a couple of translations, a couple of later manuscripts.
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And again, just so I emphasize this, when you see something like what you have there,
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VGCL, Vulgate, the Clementine version of Vulgate, you can't just automatically assume when you see a particular translation and you look it up and go, oh, this particular translation dates from, and you go the earliest date.
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You can't just assume that means that reading is necessarily that early, because sometimes there are going to be different manuscripts.
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And again, especially with a variant like this, where there is such an obvious scribal reason why the expansion would take place.
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There's not an obvious reason why it would be cut out. And given that it's not found in this, everything, basically, for the first five, six, seven, eight, nine centuries of the
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Christian era, trying to explain how that could have gotten lost to defend the insertion is what will eventually lead to a discussion we'll probably have sometime later in regards to what's called the
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Comma Johannium, 1 John 5 .7. But I will just state this right now for those of you who already know what
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I'm talking about, and the major, well, actually, exceptionally minor textual variant there, but one that many people talk about.
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I've said this many times. I know some wonderful Christian men who deeply believe that the
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Comma Johannium is inspired scripture. But I've never had one of them be able to respond to this statement.
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The Comma Johannium, 1 John 5 .7, there are three that bear witness to heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit. These three are one. That is a later insertion.
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It is not in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament. And here's the situation. Even earliest, it's not a part of the
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Greek manuscript tradition at all. If 1 John 5 .7 could be original, if that is what
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John originally wrote, then if you're consistent, if you're consistent, you would have to teach openly and directly that we don't have a clue what the
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New Testament originally looked like. None. No idea. No confidence at all.
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You would have to become consistently more radical than Bart Ehrman or any of the
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Jesus seminar as to the original readings of the New Testament. Why? Because if an entire reading can be lost, just lost, gone, no evidence whatsoever from the
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Greek manuscript tradition, then we have no reason to believe that anywhere else do we have any type of firm knowledge from a historical perspective of what the
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New Testament originally read. And if you were to apply the same standard, that if you can find anything 1 ,500 years after the original, all of a sudden something pops up, comes in from another translation, clearly, there are other places in the text where that happens that didn't happen to enter into the
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King James Version of the Bible. If you're going to be consistent, you have to insert them too. And so you're going to have to come up with something very different than the
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TR, very different than the King James Version of the Bible, if you're going to be consistent. Not a one of these people will ever be consistent.
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They can't. And that's why when I find someone who defends the comma, the comma johannium, but does not at the same time be consistent and say that means we have to radically alter all of the text in the
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New Testament, I just immediately have to say, I'm sorry, but I can't even take you seriously because you are not being consistent.
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You clearly have an agenda. You clearly have an argument you're trying to prove. And you're using whatever evidence you can find to prove your argument, but you're not being consistent.
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And that is not the mark of truth. And that's not how we should handle things. Now, if you'll go to UBS .PDF
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and let me scroll down here, go to page two. It's the second page of UBS .PDF.
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You'll find page 442 of the United Bible Society's text. It is Proxice, the
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Acts of the Apostles, Acts 9, 31 through 38 on this particular page.
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And you have a variant here in verse 31.
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And it's not the world does not shift on this particular variant.
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It's one of the reasons I chose it, but it does have some theological significance. And so I didn't want to bore people to death.
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But the variant has to do with whether it was the church throughout all of Judea and Galilee and Samaria that had peace.
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Or whether it was the churches. And if you read
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Greek, you see it. The fourth word, first line after 31, even if you don't read Greek, is
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Ekklesia. Ekklesia, the singular form of church.
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The church as a whole, taken generically as a whole, the church throughout all of Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace.
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All right. If you go down to the bottom of the page and I've blown the text up to about 166 percent here, so I got to click down twice.
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Now, the bottom of the page, only one variant in this entire page is noted.
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And again, that's one of the differences between the UBS text and the NA27 text is you have many more variants noted in the
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Nessie Olin text than you have in the UBS. But you're given much more information in the
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UBS text. Now, down below, you have a 3, then 31, then
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A. Again, the A is the relative certainty of the committee that worked on the
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UBS. And I, again, find that more of a waste of space than anything else because a lot of that changed between UBS 3 and 4.
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I'm not sure how that really worked, but their level of certainty increased greatly in many areas.
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But you see the first reading is what is provided in the text.
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And then if you'll go down to the third line, there are two slashes, which we would instead of a backslash, it's a forward slash in computer talk, but they're right next to each other.
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That is the indication where the textual data is shifting to the next reading.
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And you'll see that there is a – there are actually three readings here because there is a second one of those down on the third to last line that looks very similar.
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And as far as meaning goes, the only real differences between these readings is whether it's churches or church.
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But if you have churches, then you're going to need to change your verbal agreements and endings later on.
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Unlike many people in the English language, don't bother with that anymore and don't really know how to speak the language.
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It always embarrasses me when I hear some professional athlete or something somewhere just murdering the language and can't figure out how to make verbs agree with whatever.
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So you'll notice that there are some differences throughout that particular verse, but they all go back to whether you're talking singulars or plurals in essence in the verb endings you have and making them consistent with one another.
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And so the primary – as you would look at this, you would see, hey, ecclesia, you'd see the singular.
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And then after the reading is given – and by the way, this would be one of the differences between this and the UBS, the
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NA -27. The NA -27 is just going to have TXT for the text. They're not going to repeat what they've already printed once because remember, the idea in the
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NA -27 is to put as much information into a small amount of space as possible. And so they're just going to use abbreviations to represent things.
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And instead of the UBS giving you the actual full – they basically printed the same Greek words twice to give you this variant, and that's why they don't note nearly as many of them.
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But once you have the ending of the Greek reading given to you, the first thing you're going to see in the
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UBS text and the NA -27 text will be the papyri. Then you're going to have the unseals.
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Then you're going to have the minuscules. Then you're going to have the translations. And then you're going to have the early church fathers.
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That's the order in which the textual data is presented to you. So that's what you have here. 31, after I play
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Thuneta, you have P74. So that's papyri 74. Then you have aleph.
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And notice, unlike when we looked at aleph before, there is no asterisk. There's no 1, 2, 3,
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C, anything like that. That means there's no question as to the reading of Codex Sinaiticus at this particular point.
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It says ecclesia. It has the singular form of church at this point along with P74.
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A, B, and C. Then you have a number of other unseals that are listed. I mean,
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I'm sorry, A, B, and C are the unseals that are listed. Then you have the various minuscules all the way down to lectionary.
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By the way, I didn't mention lectionary before to you. I apologize for that. At the end of the second line, you have a italic
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L. It almost looks like, in fact, in small print, it would look like a slash, similar to the marking for a different variant coming up.
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But that is the L for lectionary. Now, what in the world is a lectionary?
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Well, if you're in a more liturgical church, you already know what a lectionary is. But if you're not, if you're one of the dreaded
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Baptists, then you don't know what a lectionary is. But lectionaries were popular. They would provide scripture readings broken up by date.
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And so you could go through the liturgical calendar and things like that, but sometimes have other writings in them and so on and so forth.
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And obviously, ancient lectionaries are copies of sections of scripture. And so they have a witness to bear as to the text of scripture as well.
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So lectionary 1178. And again, you can go to the back. And if you're going to do if you're going to, for example, if I was going to write a paper in which
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I dealt with this, and I had actually touched on it just a little bit in some things because this is somewhat relevant to the church's church issue, the
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Presbyterian Baptist argument over church polity, so on and so forth. I would want to go through each one of these manuscripts that's listed.
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I would want to be looking at the material in the back. Or if I was using the SESB, just running my cursor down, looking at the information that's found.
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And here's where having a library full of other books helps. Then you would also want to look at some of the background issues of the nature of this manuscript and what family it tends to be in.
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And are there any interesting things about this particular manuscript that you're examining? There are books that provide you that kind of information.
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Metzger's books are helpful on those lines. Allen's text, of course, rather expensive as well. But I'd be looking at each one of these.
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And I'm looking at the old Latin versions that have the plural.
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And, of course, almost any translation is going to be helpful here because almost any translation is going to be able to differentiate between the singular and the plural.
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The Vulgate, the Syriac, the Peshitta, the various Coptic manuscripts, the
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Hittite, Boheric, so on and so forth, Armenian, Ethiopian, and Pseudo -Dionysius. Okay, so that gives me an idea of the range.
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The plural is found basically when you see a papyri plus olive plus A plus B, especially outside the
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Gospels, because A has an older text. It has a
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Byzantine text in the Gospels, and so it tends to split off during the Gospels. But outside the Gospels, it has much more of an
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Alexandrian flavor to it. When you see a papyri plus olive, especially papyri olive
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B, then throw A in there. That's going to be a reading that's going to be hard to overcome because you have the
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Great Unsealed Texts, and then you have a demonstration that they are following a text that was even earlier than them found in the papyri.
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And in most modern eclectic texts, it's going to really require some major league reason why you would overthrow the testimony of a papyri manuscript plus olive plus B, and especially here you've got
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A going along with. And then you have minuscule support, you also have
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Latin support, you've got translational support, ancient translational support as well. Now, so you take a look at that and you go, okay, this is why, from their perspective, they've taken this text first and foremost as the external strength of this reading.
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And it's not like there's going to be much internally that's going to really make a difference one way or the other.
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So this is a variant that's very much determined upon external rather than internal considerations.
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But you always want to look at what's the evidence for the other readings. And so the second reading, the two readings provided here are very, very similar to one another.
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They really can be sort of put together in essence as far as the interest that we have in examining this.
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And what we have is immediately you go, hmm, there's the end of my
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Greek, this is toward the two -thirds down the fourth line.
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And immediately it goes to 614 and 1409. And then you have 2344
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Byzantine, that means this is the Byzantine reading. This is in the NA -27, this is going to be the
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Fraktur M majority text reading, L and P. So there's at least two unsealed texts and then a lot of lectionaries.
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And what you immediately see is there's no papyri or ancient unsealed support for the reading, just right off the bat.
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And you go, hmm, well, you said the other one is very similar to that.
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And I drop down there and there's E, so there's sort of a more ancient unsealed. And Psi, but there's not a lot of real ancient.
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We're not going all the way back here as far as these readings are concerned where you have the plural being used.
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Lectionaries, yeah, okay. And you do have some translational, some manuscripts.
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But notice something else. As we look down these lines, this is the kind of thing your mind wants to be able to pick up.
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You'll notice that, for example, Lectionary 1154 and 422 omit this.
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Lectionary 680 reads this for this. And then even in the
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Coptic Boheric manuscripts, there are some manuscripts of the Coptic to read this way. And in the look at BD, BD 1 slash 4, that means one out of four times.
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So there's even variant in how he renders it. And then you look at the third variant, which is pretty much the same.
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And once again, you've got these parentheses. Well, this one reads this way and it's a little bit different than here. What does that tell you?
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When you have variants that have all sorts of variants inside them, that should be a little red flag.
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That should be something that says, hey, wait a minute, there's a problem here. And where would the problem have come from here?
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Well, it does help to know a little Greek here. And that is, well, the first variant ends up causing all sorts of problems down the line because you're changing the number of a noun.
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And you have to then play with your verbs down the road to make them agree. And if the first guy who made the mistake just put churches instead of church, which is easy enough to see, by the way.
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I hope you've noticed that. What's the major difference here is the difference between ecclesia and ecclesia.
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That's one letter. Now, the article changes, but it's primarily one letter. The first person may have just completely missed that.
50:35
Might have just been a simple spelling error on their part. Anyone ever misspelled by one letter a word even when you were concentrating?
50:42
Yeah, probably have. And then the person who's then copying him sees the plural and then sees all the singular verbs following.
50:51
And then they have to try to fix it. See? And once that has happened, once there's been that interruption in the stream, it causes all sorts of issues and problems, especially when you get down the line in the lectionaries and things like that, because your later scribes don't know
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Greek very well at all. They may know how to copy what's in front of them, but they may not actually understand what they're reading all that well.
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And hence, they may make errors in trying to insert a plural or fixing a plural or think somebody else messed up fixing a plural.
51:20
See? And so when you have all that kind of variation in the later readings, that's a pretty good sign that those later readings are secondary and they come after a textual error has taken place somewhere in the transmission stream.
51:35
And so when you have strong, ancient attestation like this, that's clean and clear without all sorts of variants cropping up within it, that's widely based in papyri, in unseals, in minuscules, in the lectionaries, translations, et cetera, et cetera, and then you find other variants that are complex, they're longer, that's a very clear sign to the person reading this that the shorter reading is the easier.
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It's not actually the easier reading, but it is the much more likely reading, especially in light of the external evidence that exists for it.
52:14
Okay, so that's the UBS text and how you can utilize it and take a look at it.
52:21
All right, now, we're almost out of time here, but I want to make sure, it's a large file.
52:28
I realize a large file is 12 megs. Some of you still suffer from dial -up syndrome. That is an exotic
52:36
East Asian problem, dial -up. And so your files tend to download very slowly when you are suffering from dial -up.
52:47
We have a dial -up sufferer in our channel. One of our regulars, Carla, has dial -up syndrome, and we always are concerned for her and feel very badly for her that she suffers so badly from dial -up.
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But it is 12 megs, and so it might take you some time to track it all down.
53:07
There are seven pages, hopefully you get all seven pages, of the PDF that is na27 .pdf.
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And it begins on pages 52 and 53, so there's actually two.
53:20
And the reason I did PDFs is so you can zoom in on them, and you can at least make the text readable to you.
53:30
And especially on this one, you're going to have to zoom in because the signs just are not easy for people who suffer from presbyterianism,
53:43
I mean presbyopia, to actually read. And so you're just going to need to make sure you're able to zoom these pages up to a decent size to be able to look at them.
53:59
So starting on page 52, we have the listing of the critical signs that will be utilized in the text.
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And it's sometimes easier to just go through a text and explain each one.
54:15
But I want to go through these briefly beforehand, because to be honest with you, sometimes the
54:23
Nessie Olland textual data is so condensed and it's so thick that it can scare somebody off from even trying.
54:33
Because there's not a lot of space, and things are crammed together, and a lot of folks are going, you know,
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I don't want to go there. Maybe if we see them first out here in the introduction and then move into the text itself, that will be somewhat easier for us to press forward.
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As you're reading through text in NA27, probably the most common sign you're going to see is the small superscript circle.
55:01
And that small superscript circle is an indication that the word singular, please notice word singular, following the text is omitted by the witnesses cited.
55:11
So you'll be reading along and you will encounter this little circle. And in fact, if what you want to do, if you don't have an example of this, you can go to the fourth page of the
55:27
PDF document and you will have the textual data for Mark 16, 9 through 20. And one of the problems with Mark 16, 9 through 20 is that there's a lot of textual variations within Mark 16, 9 through 20.
55:40
And if you go over to that right now, you will see, for example, on verse 14, the second
55:51
Greek word, which is in brackets in the text, has the superscript circle next to it.
55:58
And whenever the Nestle Island uses one of those symbols within the text, unlike the
56:07
NA27, where they put a nice little number for you so you can go down there, you don't use numbers. That's another thing you have to print that gets in the way it takes up space.
56:16
Instead, what they will do is they will assume that you can go down to the bottom of the page and you can find the verse number that you're looking for.
56:25
You're reading verse 14, so you go down to verse 14, and then they figure you can match the textual symbols up.
56:33
And so it happens to be at the first variant in verse 14. There down below, you'll find the black dot is how they differentiate between verse variants, and then 14, and then the superscript circle, and then you have the variant.
56:51
And what it means is this word is deleted in these following witnesses. So CLWPSI099F13332427, the majority text, that's the
57:03
M, and so on and so forth. And then you'll have a,
57:08
I'm not sure what the technical name for a vertical line split in half is, to be perfectly honest with you, but that's the divider.
57:18
We have it on our keyboard. It's above my enter key. We have a divider, and then you have
57:24
TXT. So the text that they've given up above is the reading of Codex Alexandrinus, Basic Heterogeneous, D, Theta, Family 1, and then the listing on down the way to the next solid bar, where you have the next variant.
57:44
And notice, by the way, since we're talking about it, it is a little circle with a 1 next to it.
57:50
So if you've got more than one single word deletion in the same verse, then they'll put a number next to it so you can differentiate between the sigla as they occur in the text.
58:03
So that's how you will read that as it appears in the text.
58:09
Now, that's to be contrasted, then, with the square, the superscript square, which means the word, clause, or sentences following the text are omitted by the witness decided.
58:22
The elevated backslash sign marks the end of the omitted text. So that square is going to be at the beginning of the variant, and then that backslash will be at the end of the variant.
58:33
We'll take a look at that when we continue with our study of textual criticism on the dividing line. We'll be doing that this
58:39
Thursday. Hope you join us then. God bless. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
59:43
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