New Testament Manuscript History

Sovereign Grace Family Church iconSovereign Grace Family Church

3 views

0 comments

00:09
Well, good evening and welcome back to How We Got the Bible.
00:13
This is class four, which means as of tonight, we are officially going to be halfway done as soon as tonight's class is over.
00:23
This is an eight-week course, and we're going to begin with a short overview of what we have learned up until this point, and then we'll dive right into New Testament manuscript tradition.
00:38
That is the subject of tonight's lecture.
00:41
In our previous classes, we have asked and answered the question, what is inspiration? Inspiration is God's breathing out the text or giving the text by the power of the Spirit through the men who wrote it down.
00:59
And that is how the scripture went from God to the paper through the medium of the writer, the man who God used, and we call that inspiration or inscripturation was another word that we used for that.
01:16
And then we move to the subject of canonization.
01:20
What is canonization? That's right.
01:27
The church's recognition of what God had written.
01:31
So inspiration deals with what the authority of it because God wrote it.
01:37
Canonization deals with the acceptance of it or the recognition of it.
01:43
God determines it.
01:44
The church discovers it was the phrase that we used.
01:49
And we move then to the third category of revelation.
01:56
We said there was four steps in the revelatory process.
01:59
The first is inspiration.
02:01
The second is canonization.
02:02
What's the third step? Transmission.
02:07
And that means how it goes from the original writing to being copied.
02:14
Transmission is all about copying.
02:17
And we learned this last week, prior to the 15th century, prior to the 15th century in the Western world, how were copies of manuscripts transmitted? By hand.
02:34
By hand.
02:34
And that's important because we have to recognize that the vast majority of what we're going to be talking about when we talk about transmission is we're talking about handwritten manuscripts.
02:48
Not printed texts, not photocopied text, but handwritten manuscripts.
02:57
Now, last week we discussed the difference between the Old Testament manuscript.
03:04
Yes.
03:06
I thought your hand was up.
03:07
I'm sorry.
03:07
I thought you were raising your hand.
03:08
Last week we talked about the difference between the Old Testament manuscripts and the New Testament.
03:15
Can somebody give me at least one of the ways in which the Old Testament manuscript tradition differs from the New Testament manuscript tradition? Yeah, we would say professional scribes.
03:32
Professional scribes, scriptoriums.
03:34
The methods by which it was copied.
03:39
One big difference.
03:40
Absolutely.
03:42
That's right.
03:43
There was a longer period of time between the original writing and our first extant copies.
03:51
Yes.
03:52
They're focused on one area versus, as we'll see tonight with the New Testament, a much larger area.
03:59
Anything else? Well, I don't know if I mentioned this next week, so you don't have to feel bad if you don't remember, because I don't remember if I said it, but we also have a much different amount of copies.
04:14
When we talk about Old Testament manuscripts, even if you include the Dead Sea Scrolls within our eclectic set of Old Testament manuscripts, nowhere near as close to the amount of manuscripts that we have for the New Testament.
04:31
It's out of sight, the difference, as far as the amount of handwritten copies.
04:36
The handwritten copies that we have in the New Testament far exceed what we have of the Old Testament.
04:43
So, Old Testament copies were copied according to rigid standards.
04:48
The New Testament was more free.
04:49
There was a longer period between the original and our best copies, and there are more New Testament manuscripts than the Old Testament.
04:57
Those are some of the differences that we want to keep in mind.
05:01
And again, just by very quick, if the first writing of the Old Testament was around 1450 at the time of Moses, and if we go on a timeline to the time of Christ, and then out to about 900, we have the Masoretic text for the Old Testament, and then you rewind in 1948 with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
05:25
It pushes it about back to there.
05:27
You still have a pretty large, substantial amount of time, because this would have been around 200 B.C.
05:34
You're still looking at a 1,250-year period between the writing of Moses and our earliest manuscript of anything that Moses wrote.
05:42
So, pretty long period of time.
05:44
The New Testament, however, much smaller time period of writing.
05:50
First New Testament book, we could say around 40.
05:53
I said last week 49.
05:55
If you pushed it back to 45, I wouldn't get angry.
05:59
I would say that's about what I think.
06:01
With James going from 45 to up to and possibly 85, even though I would say 70 is the cutoff point, but we'll say out to 85.
06:13
You're still looking at only a period of 40 years.
06:18
Where the Old Testament is written between 1450 and 400, so you're looking at 1,000 years.
06:24
So, 1,000 years from the earliest writing of Moses to the last writing of Malachi, right? And then you go down here, and it's 40 years from the first writing of the New Testament was possibly James or Galatians, somewhere here, and you push out to 85.
06:44
If Revelation goes out that far, Revelation would be the last book.
06:49
It's still a very short amount of time.
06:51
If it's 70, it's even shorter.
06:52
It's 35 years.
06:54
No, I'm sorry, 25 years.
06:57
Yes.
06:58
Yeah, so we've got a very short amount of time, and then the earliest copy, and this we're going to see tonight, it's not a copy, the earliest manuscript evidence that we possess.
07:11
It's not a full copy.
07:12
It's just a piece of a piece of a manuscript, but it would be around 110, so the time period between, if we say 70 to here, is a time period of 40 years, right? Between the last book written and the first copy or piece of a copy that we possess.
07:38
So again, the time period's much different, and these are important for us to keep in mind because tonight, as we begin to examine all of this stuff standing in front of me, times and dating and all that is going to come into play because we're going to see that the earlier manuscripts and the later manuscripts are actually written in a different form of writing.
08:02
The earlier manuscripts are written in something called unsealed text, and that is, I used to think it was unsealed, but that's not what I'm saying.
08:12
Unsealed text.
08:16
The earliest Greek manuscripts were written in unsealed text.
08:21
Unsealed text means a text that is all capital letters, no spaces between words, and no punctuation.
08:32
Or very little punctuation.
08:34
And everybody who's used to reading English just looked at me like, that sounds really hard to read.
08:40
And it is for us because we're used to capital letters and lowercase letters, we're used to punctuation and separation between words, but this was the method of writing in the ancient world, and we call it now unsealed text.
09:00
So one of the ways that we can date a manuscript is by whether or not it is written in unsealed text, because what the other type of text is called minuscule.
09:19
Minuscule text is sometimes referred to as cursive, but it's not cursive like we think of cursive, but it has upper and lowercase letters, it has spaces between the words, and there are punctuation points.
09:39
Now, if I were to go into my office and bring out a copy of my Greek New Testament, and by nature, anymore, because minuscule is easier, and it's more natural for us who are English writers and English speakers to be able to see that and make sense of it.
10:09
But if you found a manuscript buried in the dirt, and that manuscript was in minuscule, then you would know that it came after the time that minuscule was introduced.
10:21
So that helps you to date that particular manuscript.
10:26
See what I'm saying? You would know that if you picked up a minuscule manuscript, it wasn't from the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th century, because that didn't exist in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th century.
10:36
The minuscule script was developed, I have it here.
10:42
Oh goodness, I don't see it.
10:43
We're going to get to it.
10:44
I've actually jumped ahead of myself a little bit.
10:46
I'll give you the date on that in a bit.
10:47
I've got to get to it in my notes.
10:48
I think it's around the 9th century, but don't hold me as a quote on that just yet.
10:58
We are talking about a vast manuscript tradition that actually has a multifamily manuscript tradition, and what we're going to see is what we would say multi-text type tradition.
11:12
There's what's known as the Alexandrian text, and the Byzantine text, and the Western text.
11:19
These are all traditions of text that all have a family line that can be traced back to originals, or at least what we believe the originals were.
11:29
And so all of that plays a part in the vast New Testament manuscript tradition that we don't have in the Old Testament.
11:38
We don't have these things in the Old Testament, because as we said last week, the amount of copies don't exist, and the thing that you'll learn is the more copies you have, the more variants that you have.
11:51
So if we didn't want any variants, we would say, just give us one, and that'll be it.
11:59
Well, that's not the way God did it.
12:01
God didn't just give us one.
12:03
And so tonight we are not going to be dealing with variants.
12:11
That's next week, and that's going to be the whole class.
12:14
It's all going to be on textual variation.
12:18
But it's almost impossible to discuss the New Testament manuscript tradition without at least mentioning some things.
12:27
So there will be some things that come out tonight, but next week we're going to talk about how variants are introduced, what happens in the text when variants are introduced, how those variants are discovered, how we deal with them in our own text, and what should we do about them.
12:45
That's going to be next week.
12:47
But tonight we're just dealing with the manuscript tradition.
12:51
So our outline for tonight is we're going to look at the Greek New Testament manuscript tradition.
12:56
That's number one.
12:58
We're going to look at significant manuscripts, specific significant manuscripts, and we're also going to look at ancient versions.
13:08
Pretty much the outline we had last week for the Old Testament we're doing now for the New Testament.
13:17
Over the years, one of the most common objections that people make regarding the Bible is that it has been altered, edited, or in some other way corrupted.
13:32
People make that argument against the Bible, and I've had it made to me directly.
13:37
Well, you're just trusting in a book that's been changed and altered and corrupted over time.
13:44
And oftentimes what people will use as their example is something called the telephone game.
13:52
You guys remember the telephone game from when you were in school where the teacher would start on one side of the room and she'd whisper something in the ear of the first person, and he would whisper to the next person and to the next person.
14:03
And by the time you get to the end over here, this person says something that may sound similar to what was originally said, but it isn't exactly the same.
14:14
And you will hear people say that that's the way that we received the Bible.
14:20
The problem is that that assumption, while reasonable, is just not actual.
14:27
That's not the truth.
14:30
The Bible we possess today, particularly the New Testament, has been amazingly preserved from its original writings, and here are some things that we know.
14:41
The New Testament was written within the first century, and as I said earlier, we have manuscript fragments beginning early in the second century, and currently there are over 5,000 handwritten manuscripts that span the time from the second century all the way to the 16th century, the last of the handwritten manuscripts when it started to go to movable text and printed text.
15:16
Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar who does not believe the Bible.
15:21
In fact, he doesn't believe in the God of the Bible.
15:26
He is an agnostic, but he is a textual critic, and this is what he says.
15:33
This is somebody who doesn't believe the Bible, but I still want you to hear what he says.
15:37
He says, quote, Compare that to over 5,000 handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament.
16:05
And that's only in Greek.
16:07
That doesn't include the Coptic, Syriac, and other versions that we're going to talk about later.
16:10
We're going to talk about the other versions.
16:13
I happen to have brought with me a list, and I would be happy, even though I didn't create this.
16:22
This comes from evangelicalbible.com, but this list provides a comparison between what the Bible, the New Testament, has compared to others.
16:34
I'll give you an example.
16:36
Homer's Iliad was written around 900 B.C.
16:41
The earliest copy we have is around 400 B.C., so 500 years after it was written is the earliest copy that we have.
16:49
And the copies that we have that exist today are 643.
16:55
Now, understand, that's the next best one.
16:59
The New Testament, again, New Testament, we have manuscripts that are within 100 years, manuscript fragments within 100 years.
17:09
We have over 5,000 of those manuscripts spanning over a 1,000-year period of time that we can trace family lines and things like that.
17:17
We have so many manuscripts.
17:18
We have a plethora of manuscripts of the New Testament, and Homer's Iliad is the next best.
17:26
After that, you have Plato's writings.
17:29
Plato wrote between 427 and 347 B.C.
17:33
The earliest copies of his work that we have are 900 A.D.
17:38
That's a 1,200-year span of time, and we only have seven copies.
17:42
We only have seven copies of his works.
17:45
Aristotle lived from 384 to 322.
17:50
The earliest copies that we have of his is from 1100.
17:55
That's a 1,400-year difference, and we only have 40 copies.
18:00
So, again, when you compare, and there's a bunch more.
18:03
As I said, I'm happy to make a copy of this, or I will post this on the website so you'll have it.
18:07
There is no comparison between the amount of attestation that God has provided for the New Testament compared to any other work.
18:21
I was at the debate with James White and Bart Ehrman.
18:24
When they debated the subject of the reliability of the New Testament, I was sitting in the audience, and I remember James White saying to him, he says, would you call the difference between what we have for the New Testament and what we have for everything else an enormous amount? I think I'm remembering this correctly because I believe Bart Ehrman said, it's ginormous, the amount of difference.
18:45
So even unbelieving scholars have to admit that what we have in regard to New Testament textual manuscript amount is vastly different than anything else in history.
19:00
And that tells us something from a historical perspective about how these documents were received and valued by those who had them, that these documents were copied and passed along, and plentifully so because they were documents that mattered to the people that owned them.
19:16
F.F.
19:17
Bruce, a Greek scholar, he said this, there is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a good wealth of textual attestation as the New Testament.
19:29
Nothing, nothing even comes close.
19:31
So everything that we talk about regarding textual variation, everything that we talk about with those subjects has to be considered in the light of this truth, that we have in the history of the New Testament vastly more information than any other book.
19:47
And when you have more information, you have more opportunity for variation.
19:53
And that's part of what leads to variance, as we'll see next week.
20:01
All of the New Testament books were written in Greek.
20:10
That's an important fact.
20:12
There are some people who argue for like a Hebrew original of Matthew.
20:16
There's no evidence that that ever existed.
20:18
I haven't heard one guy argue for a Hebrew original of Acts.
20:22
Never has there been any evidence that there was an original written in a different language.
20:27
As far as we know, based upon all of the evidence we now possess, there's no reason to believe that any of the New Testament books started in any other language other than Greek.
20:37
And would anybody like to take a guess as to why that is? That's right.
20:46
Alexander the Great conquered the civilized world of his time.
20:50
He spread Greek language and culture throughout the Western world.
20:54
And much like English has become today, Greek became the most common and pervasive international language of that day.
21:01
The language that the Bible is written in is called Koine.
21:04
Koine is Greek for common.
21:06
It was the common language of the day.
21:11
And since most people could understand Koine, it was uniquely suited to proclaim the gospel throughout the known world.
21:38
There are three main types of New Testament manuscripts that we need to be familiar with.
21:46
Now I've given you two because we talk about the unsealed and the minuscule, but there's a third which actually goes above the unsealed, and that is known as the papyrus, the papyrus manuscripts.
22:09
Many of the earliest witnesses to the New Testament were written on a material called papyrus.
22:15
Now in our first class, we talked about the different materials that God has used to preserve his word.
22:20
We said God's word has been written in stone, God's word has been written on vellum and parchment, which are animal skins, and God's word has been written on papyrus.
22:31
Now papyrus is important because these papyrus manuscripts, which here are some of, and these are pictures of the pieces of manuscripts that we possess, some of them not much larger than a credit card, but they exist and they bear witness to the original writings.
22:53
These are the earliest manuscripts that we have, and they were written on what we would call today paper, because papyrus is actually where the word paper comes from.
23:08
It was made from a papyrus plant which was taken, and the reeds were cross-thatched and pressed together and smoothed on one side, and one side was used for writing and the other side was the rough side.
23:24
Now it's interesting that Christian writings are often found to have writing on both sides.
23:29
In fact, it's actually been conjectured that Christians invented writing on both sides of the paper because of being poor and not having a plentiful amount of papyrus, but also because they wanted so much to get their gospel message out that they would write on anything, and they had two sides to the papyrus leaf, and so they would be able to write on the smooth side.
23:55
And by the way, the jagged side or the rougher side is one of the reasons for some of our variants, because if you think about, I'll give you an example of something we're going to talk about next week, but just very quickly, one of the variants that we see is the difference between that and that.
24:21
Now, the difference between this is you have an omicron and a theta.
24:28
These are two different Greek letters.
24:30
Omicron, which is like our letter O, and the Greek letter theta, which we don't have a letter for the, we make that sound with TH, but that was a sound with one letter in the Greek language.
24:44
It's where we get the word theos for God.
24:47
Well, there was something that the early Christians did.
24:51
They used something called the nomina sacra.
24:54
The nomina sacra was where instead of writing theos, which would be how you would write the word God in Greek, they would simply write the letter theta, and the letter theta represented the name of God.
25:13
It was called the nomina sacra, or the sacred name.
25:18
And we see this throughout.
25:19
They also did that with Christ, because Christ is Christos, which in Greek looks like this, right? But if you take out the Christos and just put this, you get the nomina sacra for Christ, which is just the letter chi.
25:41
This is the letter chi, or chi.
25:43
Have you ever heard of the chi rho symbol? Chi rho is chi rho.
25:49
That's the two letters in Greek that make up that symbol.
25:53
And so the chi symbol, or the chi symbol, became the name for Christ, and the theta becomes God, and these were known as the nomina sacra.
26:07
Now imagine you're looking at a piece of papyrus that has pieces going this way and pieces going this way, and they're pressed together, and someone writes this letter, but there's already lines going this way.
26:29
You can see how variant could be introduced accidentally, based on the fact that the next person who sees it doesn't know, is that a line or is that simply a mark in the papyrus, right? And where this comes into play, there's actually a textual variant where it says God was manifest in the flesh, right? We see that phrase.
27:00
And there are other manuscripts that say he was manifest, and the he who was manifest in the flesh.
27:07
And the question is whether it should be theos or huios.
27:12
Theos is God, huios is son, right? I may be getting the verse wrong.
27:20
I don't think it's God was manifest.
27:21
There's a verse where it says...
27:26
I'll have that for next week, but ultimately the point is whether or not it's an omicron or a theta makes the determination as to whether or not it should be this or this.
27:37
It's an interesting question and an interesting history, because this isn't where someone was manually trying to corrupt anything.
27:46
This is just the natural order of dealing with materials that aren't exactly perfect.
27:51
The backside of a piece of papyrus isn't made for writing, but they wrote on it anyway.
27:57
So anyway, the papyrus manuscripts that we find predate anything else.
28:03
These are the oldest manuscripts, and they are not full manuscripts.
28:11
I'll give you a few if you want to...
28:15
You don't have to write these down.
28:17
In fact, I would be happy to put this page online as well.
28:22
Maybe I will, because this would be good for you all to have.
28:26
These are notable papyrus manuscripts, and they are all given a letter P.
28:31
So if you see something about P52, that means papyrus fragment number 52.
28:42
These are catalogued by the archaeologists who do this work and the papyrologists who do this work.
28:50
The first one is P52.
28:52
This is the oldest one that we possess.
28:57
Based upon all of the evidence that we have, this goes back to possibly 110 to 125.
29:05
That's the reasonable assumption of its birthday.
29:12
I'll read what it says about P52.
29:17
Oh, by the way, just real quick, let me read this first.
29:19
There are 88 papyri manuscripts of portions of the New Testament.
29:24
These very early and important witnesses of the New Testament include most of the New Testament, and the following are the most significant.
29:30
So out of the 88, I'm going to give you 10.
29:33
There's 88 that are in existence.
29:35
First of all, I have to stop and take a step back because I keep getting ahead of myself.
29:39
This isn't exciting for me.
29:40
I get all excited, and I move ahead.
29:42
Can you imagine what it's like to hold a piece of paper from 2,000 years ago? Doesn't it just blow your mind? I have work that I did in seminary, and I keep my notebooks.
29:52
Sometimes I've had them out in my shed where they've gotten a little bit of weather, and you go out and you open up your old notebook from something you wrote 20 years ago, and you pick up, and it cracks.
30:01
Like notebook paper gets hard, and it breaks apart, or it folds and then falls apart.
30:11
And that's a modern piece of paper designed by modern technology.
30:16
We're talking about 2,000-year-old ancient technology, and it's still around.
30:21
The fact that we have 88 is amazing.
30:26
Again, God has given us so much.
30:29
So P52.
30:34
According to most scholars, the closest copy to an autograph is a papyrus manuscript designated P52 dated around 110 to 125 containing a few verses of John 18.
30:46
So that's what's on P52.
30:49
Write that down.
30:50
That may end up on the final.
30:52
What is on P52? A few verses of John 18.
30:56
This fragment, only 20 to 30 years removed from the autograph, was part of one of the earliest copies of John's Gospel.
31:07
It should also be noted that P52 confirms the traditional belief that the Gospel of John was written before the end of the first century.
31:17
You say, why does that matter? Here's why that matters.
31:19
Because up until the discovery of P52, it was argued by progressive textual critics, what are called higher textual critics, it was argued that John's Gospel was written hundreds of years after the time of the apostles as a defense for the deity of Christ, that the Gospel of John wasn't really Yohannin, and Yohannin is simply just a way of saying written by John.
31:48
They said the Gospel of John is not authentically Yohannin because it wasn't written in his time period.
31:55
Well, guess what? We have evidence that it absolutely was written in his time period.
31:59
It did fall well within the range of his life.
32:04
And so P52 is not only an important witness to Scripture, it's an important witness to the apostolic nature of John's Gospel.
32:16
Number two, P87.
32:21
And again, I'm going to give you this.
32:22
You don't have to write every one, but I'm going to go through these quickly.
32:25
P87 dates around 125.
32:27
It contains a few verses of Philemon.
32:30
P77 dates around 150.
32:32
It contains a few verses of Matthew 23.
32:35
Remember, these are just pieces of things.
32:38
We'll get to a few manuscripts or a little bit more here in a moment, but we're talking about 2,000-year-old pieces.
32:47
P32, portions of Titus 1 and 2.
32:50
P45, it's a second-century work.
32:52
It contains portions of all four Gospels and Acts.
32:54
This is when we start seeing more of them.
32:58
P46, which was around 200, has almost all of Paul's epistles and Hebrews.
33:05
So that's an 1,800-year-old manuscript.
33:08
Ah, Hebrews, I know why you laughed.
33:11
Yeah, I know you.
33:16
P47, now we're getting into the third century.
33:19
We're getting into the 200s, right? P47 contains Revelation 9-17.
33:29
P66 is almost a complete copy of the Gospel of John, dating around 175.
33:37
And P75 contains large portions of the Gospel of Luke through John 15, and it's dated around 175 to 225.
33:48
Again, these manuscripts, and to call them manuscripts, these portions of manuscripts are witnesses to the fidelity and the ancient veracity of the text, and all of these date within the second and third centuries.
34:11
And this moves to the second form, so we're, again, getting to dates.
34:16
So you have the second to third centuries.
34:19
Now we move into what's known as the unseals.
34:26
The unseals are the manuscripts that your book, your textbook, will call these the earliest and most important manuscripts that we have.
34:36
Now, there are people who debate that as far as whether they are the most important.
34:40
I will at least say they are very important.
34:43
Whether or not they're most important really falls to how you feel about the Alexandrian text type and things like that, and we're going to talk about that more next week.
34:52
But your book makes no bones about it.
34:56
It says these are the most important.
34:58
And typically, when you read in a new version of the Bible, like NIV or ESV, and it will say the earliest and most reliable manuscripts don't contain this verse, or the earliest, you've seen that at the bottom of the page of your Bible, it will say the earliest and most reliable manuscripts say this.
35:12
These are the ones it's talking about, because these are the earliest full copies that we have.
35:19
Full copies of the Bible are the unseals.
35:22
Because, again, we don't have full copies of the papyrus.
35:26
They just don't exist.
35:28
But we do have the unseals.
35:34
Unseal manuscripts, as I said earlier, written with all capital letters, no spaces between the letters, and very little, if any, punctuation.
35:41
And here are, and this is on the same page.
35:44
If I put this on the website, it will be on the page, too.
35:47
Here are the manuscripts that are in this era that we would call most important of this text type.
36:01
Number one is Codex Vaticanus.
36:05
Codex Vaticanus, also known as B.
36:16
If you're ever listening to a lecture or something, and someone says Codex B, they're talking about Codex Vaticanus.
36:27
Codex Vaticanus is dated somewhere between 325 and 350.
36:35
Still immensely early.
36:38
Immensely early.
36:40
And, by the way, a codex means it's not a scroll, it's a book.
36:44
The codex is the form where it is bound as a book and opened like a book.
36:49
The codex really was popularized very quickly because of its much easier use than a scroll.
36:56
Think of how you have to read a scroll.
36:58
You have to unroll one side as you roll the other side and as you go through.
37:01
And imagine wanting to go back ten chapters in a scroll.
37:05
It's a lot of this.
37:07
But when you have a codex, you can open and you can shut to where you want it to be.
37:12
And, obviously, we still use book forms in pretty much the same way, so we understand why they were popularized and why they continue to be in use.
37:20
So when I say, I'm not going to write codex for everyone, but it's Codex Vaticanus, or B.
37:27
This 4th century manuscript is widely acknowledged as being the most important witness to the New Testament text.
37:33
This manuscript has been located in the Vatican Library in Rome since 1481.
37:39
But its contents were not made available for all of us until 1889.
37:45
So even though it existed during the writing of the King James Translation, it was not used by the King James translators.
37:54
So that's important.
37:55
We're going to talk about why when we get to the question of the King James Bible and those things.
38:03
There is a, if I remember the story correctly, when Erasmus was working on his 3rd edition of his Greek edition, what's called the Textus Receptus, when he was writing the 3rd edition, and there was debate about 1 John 5-7 and whether or not it should be included, because he did not include it in his first two editions, and it was not until the 3rd edition that 1 John 5-7 was included.
38:28
He did write to, I believe the man's name was Bombastius, and if I ever have another son, Bombastius Foskey.
38:36
I like it.
38:38
He wrote to his friend Bombastius for them to consult with the Vatican manuscript to see if it was there.
38:43
I don't know the rest of the story, but I know that that's part of tradition of trying to determine whether or not this text was part of what was in the original.
38:53
So 1481 is how long Rome has had it.
38:57
1889 is when it was made public for inspection.
39:04
It is rare in that it contains in Greek practically all of the Old and New Testaments.
39:11
So it's not just the New Testament.
39:13
It's Old and New Testament, and it does not include the pastoral epistles in Hebrews 9-15 through Revelation.
39:20
Those parts are missing, but most likely due to time, pieces fall out of books, things happen.
39:28
We don't look at things like that as necessarily corruption on purpose.
39:35
Sometimes we go, well, see here, somebody corrupted this, took this part out.
39:38
If that much of the end of a book is missing, it probably has something more to do with time and age than it does to do with intentional corruption.
39:47
We'll see some intentional corruptions.
39:48
There are manuscripts that show obvious intentional corruptions, and then there are stupid corruptions.
39:56
There was one manuscript where the original was in columns, but the writer who was copying it didn't speak the language, so he just wrote all the way across the page.
40:07
He didn't know there was columns, so we can go back and see where one stops, one starts.
40:12
It's really funny.
40:14
We call that just ignorant corruption.
40:16
He didn't do it on purpose.
40:17
He just didn't know.
40:19
Those things are in the transmission history as well.
40:26
Last sentence about Vaticanus.
40:27
In spite of all its gaps, it is considered to be the most exact copy of the New Testament known.
40:31
Printed texts of the Greek New Testament today rely heavily on Codex Vaticanus.
40:36
This is typically one of the ones we say in the ancient manuscripts, this is what it's referring to.
40:43
Number two, Codex Sinaiticus.
40:54
Codex Sinaiticus is also known as Aleph.
40:58
Aleph is Hebrew for the letter A, so Aleph Bet.
41:05
That's the Hebrew alphabet.
41:10
You'll hear Codex Aleph.
41:13
Around 340 is the dating of this.
41:16
Right around the same time as Vaticanus, this unsealed manuscript was produced, there is an entire chapter in your book that I didn't require that you read, but I recommend reading the whole book when you have time.
41:34
There's an entire chapter about the discovery of Sinaiticus.
41:38
One of the myths that you will hear people say is that Sinaiticus was found in a trash can.
41:45
It's not true.
41:46
It's often said that we shouldn't accept anything from any of these manuscripts, especially when something's found in a trash can.
41:55
The reality is Count von Tischendorf, Constantine von Tischendorf, who discovered this manuscript in a monastery at the base of Mount Sinai, he was in the place where there were discarding pieces of a manuscript.
42:11
You read about it in your book, discarding pieces of a manuscript, and he began to see there was writing in the manuscript that appeared to be biblical.
42:19
He left and came back a few years later.
42:23
If memory serves, he comes back later.
42:25
When he comes back later, he told them, don't throw this away, don't burn this, this is important.
42:29
When he comes back later, he was invited into the room of one of the monks, and there was a manuscript that was wrapped in red cloth in a closet, and that was Codex Vaticanus.
42:41
So the two stories about the trash can and Codex Sinaiticus are two different events, time period between them.
42:48
There is a trash can involved, but that's not where they found Sinaiticus, just to be clear.
42:52
But oftentimes, stories get conflated, things happen.
42:55
Read it in your book if you're interested in learning more.
42:57
But Codex Sinaiticus is of near equal value to Codex Vaticanus.
43:04
It is also an important witness to the New Testament because of its age, accuracy, and completeness.
43:08
It is known as Codex Sinaiticus because it was discovered by the great textual critic Constantine von Tischendorf at St.
43:16
Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai in 1844.
43:19
Tischendorf first discovered Sinaiticus while stumbling upon portions in a wastebasket awaiting destruction by fire.
43:26
Codex Sinaiticus contains over half of the Old Testament and all of the New Testament except for Mark 16, 9 through 20, and John 7, 53 through 8, 11, two of the major textual variants which we will discuss next week.
43:40
That is known as The Longer Ending of Mark and The Pericope Adultery, The Story of the Woman Caught in Adultery.
43:46
Both of them are passages that are argued as far as their authenticity.
43:53
They're not in Sinaiticus, no.
43:56
Vaticanus and Sinaiticus rank as the two most important manuscript witnesses to the Old Testament that date to that time period.
44:04
Number three, Codex Alexandrinus.
44:10
I'm going to run out of time if I keep going this slow.
44:16
This is to me the bread and butter of this stuff.
44:19
I love to look at these things, to study and look at the pictures and learn more about them and where they came from and how they were discovered.
44:27
So again, if I sound like a kid in a candy store, this is my candy store.
44:33
Textual history, how we got this Bible and why it matters so much to me.
44:39
This one is also known as Codex A.
44:42
So A, B, and Aleph.
44:46
Why does it last? Well, it's later.
44:48
It's around 450, so 450-ish.
44:56
The Alexandrian manuscript composed by scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, ranks second only to Vaticanus and Sinaiticus as a superior New Testament witness.
45:05
It is a near-complete manuscript of the Bible with very little missing except for portions of Matthew, John, and 2 Corinthians.
45:11
Codex Vaticanus was originally to be offered as a gift to King James of England, but since James died before he received it, it was presented to his successor, Charles I, in 1627.
45:24
Alexandrinus was not known early enough to be of help to the translators of the 1611.
45:30
So even though it was going to be a gift to King James, it was not discovered until after the King James translation had been already made.
45:44
Two more, and then we'll move on.
45:48
Codex, whoo, this one's hard to say.
45:54
Ephraimi Rescriptus.
45:55
We'll just call it Codex C, because that's what they call it.
45:58
Codex C.
45:59
I'll write it up here, though.
46:20
This document is a palimpsest.
46:24
Now, a palimpsest, and I'll write that, a palimpsest is a manuscript in which the original writing was erased and written over.
46:45
So imagine you have a manuscript that's written.
46:48
Someone decides they want to use that vellum or whatever the material is for something else, so they scrape the ink off and write over it.
46:59
You say, well, that's lost to history.
47:00
No, through chemicals and hard work, the original writing underneath can be read.
47:11
That's just amazing to me that that's even possible, but it is.
47:19
And this Codex, Codex C, has material from every book of the New Testament except 2 Thessalonians and 2 John.
47:27
Its age makes it a very valuable witness.
47:31
It dates to around 345, again, right at the same time period as all of these great unseals.
47:43
It was not until 1845 that a full edition of this manuscript was published, but it is now published and available for people to see.
47:55
Last one, Codex D.
48:00
Bet you couldn't have guessed that.
48:03
This is known as Codex Beze.
48:06
I'm going to write it over here.
48:08
Codex Beze.
48:24
Codex D.
48:26
Dates between 450 and 550.
48:30
So, again, we're getting further and further away.
48:34
We're getting closer and closer to the minuscules as we get further and further down.
48:41
Codex Beze.
48:45
This is the earliest known biblical copy in 2 languages.
48:48
This is a, I think it's called a diglot.
48:54
We call it today like a multi-version Bible where you have one language next to another language.
49:00
This has Latin and Greek.
49:03
It contains the Gospels and Acts and a small section of 3 John in Latin.
49:08
The rest of it has been lost to time.
49:12
Of these five very important manuscripts, only one, Codex Beze, this one, was available to the translators of the 1611 King James Version.
49:23
Revised versions today, however, are based on these earlier and better manuscripts, as we said.
49:29
This is the only one that was available to the 1611 King James translators.
49:37
So, from a historical perspective, we have looked at the papyrus manuscripts, which date the 2nd and 3rd century.
49:46
The unsealed manuscripts, which are larger and more full, written on more long-lasting material.
49:54
They date within the first 7 centuries, 6 to 7 centuries.
50:00
And then we move on to the minuscule manuscripts that are introduced in the 9th century.
50:12
The minuscule script was a development of the cursive hand and differs from the unseals by its use of smaller forms of letters.
50:22
The small letters could be written more quickly and required less space.
50:26
And the minuscules did not make their debut until the 9th century and thus are of less value because of their date.
50:33
Alright, so let's just for a moment talk about time.
50:39
Even though we do have a wealth of handwritten manuscripts, the vast majority of those handwritten manuscripts come after the 9th century.
50:49
Just a fact of life.
50:52
The earlier manuscripts are the papyrus and the unsealed manuscripts.
50:58
And we don't have many of those.
51:01
We just don't.
51:02
So when we say 5,000 manuscripts, we have to be realistic and say, of those 5,000 manuscripts, the vast majority of them come after the 9th century because most of them are in the minuscule form.
51:14
So we know when they came into existence, we know how they came into existence, and after what time they came into existence.
51:21
Here is a...
51:23
I'll read this to you.
51:25
Minuscule manuscripts.
51:26
Because of their late date, minuscule manuscripts do not possess the higher quality of the earlier unseals.
51:33
These minuscule manuscripts, though, make up the majority of the New Testament manuscripts.
51:37
There are 2,795 manuscripts and 1,964 lectionaries in minuscule script compared with 362 manuscripts and 245 lectionaries in unsealed script.
51:55
The numbers are vastly in favor of the minuscule manuscripts, the later cursive manuscripts.
52:03
There are many more of those than there are...
52:06
And this is why when you start talking to people about textual variance, you'll often hear people talk about the majority text.
52:15
People talk about the Alexandrian text, people talk about the Western text, people talk about the Byzantine text.
52:23
But you'll hear people talk about the majority text.
52:26
And what they mean by that is what do the majority of the manuscripts say? But what you have to consider when you ask the question of what do the majority of the manuscripts say, you have to say why are they in the majority? Because they're much later manuscripts.
52:42
The earlier manuscripts are far fewer, and there are just by nature going to be a lot less from the earlier time than there are from the later time.
52:57
So the minuscule manuscripts make up the majority of what we possess.
53:02
I also used a word just now I need to define what it is.
53:06
Not only do we have papyrus, uncial, and minuscule manuscripts, we also have something called lectionaries.
53:14
A lectionary is a manuscript arranged in sections for the purpose of being read in public worship.
53:25
Most lectionaries are of the Gospels, but some include Acts and the Epistles.
53:31
And there are 2,200 lectionaries that have been discovered.
53:40
So we have papyrus, we have the uncial manuscripts, we have the minuscule manuscripts, and we have the lectionaries that all bear witness to the New Testament.
53:57
Now we're going to go ahead and take our break, and when we come back we're going to talk about the ancient versions like we did last week with the Old Testament.
54:10
What versions do we have? Remember we talked about the Septuagint and those things.
54:14
We're going to talk about the ancient versions of the Old Testament after the break.
54:18
So let's take a break.
54:38
I want to read to you a quote from Clinton Arnold's book, How We Got the Bible, A Visual Journey.
54:47
I've been showing you pictures from this.
54:50
I really do recommend this.
54:52
This is sort of like, I don't know if you guys remember back in the day you could get the National Geographic books.
54:57
It's sort of like that because it has images you can see in it.
55:00
They're written more like a magazine style.
55:03
But it's good short factual information.
55:05
But I just want to read this quote.
55:08
This is about the minuscule manuscripts, but this calls them the manuscripts from the Middle Ages because think about it, 900 to 1500, we're talking about the Middle Ages at that point.
55:25
And it says 5,500.
55:27
The bulk of the 5,500 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament are parchments that use a minuscule or cursive script.
55:36
This style of writing made its debut in the 9th century and continued in use for centuries.
55:43
Most of the minuscule manuscripts date to the Middle Ages, particularly the 10th through the 15th centuries until the inventing of the printing press.
55:53
Even after that, however, scribes and monks continued to make parchment copies of the New Testament by hand.
56:00
Almost all of the minuscule manuscripts of this age tend to reflect one textual family known as the Byzantine or the majority text.
56:12
In other words, they usually agree with one another against other forms of the text, such as the papyri, which we talked about, when there are variations.
56:21
So when we talk about variance next week, most of the variance exists between the papyri, the uncial, and the minuscule.
56:31
That's where the variation tends to be.
56:33
Not always, but that's the tendency.
56:37
If you have a reading in the uncials that is different, it's probably going to be different in most of the minuscules.
56:47
Most scholars conjecture that a standardized form of Greek text was created in the 4th or 5th century AD after Christianity had become a legalized religion in the empire, and there were no more book burnings and much less persecution.
57:00
The minuscule manuscripts are probably copies of this authorized form of the text.
57:06
So it makes sense that there would be more standardization and consistency among them, and this creates manuscript families.
57:15
We talked about the family of manuscripts.
57:17
Typically, these are what's known as the Alexandrian manuscript family versus the Byzantine manuscript family, Byzantine coming out of the area known as Byzantium, and of course, Alexandria is in Egypt.
57:35
So if you want to see what some of these manuscripts look like, you can see here is a 13th century Codex of the Gospels.
57:47
Can you imagine just holding that? You wouldn't even want to touch it with your bare hands, would you? It's such an amazing thing.
57:54
Here's a Codex manuscript of the Gospels from the 9th century.
57:58
It's actually got a cover like a book that we would have.
58:04
This is the beginning of Mark's Gospel from the mid-10th century manuscript, Codex 669.
58:12
It's just amazing.
58:13
And by the way, here is a chart of the distribution of the New Testament minuscule manuscripts.
58:19
They start here and immediately begin to rise as they become more popular and more widespread, and then we see the following after the inventing of the printing press.
58:29
Obviously, handwritten manuscripts are no longer necessary.
58:32
So this time period here between the 9th century through the 15th century is where we see the rise and fall of these majority of manuscripts that we possess are in that time period.
58:51
All right, so now let's talk about the ancient versions.
58:55
As we talked about with the Old Testament, there are other versions of the New Testament that bear witness to what the New Testament says.
59:06
The first one is what's known as the Old Syriac.
59:13
The Old Syriac is a translation of the New Testament that was in circulation in Syria around A.D.
59:21
400.
59:22
So again, even though our amount of Greek texts from that time is lower, we have other translations from around the same time which bolster and give us more information.
59:34
So we have the Old Syriac.
59:38
Number two, we have the Old Latin.
59:43
The Old Latin version was probably translated around 150 and served as the Bible for the Western Church.
59:53
Some of the Old Latin copies are as old as the celebrated Vatican and Sinaitic manuscripts, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.
01:00:01
The Old Latin is by far the most important of the Latin versions since it reaches back very close to the time when the last books of the New Testament were written.
01:00:10
That's a direct quote from your textbook.
01:00:17
The next would be known as the Peshitta.
01:00:21
The Peshitta is the Syriac translation.
01:00:28
As we said, there's the Old Syriac and then there's the Peshitta.
01:00:32
The Peshitta is the Syriac translation that's been in use since the 5th century.
01:00:37
So the Old Syriac was used and then the Peshitta was used after.
01:00:47
And finally, the grandfather of them all as far as versions.
01:00:52
Anybody want to take a guess? What is it? Nope, that's for the Old Testament.
01:00:59
For the New Testament, the Latin Vulgate.
01:01:03
The Latin Vulgate.
01:01:11
This work, which was begun by Jerome in AD 384, became the standard Bible for more than a thousand years and was made the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.
01:01:29
So the Latin Vulgate, which includes both the Old and New Testaments, but for our purposes in this class, the focus is on the New, bears witness to the historicity, accuracy, and truth of the New Testament writings.
01:01:53
So essentially, if you think about it, we have the Old Syriac and the Peshitta.
01:01:57
You have the Old Latin and the Vulgate.
01:02:02
There are other versions I don't have dates for, such as the Coptic and the Ethiopic were also very early translated.
01:02:11
Coptic is Egyptian.
01:02:19
And something else that often gets left out of the conversation is we also have the writings of the early church fathers.
01:02:30
The early church fathers, which means those early leaders who were after the apostles in the first few hundred years after the apostles, they wrote with just tremendous breadth.
01:02:50
They just wrote so much.
01:02:53
I don't think I've written in my life, and I write by electronic light with a keyboard.
01:02:59
These guys were writing with a quill pen by candlelight, and they wrote so much.
01:03:05
And I just read this quote, many volumes of literature exist from the early church fathers.
01:03:11
Many of their writings are filled with quotations from the New Testament.
01:03:15
These men possessed copies of the New Testament, which are older than our manuscripts.
01:03:21
Many of our manuscripts come after, like the ones 300 and 400, we're talking about after the early church fathers.
01:03:27
So we can go to the early church fathers and see their quotations of text and compare the quotations of their text with the manuscripts that we have.
01:03:37
Isn't that an amazing thing to consider? In fact, Bruce Metzger said this, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, meaning all of the unseals, all of the other manuscripts, all the manuscripts, if it was all destroyed, there would still be sufficient alone enough, I'm sorry, there would still be sufficient alone in reconstructing practically the entire New Testament just from the writings of the early church fathers.
01:04:09
That's how much they quoted the New Testament in their writings that we could reconstruct the New Testament because they wrote commentaries on books.
01:04:17
They wrote down, you know, I mean, if you took, consider this, took John MacArthur's commentaries, I've got them on my shelf.
01:04:23
John MacArthur has written a commentary for every book of the New Testament.
01:04:26
If you took all of his books down, you could reconstruct the New Testament from his commentary because his commentary includes the text.
01:04:34
As long as you could discern what was text and what was commentary, you could easily reconstruct the text.
01:04:41
And that's what Metzger is saying.
01:04:42
He's saying that if we lost all the unseals, we lost all the papyrus, we lost all of the minuscules, we would still have the early church fathers, and that bears witness to the manuscript tradition or bears witness to the New Testament text.
01:05:05
And here's something interesting.
01:05:06
When we talk next week about textual variants, one of the things that sometimes sheds light on textual variants is when you have a textual variant and you can go back and see how the early church fathers cited it because you know you're working from an ancient source and they are citing this text.
01:05:29
How did they cite it? Did they cite it with this word or without this word, if it's a single-word issue? Did they cite it with this phrase or without this phrase? Recently on my podcast, I interviewed a man named Thomas Ross.
01:05:46
Thomas Ross was debating James White on the subject of the King James Translation.
01:05:51
And it actually wasn't.
01:05:53
They were debating really the history of the text and whether or not which Greek text we should use and how we should use it.
01:06:04
Well, I got to interview him afterwards, and this was the question I asked him.
01:06:09
1 John 5-7 is one of the most severely debated textual variants in the Bible.
01:06:15
It's sometimes referred to as the Comma Johannium.
01:06:18
The Comma Johannium is in 1 John 5 where it says there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.
01:06:26
That phrase is not found in any Greek manuscript before the 11th century.
01:06:30
And even after the 11th century, it's only found in a handful of Greek manuscripts, most of them dating after the 15th century.
01:06:37
So the Comma Johannium is likely not part of the original text.
01:06:41
There are arguments for its inclusion, but here's my question, and I asked this to Thomas Ross.
01:06:47
I said, you believe in the inclusion of the Comma Johannium? He said, yes.
01:06:51
I said, why is it that in all of the early church fathers, when they are seeking to defend the deity of Christ, when they're seeking to defend the doctrine of the Trinity, none of them cite this text? If it was there, and they had access to it, and it was in their Bible, and it would have proven the case for their position, why do none of them make reference to it? And again, answer that however you want.
01:07:25
That's my question.
01:07:27
And so the great thing that we have is we have not only the manuscripts, but we have the early writings of the fathers as well.
01:07:35
And all of this bears witness to the text.
01:07:39
All right.
01:07:41
Because of the vast amount of manuscripts, there exists also a vast amount of textual variation.
01:07:46
So next week will be the most important class we do in this whole time, because it's the one that everybody's going to have differences of opinion on, and everybody's going to come with different ideas, and may leave with different ideas, and that's okay.
01:08:01
But next week we're going to talk about textual variation, why it matters, and why it doesn't matter, what I mean.
01:08:10
There are times when textual variation is important.
01:08:13
There are times where the variants aren't important.
01:08:15
There are times where they're viable.
01:08:18
There are times when they're not viable.
01:08:19
There are times when they actually make a change in the text, and there are times when they don't.
01:08:25
Here's a little preview, though.
01:08:29
How many textual variants are there that we know of? Over 400,000.
01:08:40
How many words are in the New Testament? Only about 150,000, 180,000 Greek words, which means there's two to three variants for every word.
01:08:56
But that's actually a wrong way of looking at it, and next week I'll explain why.
01:09:02
But you'll hear people say that.
01:09:04
You'll hear people say, there's more variants than there are words in the New Testament, and it's not untrue.
01:09:12
But the vast majority of those variants, 99% of those variants, are either unviable or meaningless, such as spelling errors, order of word changes, or even one letter left out of what we call the movable new.
01:09:35
We do this in English.
01:09:37
Or if I write a apple, would that be right? No, because in English we would put an apple, right? Well, that same rule applies in the Greek language, and the movable new actually is part of several textual variants where it only varies by one letter, and it doesn't change a meaning.
01:10:05
We call that a meaningless variant.
01:10:10
It's one that, even though it's there, it doesn't affect the meaning.
01:10:16
So that should give us a little bit of a better feeling about it when we hear 400,000 versus this, the numbers just are so outstanding.
01:10:24
But the reality is, when you actually get down to it, there's only a handful of meaningful variants that bring any form of question to the text.
01:10:35
I can name the three most important ones without even having to think hard.
01:10:41
The three most important textual variants are the longer ending of Mark, the pericope adultery, and the Kamiohonium.
01:10:46
I think the Kamiohonium is the easiest to consider.
01:10:50
I think the pericope adultery is fairly easy as well.
01:10:54
I think the hardest one to consider is the longer ending of Mark, and we're going to look at all of those next week because those three are what we call the big three textual variants.
01:11:06
All right, so we've got a few minutes.
01:11:07
Does anyone have any questions? Or do you just want to go home early? Yes, sir.
01:11:20
Late 1st century.
01:11:22
We have writings of the apostles' disciples that go all the way into the late 1st century, early 2nd century.
01:11:37
Some of those men, though we cite them as early fathers, some of them did get some things very wrong.
01:11:45
Because remember, they're dealing with not whole New Testaments.
01:11:48
They're not dealing with all of Paul's writings because this is not a time where they could just go to the local lifeway and buy themselves a Bible, right? So there are times where the early church fathers don't get everything right because they were in a time and a place where they didn't have as much information as would later be available.
01:12:10
Some of them.
01:12:10
I mean, again, it depends.
01:12:12
Like Justin Martyr and others.
01:12:16
I'm trying to think of the one.
01:12:17
There's one that really gets out there, and I can't think of which one it is right now, and somebody's going to nail me online and say, you remember who this is? The name escapes me right now, but his stuff really gets away from orthodoxy.
01:12:34
And you have to, again, you have to be able to...
01:12:36
What was it? Yes, it's a pre-Nicene early church.
01:12:41
The origin, as I'm thinking, but gets quite a bit away from orthodoxy.
01:12:48
So, again, everyone and every age has to be read in light of what the Scripture says.
01:12:54
But, yeah, I mean, we're talking very early witness stuff.
01:12:57
These guys were writing, you know, defending the faith against the earliest opposers of the faith, like the Gnostics and others who were opposing in the second century.
01:13:10
These men are writing apologies.
01:13:11
That's what they're called.
01:13:13
They were their defenses of Christianity.
01:13:16
So, hugely important.
01:13:18
All right, anyone else? Yeah, that's one of Bart Ehrman's...
01:13:42
What we would say, it's a truthful trick.
01:13:46
Because even though what he's saying is true, it's a tricky form of truth.
01:13:52
You know what I mean? It's a meaningless statement to say there's more variants than there are words, because what he's saying sounds like, well, then we have no idea what it says.
01:14:03
But if you ask him, the same guy, if you say, do we know with almost exact certainty what the New Testament said, he would say yes.
01:14:12
I heard him say it.
01:14:13
He was on a radio show with an atheist, and the atheist was like, well, yeah, we have no idea what the Bible said.
01:14:19
And he said, well, slow down.
01:14:21
We actually do.
01:14:23
We have so much evidence that we know.
01:14:26
You know, there's a few places where there's a few questions about this or that, whether or not this word is there.
01:14:30
But it's even for the heavy skeptic would say, you know, we're looking at a percentage point of things that actually matter.
01:14:44
You know, the 99%, you know, it's not even a question.
01:14:49
It's just a few places.
01:14:52
And some of those places are big.
01:14:53
Like I said, you know, the Percopaea Adultery is John 7.53 through 8.11.
01:14:59
That's, you know, 20 verses or so.
01:15:03
That's enough.
01:15:04
That's a story.
01:15:06
What's interesting about that variant, though, is that that variant is found in other books.
01:15:11
If you look throughout the manuscript history, the story of the woman caught in adultery, in one manuscript it's in Luke.
01:15:17
It's not even in Mark.
01:15:19
It's not included in the earlier manuscripts.
01:15:22
It's not included in the Anseals.
01:15:23
And in later manuscripts it finds itself in different places.
01:15:26
It's like a story without a home.
01:15:29
I forget which New Testament professor said it, but he said, the Percopaea Adultery, the story of the woman caught in adultery, is the greatest story that's not in the Bible.
01:15:38
That's his argument.
01:15:39
He said, because he's like, I like this story.
01:15:41
I want this story in my Bible because it's a beautiful story.
01:15:45
But he said it's just the evidence for it is not good as far as historically.
01:15:54
So, yeah.
01:15:55
But when we get into textual variation, we start tapping on the door of tradition.
01:16:03
And that's where things get a little tough.
01:16:05
We have to be fair and be honest and not give up truth for certainty.
01:16:11
That's the other part.
01:16:12
If it's true, it's true.
01:16:13
We've just got to believe it.
01:16:16
All right, any other questions? All right, my friends.
01:16:21
Well, we are ending five minutes early.
01:16:23
You can mark this down.
01:16:24
My New Testament class ended five minutes early.
01:16:27
Let's pray.
01:16:28
Father, thank you for this time together.
01:16:29
We pray that this will glorify you and edify your people.
01:16:33
In Christ's name, amen.
01:16:43
Oh, there will be a test this week.