What Do Jory Micah and Ijaz Ahmad Have in Common? A Textual-Critical Heavy Dividing Line

Ran in here and forgot a book. It's in my bag. You know where I put my bag? It's in the very back of the bag.

It's Bart Ehrman's book. I left it in the other room. Sorry. Too many things going on.

Actually, I think I entered a password

I shouldn't have entered. And now my poor little computer here is going, you know, there's only a few people in the audience who can understand this, but it's running like an 8088.

Yeah, yeah, that bad. Thank you very much. That's why you don't do this alone, because if you do it alone, you just walk out and it's sort of dead air, dead camera.

I know dead air and radio, but dead camera, I guess. I don't know. Hey, welcome to the program today.

We've got a lot to get to, and this is the last program. Are you planning anything? You haven't talked to me about doing anything.

Dividing lines. I'm leaving. Remember? I'm going bye bye. Got some stuff going on? It's all good?

Okay. All right. Heading for Brisbane, Sydney in Australia and Wellington, New Zealand.

Do not get back until the 7th of November, which for me will be like a 36 hour day or even longer than that.

It'll be ridiculous. It'll be like this massive, huge day. But Friday will be like gone, like just a few hours long.

Anyway, that's what happens when you play with international date lines and 14 hour airline flights and stuff like that.

But heading down there, looking forward to seeing the Saints down there. It's been a while since we have been in Australia.

Really looking forward to the dialogue with Abdullah Kunda on how to have peace with God, a

Christian Muslim dialogue on that subject. That should be extremely useful and helpful and so on and so forth.

So this is it until then, for me anyway. Got some interesting stuff that no one else is going to be touching with a 10 foot pole.

Nothing, absolutely nothing whatsoever. How did that get up there?

I have no earthly idea. Nothing to do with politics. Don't have any interest in saying anything more.

I guess that one program, just all sorts of people just all want to talk about politics.

I don't. So I've done said my piece, as they say. And if that's not enough for you, well, then maybe you like politics more, whole lot more than I do.

Most people do. Anyway, what I wanted to get to today, and as you can see,

I'm still trying to get everything set up properly on the computers, which just again are just moving very slowly.

This is going to be a very strange conjunction. My intention when

I got up this morning was to do a deep TC program, textual critical program.

I realize there are some of you that are reaching for the quit button right now.

Okay, but don't for just a moment. Okay, hear me out. Some of you saw the video that I posted a couple days ago where I responded to Ijaz Ahmed on about a seven minute video that he had put up where he claims to prove conclusively that the

New Testament is unreliable. Conclusively, big words. And that the text is based upon conjecture.

And then he tied that in with Surah 4, verse 157. They have nothing but conjecture, speculation. And so I put up a video and he was dealing with a textual variant right at the end of chapter 9 in the

Gospel of John, which is a textual variant. I've been seeing, I haven't had time, it's busy week.

Okay, you know, when you're getting ready to go out of town for 18 days, not out of town, out of the country for 18 days, you got a few things you got to take care of.

And so in the process, I stumbled across comments made on Ijaz's page in regards to his video.

Now there were immediately some Muslims that said, wow, Ijaz got his head handed to him on a platter with my response, which

I found interesting. I'm sorry, I'm really not up on the, these lights are really bright, man, they're bright.

I'm going to be sitting here like this the whole day and I'm going to have a headache really quick. So, oh, thank you.

Life is better now. And I looked like I hadn't seen the sun in two weeks, for two months, two years.

I was just all washed out there. Who is that guy up there? Anyway, that and the squinting is probably a bad thing.

Anyway, oh, yeah, this computer just said 568 files added to your

Dropbox. I understand, computer, you're working hard. I said, yeah, we should have fired you up earlier.

Anyway. So, I'm reading these comments and it seems,

I can't keep up with all the inter -Muslim rivalries or people who like or dislike other

Muslims or stuff like that. I don't know exactly who's on what side and all the rest of that stuff.

So, I'm not sure if some of that's involved in this, but in the original video,

Ijaz dealt with two things, John 9 and John 2028. Those two things should be separated out because, well, they never should have been put together in the first place, to be honest with you.

One is a genuine textual variant in the sense that it addresses the issue of viability.

Now, what does that mean? Well, when we talk about a textual variant, there are viable and non -viable textual variants.

If we have a single 13th century manuscript that has an exceptionally unusual reading in it, and I'm only talking

New Testament here, has an exceptionally unusual reading in it that has never been seen before in the

Greek manuscript tradition. That manuscript is not like 1739 or 1881 where we can tell that while these are after 1000

AD, the scribe is copying from a very, very, very early manuscript, 2nd, 3rd, 4th century.

It's not like that. And it has no versional, V -E -R -S -I -O -N -A -L versional.

In other words, there's no translations into other languages, whether it be

Coptic, Sahitic, Boheric, whatever, Latin, any of the early translations. There's no support there.

That's not a viable textual variant. In other words, there isn't any chance that it actually represents the original.

And so, a large portion of textual variants in the

New Testament are not themselves viable as alternatives, as being possibly the original text.

And so, when we look at John 9, 38, as I discussed it in the video, and I'm not going to go back over all that.

I mentioned to people on Twitter and Facebook, if you want to get the most out of today, watch that ScreenFlow video first, because that'll give you a lot more information.

The John 9 text with the worship of Jesus. Now, again, proskuneo is not a common

Johannine term. Jesus receives proskuneo in the Synoptic Gospels.

If Muslims are going to try to argue that Jews never received worship, what set of arguments are you going to use here?

You all seem to just want to pick and choose from which one or the other. If John's the last, why are you even worried about this?

I mean, even Bart Ehrman recognizes it's John's intention to present Jesus as the us.

I mean, this is sort of obvious. So, I've just never heard anyone make

John 9, the end of chapter 9, the focus of John's presentation of the deity of Christ.

It's not. I mean, you've got John 1, 1. You've got

John chapter 10. We could start going through John and the references are too many to even count.

But I saw some people actually disputing with Ijaz as to whether that's even a textual variant based on their

English translations. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. If many

Christians are ignorant of textual critical issues, Muslims much more so.

The text notes in an ESV or an NIV or whatever are relatively few and certainly do not even represent what you would have.

I don't have a UBS text just sitting nearby, at least not that I'm aware of, or can grab quickly.

But most English translations won't even provide the number of variants that UBS does.

And the UBS text is primarily focused upon providing variants that could be directly relevant to the translation into other languages of the

New Testament. And certainly none of them get anywhere close to the number of variations noted in the

Nesial in the 28th edition. This is 27, but big deal. So your

English translations only giving you a small number just because it doesn't mention a variant doesn't mean there's not a variant there.

And I even saw in one of the people that was responding to Ijaz, in other words, I'm agreeing with Ijaz on this part, where his friends or his people writing to him just don't understand what they're talking about.

There is no question that there is a variant and it's an important variant at the end of John chapter 9.

No one disputes that. I certainly don't dispute that.

No serious biblical scholar is going to dispute that. I mean, facts are facts. It's right there. You just look it up.

It's right there. And I find it to be a particularly relevant one.

And one of the guys that was responding was saying, ah, but all these minuscule manuscripts contain it and all these things is basically making a majority text argument.

The reason it is a very significant variant, even though it's a very small number of manuscripts that do not contain it, is because they happen to be the earliest exemplars, the earliest examples of at least two of the major manuscript families.

In other words, it's representing a wider geographical distribution than if it was just the

Alexandria manuscripts versus the Byzantine or something like that. Codex Washingtonianus does not have it. That's relevant.

Now, when you have that small a number of manuscripts that don't have it, then you have to start looking for things like Homo Etelyatan and things like that.

Would there be something about the text that could lend to its being accidentally omitted?

And that's one of the issues you have to examine in regards to that particular variant.

But it has to be noted. And it is there. That does not make the

New Testament unreliable. And this is one thing that I think Ejaz really needs to seriously give contemplation to.

Ejaz is doing a tremendous amount of reading in textual critical information. That's obvious.

He can't do that same amount of reading in textual critical information about the Quran. And he knows that.

The programs that we have, the databases, the number of manuscripts, you can't do that with the

Quran. And the Quran is a younger document. It has a much less complex transmission history prior to printing.

You've all heard me say it before, but I am like the man searching for the honest person with the lamp in the darkness.

I'm searching for the consistent Islamic apologist who will apply the same standards to his own text that he applies to the

New Testament, the Old Testament. And in this particular instance, I've yet to encounter somebody like that, especially when it comes to this.

And I think Ejaz has some serious issues in this area. He happens to be right about John 9, wrong about the conclusion that this means somehow the presence of textual variation.

That's the Bart Ehrman thesis, but Bart Ehrman won't defend the theology behind that, which is if God inspired it, then he would never allow any textual variance at all.

Well, there are textual variants in the Quran. Everybody I've debated on that. Yusuf Ismail, Shabir Ali, they've all admitted it.

I could guarantee you some of the Muslims that I've debated would never admit that. Now that I think about it, didn't necessarily come up with them, though.

But it's a known fact. I mean, we can show them to you. We can put it up on the screen.

Here's what this manuscript says. And so from Bart Ehrman's perspective, though he's loathe to talk about this because he has such disrespect for Islam.

I've got it on here someplace, but remember when he was asked, why haven't you written a book about Muhammad in the

Quran? He says, because I want to stay alive. That was meant to be a joke, but I would be shocked if any of our

Muslim friends took that as being a compliment in any way, shape or form.

Anyway, so John 9 set aside.

We need to set that apart. The other part of his video was about John 2028, and I had never heard this approach before.

And there's a reason for it. It's really vacuous and bad. But the documentation of it being really bad will help a lot of people to understand something about the history of the

New Testament, the history of the manuscripts, and how you do textual criticism. And I'm going to try to do my best to explain that and make that understandable to folks because I think it's important.

And what does any of this have to do with Mrs. Peterson, also known as Jory Mikan?

I'm sure she just really does not like being called Mrs. Peterson, but she's married to a man named Peterson. So that makes her

Mrs. Peterson. When I was growing up, that was Mrs. Peterson. I've never really listened closely to just how much you can actually hear, but someone may find a way of running a filter and pulling all that stuff.

I'm sure Jack Bauer could do it. No, what's her face? What's her name? The lady that could do anything with computers in 24.

Chloe! Chloe! Chloe could pull it up.

Chloe could tell everybody. Yeah, something.

Or your phone. Or your sunglasses. Something. Yeah, she'd find a way. That's Chloe. Anyway, I miss

Chloe. Because Chloe reminded me of one of my favorite cartoon characters,

Eeyore. Isn't there a connection between Chloe and Eeyore? I see one.

I see a very close one. Anyway, Jory Mika, a .k .a. Mrs. Peterson.

I have to read Goatee. Is Dr. Lee taking calls today? Not from you, or anybody else.

I guess you started getting contacts about this. So I just asked

Summer, has Jory Mika said something about this? And like 30 seconds later, beep, there it was.

So I was using Summer as Facebook Google, I guess you might call it.

But sometime recently, popped this thing into, is this

Twitter? No! No wonder I couldn't find it on Twitter. This is Facebook. On Facebook, I believe that the original

Bible was inspired by God. But I think that patriarchal translators and theologians have hijacked it and changed things and left things out to exclude and marginalize women.

Well, there you go. It always happens that when your biblical argumentation just isn't all that convincing.

In the non -debate that I did with Steve Tassi, and I finally had the opportunity of doing what he refused to do, which was to actually explain

John 6, there are just certain times you just let the Word of God go, and it just overwhelms people when you just let it say what it needs to say.

And when it comes to proving the deity of Christ and things like that, the

Word can just be absolutely overwhelming. Not so much for Jory Mika's pet peeves.

And so what you eventually have to start doing is, well, I believe the Bible was inspired, but it's been changed.

What does she mean by this? What is a patriarchal translator? Does that mean we need to have more women translators?

That they would have gotten it better? We have the original languages. Why would translators be relevant?

Theologians, they've hijacked it and changed things. How do you change things? This kind of just general, vague accusation, just throwing stuff out there, very common for the folks on the road out of the faith, out into the outer reaches.

She's just from the land of liberalism, which is another religion, basically.

But what's the connection here? Well, I'm sure that this could possibly cause

Ijaz some physical difficulties, but yes, I'm connecting him with Jory Mika.

Sorry, Ijaz. I'm really not trying to offend you here.

But in both instances, you have an overriding tradition that ends up causing a person on different levels to question the reality, accuracy, and sophistication of Scripture.

It is her liberalism and away from a

Christian worldview and biblical worldview and so on and so forth, off into the secular wasteland of dead liberal religion.

And that's where a lot of people already are, and that's where they're headed. For Ijaz Ahmed, it is, of course,

Islam. And it is his recognition, I think, of the fundamental problem that Islam faces.

Islam, in its founding document, cannot avoid dealing with the al -al -anjeel, the people of the gospel.

Cannot avoid dealing with the al -kitab, the people of the book. The kitab is there.

The anjeel, the Torah, they are natsal. They're sent down. They contain light and guidance.

They have to deal with this. And the problem is that it's plain as the nose on anybody's face that the author of the

Quran provides no meaningful interaction with the New Testament, especially as it exists today.

There's just no interaction. There's no understanding of the argument of Hebrews or Colossians or John or anything.

And they can't just get rid of it because not only are we told to judge by what's contained therein, but then you've got those nasty little problem of the prophecies of Muhammad.

And if you're going to go to John 14 to try to come up with the parakletas actually being the periklutas, being

Ahmed, you can't just get rid of John. You can't just pick and choose.

And so, that's the problem. And Ijaz has realized, well, the best way to approach this is to go after the text because the vast majority of Christians don't know anything about it.

And you know what? He's exactly right. The vast majority don't. Now, we've been doing our best for a very long time to try to change that around here.

We've done entire programs on a single textual variant that no one else was talking about.

So, we're doing our best. But by presenting this theory of his and doing it in the language of conclusively, when you say this proves something conclusively, you are setting yourself up for it.

And we did that already. Now, again,

Ijaz has some medical issues. I don't know the nature of them.

He hasn't shared them with me, but he has some medical issues. And I was willing to hold this off, but when he posted an article, specifically, again, sort of throwing a little something in my direction, and I saw all the comments were being made and the interaction he was having with other folks, it's an important issue that needs to be dealt with even before we leave.

So, I thought, well, let's use the last dividing line to deal with this and then pick it up when we get back. In his article, he says, nonetheless, the second argument

I received was that no other variant of John 2028 existed post -P66. Although I did point out this was the case in Codex Beze, as minor of a variant as it is, the challenge that not one variant exists has thoroughly been debunked.

For those unread, the variant was eventually edited by a scribe. And I assume he's referring to me, but he missed my point.

What I said in the article is when it comes to what to put in, well, let me show you.

You've got the keynote. Okay. All right. I just realized that this is way zoomed way too big.

Let's boom. There we go. Okay. This, folks, is a biblical manuscript.

I love biblical manuscripts. I love papyri. They're a gift from God. I know most of you think that makes me very weird.

I'm weird in many ways. And my weirdness is a benefit to you. And by the way, may

I say once again, I'm going to be responding to Ijaz, but Ijaz, I pray for you.

I want you to come to know Christ. I want Christ to comfort you in your sickness, to restore you to health and to draw you to himself.

And so I want my words to you to be seasoned with grace. And I ask the listening audience to pray for Ijaz Ahmed as well.

And to not respond to him, unfortunately, as some people do, with anger and vitriol, but to show the love of Christ.

And even in disagreement, Ijaz, we care for you. Here's the argument.

And I thought it was fascinating. And that's why I rushed to do the video that I did, even though we're in the midst of a lot of preparation here.

Alright, let's minimize that for a second. Yeah, I'll tell you when to bring her up again.

Papyri is not the world's most durable substance.

It's a lot more durable than you might think. Most of our books will have turned to complete dust in 1800 years.

But thankfully, in the dry desert heat of Egypt and areas like that,

Syria, in some areas of Syria, not all, Iraq, places like that, you can have lengthy preservation of organic material.

Because papyri is obviously from the papyrus plant, its leaves, the papyrus plant. And unlike the

Quran, this is one of the major issues that we get back if Ijaz is up to it, it'd be good to have a discussion on the program about these things and other things.

Unlike the Quran, from especially the middle of the third century with Diocletian and then the adoption of an empire -wide

Christianity, you have tremendous persecution for at least 63 years there.

And despite certain Notre Dame scholars who I don't know ever even mentioned this particular papyri that I was looking at even before my debate with Bart Ehrman, where we have documentation that provided from Rome, from the

Roman authorities of the sacking of a church and how many documents they took and destroyed from that particular church, that wasn't happening with the

Quran. Well, not in the same way. We do have the Uthmanic revision, that's a whole other issue that is very, very, very important and very relevant here, but we can't get into it today.

The point is that the fact that we have any papyri that date before the peace of the church in 313,

I view it as a gift from God, it's a wonderful thing. And P66 is one of the most important of these.

Now, I noticed that Ijaz is enamored with the, well, hyperskepticism.

And Ijaz, you have to understand, I really doubt that when it comes to the dating of Quranic manuscripts, you engage in hyperskepticism.

I really doubt when it comes to the examination of the

London Quran or the Paris 328a or even the

Su 'ana manuscripts. I doubt that you engage in hyperskepticism. I haven't seen what you've said about that, but I would be interested.

Because if you're consistent, then you're going to be taking the absolutely latest dates for Su 'ana and all those.

There's no way that you with a straight face could buy into any type of pre -Uthmanic date for any

Quranic manuscript at all. Given the sources that I saw you using to try to move the papyri as far away from the

New Testament time period as possible. Again, it's this really constant problem that Islamic apologists have of being fair and using equal scales.

If you're going to go with the most, nah, nah, nah, that's even into the 3rd century, 4th century type of argumentation regarding these papyri, then you're going to have to do the same thing with Quran, right?

And if not, why not? P66 and P75, along with P52, which is just a fragment, though an important fragment, from John chapter 18.

I've shown you P52 many, many times. P52 is the small credit card size manuscript.

Let me see if I can grab it real quick here, just for an illustration.

Of course, right now, well, you don't want to do that. Let's watch it opening the file!

Especially because I can hear the fan running. When the fan kicks in, that means the

CPU is going, oh no, not again! I've never seen this thing open so very slowly.

Wow, man, that was painfully slow. We do have, hopefully, it won't even let me scroll.

Okay, this brief pause brought to you by the fact that I've done something to my, this is a 2011

Mac. It will be replaced fairly soon. And it's just going slowly.

Okay, here she is now. That should be in the same window area.

Here's P52. And it is a credit card size scrap, but it's probably the earliest section of the

New Testament that we have, at least currently. And when you think about it, there's one of two ways of looking at something like this.

This contains just a portion of John 18, 31 -34, and then 37 -38.

It's written on both sides. Like I said, it's about the size of a credit card. Now, there's two ways of looking at it.

Here, by the way, is what it would look like if you had the text wrapped around it and stuff like that.

The hyperskeptic looks at it and says, we don't know what was around it.

We can't tell. How useful is that? Up until this time period, the vast majority of people looked at it and said, wow.

I mean, 125 AD? Maybe 150 at the latest?

That's amazing to have this kind of evidence of the existence of the book of John at that time. For many reasons.

One of the main reasons is the average, for any work written around this time period, on average, you have 500 -900 years before the first copy of almost any other type of book that's written at this time.

Historical works, works of philosophy, whatever. 500 -900 years. Something like this, absolutely unheard of.

It's amazing. It really is amazing. And the fact that it contains the same text.

It's not some different text. It's not a book about somebody other than Jesus. It's the gospel of John.

I mean, it's not something else. These ideas of all these redactions and all the rest of the stuff, there's just no evidence of it.

So, when Ejaz comes up with the idea that, well, here's

P66 at John 2028. Now, for most of P66, it's complete.

I mean, I have shown one particular picture. Well, I just minimized it, didn't

I? I have used this picture for a long, long time of P66.

Move it to where you can see it there. There's P66. This is before the pages were separated out.

You can see how it was bound, what a book looked like. That's from John 1 -1. That's pretty complete. I mean, you've got your standard damage, especially lower corners here get damaged.

That's what happens to books, upper corner here. But this is pretty complete. I mean, you're going to have some places down here where there's a few letters missing or half a word or a word or something like that.

But that's in really good shape. And so, to get down to the end of John and it looks like that, well, obviously, toward the end of the book, those last pages can get damaged over time as they did.

And so we only have portions of of the last sheets. And so what

I showed in the video was that right here. Let me let me.

All right. Right. Here, you can see the word

Apocrypha right there. Answer it. And then whoever answered their name starts right there.

That's Thomas. And what happened?

So Thomas answered. And said, and then Alto to him.

There's the last two letters of Alto. So the margin goes out over here. Ha. And then right here, you see two letters.

Looks like a K and a C in English. OK. Now, the C is the final form,

Sigma. This is called Maguscule. Sometimes called Unseal, but more technically, correctly,

Maguscule, Greek. And there you see the indicator of the Nomena Sacra.

This is the Nomena Sacra for Kurios, Lord. Said to him,

Ha Kurios. And then you can see Mu. You can see the Upsilon, right?

What's left of the, even though it's broken there, you can see Mu. And then,

I'll move this out of the way. You can see the beginning. And you see how, I'm sorry for those of you listening.

I apologize. This is a rather graphically oriented program. I apologize. You might actually find it worthwhile to watch this one on YouTube.

Notice how there's a little bit of an uptick. And notice how even in, this is,

I have what's called the P46SL font on my Mac. I've had it for years.

And it's based upon the standard. You can see another cap down here.

See how there's the same thing here? There's the same thing here. And so, there's the, what the font says.

Most of the time, this particular scribe, this is what it looked like. Okay? So, you can see how that sort of goes right there.

Fits right to it. So, you can tell. Now, obviously, the problem is that the character spacing is going to be really difficult.

That's going to depend on which page and what time of the day it was and how long the scribe had been copying and stuff like that.

So, it's an approximation, but it's a very good approximation. So, you can see how, Ḥaḫurīyāsmu kāi Ḥathayāsmu.

And then, Legay al -ṭo -yēsūs, right here, is the nomena sacra for Jesus.

And then, I guess I, there's the al -ṭu. And then, because you have seen, because you have seen me, have you believed?

You can put that right there. And then, the next line, Blessed are those who, having not seen, have believed, so on and so forth.

So, the text that is found everywhere else, in manuscript after manuscript after manuscript, fits perfectly into what's called the lacuna, the hole in the manuscript.

Now, Ijaz talks about conjecturing what fits into the spaces when you have damaged manuscripts.

There's two kinds of reconstruction of a page like this.

If this is a work and we have no other example of it, then that's pure conjecture.

If we don't have other manuscripts like this, then yeah, you're conjecturing what went in there.

We have lots of other manuscripts like this. We have lots of other manuscripts like this. So, what you have is

P66. No one can seriously question that the

Gospel of John, as contained in P66, is, for all intents and purposes, the exact same gospel we have today.

Are there textual variants? Yes. Is it the same message? Absolutely. Absolutely.

No question about it. And so, it's the Gospel of John.

It's way back in this time period. And what was the focus?

What was the reason why Ijaz was focused upon this? Well, put the two together.

Bring John 9 back in. In the video itself, this is used as evidence that the early

Christians believed that Jesus was a God. Well, not a God, but God. God in human flesh.

As John 114 says in P66, the Word became flesh. I can show you that.

I've got it on another screen here. The Word became flesh. Dwelt among us, we beheld

His glory. These are things that no Muslim could ever say about Jesus. There is no way to even begin to try to make the

Apostle John a proto -Muslim. You can't go there.

And this is the problem. Because there's no question that John is a 1st century document. There's no question it goes back to that same time period.

It's not like the Gospel of Thomas or any of the rest of this silliness from the 2nd and 3rd centuries. It has a deep historical basis.

It's knowledge of geography, place names, so on and so forth. Very consistent. This is what early

Christians believed about Jesus. And it's the same Gospel that you're dependent upon for your one fulfillment of Muhammad in the

New Testament. So, to say that it is conjecture, that the

New Testament Scriptures are unreliable conclusively because the last few pages of P66 got damaged?

What? How does that conclusively prove something? And I point out, that's why no one argues this way.

So, what happens is, Ejaz writes what

I read to you about Codex Beze.

Now, Codex Beze. Go ahead and take that down, if you would, please.

Codex Beze. Codex Beze Cantabrigiensis is the name of the document.

And I want to see if I can bring something up here. Again, I may not be able to, simply because my computer is just not wanting to do anything.

And anything is particularly challenging at all right now.

But let me see if I do have it here. This particular manuscript,

I've mentioned it a number of times before. It's 2009.

Let's see if we can find it here. Yeah, yeah, here we go.

Let's see if this is what I want. This manuscript, when it was given to Beza, that's where its name comes from.

Codex Beze Cantabrigiensis comes from Beza himself, who was

Calvin's successor at Geneva. When he donated it to the university, he donated it with a page that basically said, this particular manuscript is more worthy of being stored than read.

I don't know if you can bring this up or not, but when

Theodor Beza gave the manuscript to the University of Cambridge, he wrote it on May 18, 1852, in the letter recognizing the widely divergent text it contains on the whole to be stored up than to be published.

The most striking feature of Codex D is its perpetual tendency to interpolation, by which term, we understand the practice of adding to the received text passages, often of some length, which whether most critics, it may be feared that the obvious faults and palpable glosses, so especially conspicuous in this one book, have engendered a natural but not very reasonable habit of unduly disparaging our venerable document as a whole.

D, no known New Testament manuscript contains so many distinctive readings, chiefly the free addition and occasional omission of words, sentences, and images, according to Bruce Metzger.

When D supports the early tradition, the manuscript has a genuine significance, but it, as well as its precursors and followers, should be examined most carefully when it opposes the early tradition,

Kurt and Barbara Ahland, in their statement. And then D .C.

Parker has written an entire book on Codex Beza. The fact is that the longer I have studied it, the more

I realize that Codex Beza's only rarely deserve serious attention.

What does that mean? What that means is that Codex Beza can't be described as not trying to simply copy, interpreting, even correcting at times.

And so, especially when Beza is alone in its reading, then it just simply is not to be overly trusted in what it has to say.

Well, not overly, shockingly. The manuscript to which

Ijaz Ahmed pointed as a rebuttal of my statement, there weren't any textual variants here. And what was

I referring to? I was referring to the fact that what's the one thing that Ijaz was focused upon?

The use of the word God of Jesus. That's why he talked about Jesus being worshipped, and the whole reason he brought up P66 is that the phrase doesn't have

Kai Haasing as in the name of Jesus put in there.

See, this is what happens when the serious person, and Ijaz is serious, but he's seriously influenced by his tradition.

That's where the problem is here. He's misusing textual criticism. He's not doing, again, because he would never apply the same type of stuff.

I've got, and I may bring up the Sana manuscript. I will bring up the Sana manuscript, but let's do this first.

Let me show you, do you have the, oh, that's wait, no.

I don't know why you're zoomed in like that. Zoom out. That's not me either. I'm just sending you what

I got. Source, window, preview.

Yeah, that's just the thing. That's the graphic. What we eventually will show you here, hopefully, is

Codex Bezae Canterburgensis. What it reads in the Greek portion of Codex Bezae is a diglot.

There you go. Codex Bezae is a diglot, so it's Greek Latin. I'm not going to bore you with all the, actually, no.

Yeah, I'll tell you when to bring it up here in a second. I'm not going to bore you with all the background information and stuff like that.

It's a diglot, and the relationship between the

Greek and the Hebrew has been the source of many papers and symposiums and presentations and trying to recreate what was being copied and stuff like that.

Not an easy thing. Not an easy thing at all. Very complicated.

But there is a text we're burying here. There are actually two, and I'm going to explain them to you.

All right? Let's take a look at it. Here is the final text.

Ha, kurios, nomina sacra, mu. Kai, theos, the nomina sacra for God, theos, mu.

Now, what is the variant as it exists right now?

Well, everywhere else, it's ha, kurios, mu, kai, ha, theos, mu.

So, there's no article before theos.

Now, theos is still there. The very word that is the issue in the conclusively, ha, ha, ha, proving things from John 9 and John 2028, which was not conclusively done, that word is there.

One could make the argument, in some sense, that the article would not need to be repeated in a form of a

Granville -Shark construction type idea. Won't go into that. Though it would be relevant for Bezaicandrogenesis, because the scribe was clearly sensitive to stylistic issues.

So, there is a variant there. And, evidently, that's what Bart Ehrman was referring to.

Oh, great. Yeah, there was a day when he was referring to, in his book, and I don't have the updated version of this.

I need to probably help his retirement fund by getting him a little bit more money on this.

And especially because the footnote stuff in here is horrible.

It's all wrong. He makes reference to Codex Bezaicandrogenesis in regards to anti -patrapassionist corruptions of Scripture.

Here it is. This is currently in this edition on page 266. How can one avoid drawing from this designation the conclusion that he is the one and only

God? Several scribes of the early church adroitly handled the matter in what can be construed as an anti -patrapassionist corruption.

The predecessor of Codex Bezaicandrogenesis and other gospel manuscripts simply omitted the article.

Jesus is divine, but he is not the one God himself. Now, again, one of the major problems

I have with much of what's happening in Textual Criticism Day is this idea of mind -reading. Mind -reading scribes.

People who lived long, long, long ago. You can speculate, you can conjecture, to use a word, as to why a scribe might have done what he did.

But there's a problem here. I'll bring it back up on the screen. You'll notice how

Mu is a little darker than the second

Mu. You notice there's something written behind it? Yeah.

There's been a correction made. Now, there's all sorts of theories about, you know,

I've got entire books on the scribes and correctors of Codex Sinaiticus and which scribe did what and so on and so forth.

There are theories as to scribes and correctors of Bezaicandrogenesis as well.

Some theorize that this is a later insertion and that the original was what the original scribe put.

Problem is, you compare it to the Latin and it's really weird, but we won't get into that right now. We don't want to lose everybody here.

But you can actually read it, even in this image. If it's full screen, you can probably see it.

It originally said Hacurias hasn't changed. But what you see behind it is

Chi Ha Theos. Here's the Kappa.

There's the downstroke. See the bold downstroke in the alpha here? Well, there is the bold downstroke.

There's the out for the alpha right there. Kappa Alpha, there's your Iota. Then you have the

Omicron. There's the article. Then you have the erased Nomena Sacra line over Theos.

The erased, whether it was immediately done or later done, in both readings, the very word that is the key of the argument at John 20, 28 is in Bezaicandrogenesis.

Both readings, the erased and the second, both say

God of Jesus. Now, it is strange that Ehrman would make the comment that he did.

How does he know what's in the exemplar, especially with Beza? Because there's so many questions as to the influence of the

Latin and the Greek on the Latin, Latin on the Greek. The idea of reconstructing exemplars, but even more so, the articles in the underwriting.

There's technical terms we could use for overwriting and underwriting. It's all normally just either

Latin or Greek. That's how scholars make it look like they really know a lot because they use Latin and Greek.

But it's right there. The article was there. If you're going to quote

John 20, 28 as evidence in Beza of an anti -patrapassionist construction or emendation, why not mention that the original didn't have it at all?

I don't know, but it's there. Here's what you actually have.

What's the relevance? When you can see right there, there's the os that's been erased.

There's the os that has been written. What do both of them do? They identify

Jesus as God. What is ironic here? What is ironic is that what

Ejaz is actually doing is he is engaging in conjectural emendation.

The very word that he uses, I think completely inappropriately drawing it from Surah 4, a completely different topic.

I really think that's a misuse of that text. But anyway, you see, if you're going to go, if you in your mind go back to P66, if you're going to say, we don't know what was in there, then you have to, well, to be taken seriously, you have to suggest something that could have gone in there that's different than everything else.

Because you see, when I've done my New Testament Reliability presentation over and over and over again, what have

I emphasized? And sometimes this is where the audience starts getting a little lost, only because it's not uber exciting.

Well, you need to understand this. The New Testament was not transmitted in a single line of transmission.

You don't have the phone game. You don't have this as a copy of this, as a copy of this, as a copy of this, so that Beze is just a little later copy of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and then you go back to the papyri, and it's all just one nice neat line.

It doesn't work that way. Multifocality, multiple lines written by different people at different times, different audiences, never under the control of any one particular organization.

It could not have undergone wholesale editing and changing because of that. And those lines intersect with one another as they're going along.

That's what's so important about P45. P45 is one of the intersections. That's why it's so important.

Much earlier intersection than Beze. And the point is, Beze, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Washingtonianus, different lines, different lines.

What do they all say? God. God. So, if you're theorizing, which is exactly what

Ijaz is doing, but he doesn't want to have to defend it because he knows he can't. If you're theorizing there was something else in the damaged portion of P66, what was it?

Where's the evidence of it? What is its precursor? If P66 was ever copied, why don't we have any copies from P66 that have this other stuff in it, this different reading?

Because they all say God. They all say God. And the whole point of the video was to inculcate in the minds of weak, uninformed

Christians and Muslims the idea that the deity of Christ is not firmly grounded and rooted in the very text of the

Gospel of John. And it is. There's no question of it. And so, like I said,

I made this argument in the video.

And let me see if I can, again, if this will stop pulling stuff down.

Why is that doing that? That's not even supposed to be there. I thought I deleted that. Here we go.

All right. Here is... I'm going to have to change the...

There. Should have it now. Here is a very, very early manuscript.

What? I don't know either. He is...

The man says he's working on it. And we are sure that he is working on it. This is from Sura 12.

And contains about 20... Well, originally contained about 20 verses.

Yeah. From Sura 12. Now, this is very early.

Now, I... No one can prove that this is the earliest.

But let's say it was. How many Muslims are going to buy the argument that...

Okay. Every other... Let's say right up here. Okay. You see this line right here? Right in verse 30.

It's missing. Everything from here to here. Because remember you read right to left.

It's gone. It's not there. So, is anyone going to seriously believe?

Is any Muslim going to seriously believe that when you pick up your Quran today, that what is found between that word and that word is conjecture?

And that having a hole like this is sufficient to demonstrate conclusively that the

Quran cannot be trusted as divine scripture. Are you going to accept that? Because the fact of the matter is...

Now, I realize comparing the Quran and the New Testament, a little bit apples and oranges. It's a much younger document.

Much smaller. Should have considerably less textual issues.

Given its history, lack of persecution, all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And of course, the big issue, free transmission versus controlled transmission. Big, big, big, big issue.

But when we look at this, this line here, the holes in here, down here at the bottom of the page, all along here, this whole section here, the beginnings of these lines, is anyone going to question, because we have this early manuscript of the

Quran, that we don't know what goes there? When every other manuscript of the

Quran has the same words there? Now, if we could... Let's say we...

And I didn't have time to look this up, sorry. But I don't know if the

Sa 'ana manuscripts contained Surah 12. I don't know. It's possible that the undertext in the

Sa 'ana palimpsests might have some textual variance there. That would be significant.

But if you buy Ijaz's theory, and you're going to be consistent...

Now, if you don't want to be consistent, then you don't have to go here. But if you're not willing to be consistent, then you have nothing to say.

Logically, rationally, if you're going to use one argument for P66, and then look at this and go, well,

I'm just not going to do that. I'm not going to apply the same standards. Well, then you've just lost the debate.

You've just said, I'm not a person of truth. I cannot operate within categories of truth. Okay. But if you're going to accept

Ijaz's argument, then you're going to have to look at everything along here, everything up here, and go, conjecture.

Now, let me tell you something. I will never make that argument. I am highly skeptical, to be perfectly honest with you, of...

You'll notice, Ijaz, the two abus that I responded to before, you guys don't hear me repeating a lot of the argumentation against the

Quran that's common from other people. Do you? That's because I don't believe that some of what's being said today has yet been demonstrated consistently.

I heard about the green stuff, the Green Project, when

Dan Wallace put the word out. What was... You guys can go back.

Check me out on this. From the time it came out, what did I say? Well, we're going to have to wait and see.

Don't be quoting stuff like this. And until material can be thoroughly vetted by many eyes, from people from different perspectives, don't go throwing it out there.

And I am... I'm trying to be consistent. I just don't see anybody on your side trying to do the same thing.

I really don't. That's disappointing. It's very disappointing. It shouldn't be that way.

It should not be that way. Just because this early manuscript is damaged doesn't mean that we don't know what was all through here, all through here, in these holes here.

We do know. And it's not mere conjecture. Now, if this was the only page of this text, that's a different kind of conjectural emendation.

I can't do anything other than conjecture because I don't have a meaningful literary testimony to what was there originally.

That's not the case here. And it's not the case with p66. In John chapter 20.

Either one. Either one. So, there you go.

You might say, wow, that's helpful in talking to my kids this afternoon. Well, probably not.

Yet. Until your kids run into a Bart Ehrman clone when they go to the local community college.

Then, at the very least, you'll know where you can turn if by then we still have the freedom to be here for information on such things.

And maybe if you actually did pay close attention, you've gotten a little better idea of, well, you know, the text comes to us from multiple different sources and those lines cross and if there was some big corruption then it would leave evidence in the tradition.

There would be lines that would show that. But, in John 20 .28, Bese Canterburgiensis has a variant there, but we can't know what the document before that was.

It doesn't leave, that doesn't get copied on down the way either. And, as far as the issue of Jesus being identified as God in John 20 .28,

both readings identify Jesus as God. And, in fact, the original reading with the article.

So, there you go. Not too many people find this particular subject overly fascinating.

It's something that we do need to talk about and you need to be aware of. I see that Jory is who

I have not blocked. I have Mr. White blocked so I don't read anything he writes, so I have not been debating with him at all.

I have no desire to meet with Mr. White privately. I've asked him to leave me alone, but he refuses. As I said in a very lengthy what's called twee short, the thing where you can write a big long thing on Twitter, Jory Micah wrote to my daughter and her big thing was

I want you to promise to never mention me again. If you promise to never mention me again, then I'll pull down everything

I've said about you. That's weird. Huh?

Yeah, it sounds like junior high, doesn't it? And I explained my twee short.

Look, I had never heard of you before, but if you're going to keep putting out foolishness,

I will correct it. And that tweet you put out today was foolishness.

And I corrected it. And I can guarantee you, you are in no position to even begin to challenge that correction.

So, I've made no promises. If you want to keep putting out silly stuff about the Bible being changed,

I will keep explaining why you're silly. Until those freedoms are taken away from us.

And it does seem that people like you would like to see those freedoms taken away. I did notice in looking through her tweets that she was a big supporter of Senator Sanders.

So, hey, socialism has a long history of shutting down dissent.

And something tells me you'd probably like this. You certainly are good at blocking people anyways. You must have some uber -duber super software for blocking folks.

I don't know. But, I'm not interested in chasing that woman around.

She doesn't have much worthwhile to say. But if she's going to say something silly, I'll correct it. And there you go.

So, I wanted what

I was going to do otherwise. What I wanted to get to, and I'm just not going to be able to.

And I hope I can still get to it when we get back, is the unbelievable radio broadcast with Sean McDowell, Josh McDowell's son, where he dialogues with this quote -unquote former

Christian. He was actually a former Seventh -day Adventist who did the atheist -for -a -year thing and then remained an atheist.

And it might be good if I get a chance.

I understand that Andy Stanley not only wrote that article, but has done another podcast that likewise complains about how mean everybody has been to him.

But, in the process, has, in essence, raised all these issues again.

People are saying, when are you going to respond to this thing? When are you going to respond to that thing?

And I'm like, well, we respond to Frank Turek.

By the way, this was with Frank Turek, so it's Turek and Stanley together. That's why it might be worth listening to. Is there anything new to be said?

I don't see that there is. But I'll listen to it and see if I can find the time in editing the sound files.

I just realized I need to load Audio Notetaker onto my travel machine now. Editing the sound files, it takes so long to mark stuff out.

But, who knows? Maybe I will just be absolutely bored to tears on the 15 -hour flight home and have plenty of time to do that.

We'll try to get to it. We'll see when we get back. I get back the day before the election.

So, something tells me we may have plenty of other things to be dealing with by that particular time period.

I don't know. We will find out. The Dividing Line will continue on in some form with someone.

This Thursday we'll have Pastor John Sampson. Oh no! The ESV -only people are back again.

And then next week on Tuesday we're hoping to have Pastor Dan Cafessi.

Really? Yes. About what? Whatever he wants to talk about.

Okay. News to me. And then probably going to have

Pastor Sampson in again. And I've actually tried to push the envelope and see if I can get

Dan in twice. We'll see what happens. You're not going to be able to get

Jeff Durbin in because he and I are going to be hanging out. Australia and New Zealand. It's going to be fun.

So, there you go. The Dividing Line will continue on. When I get back then we'll see what has happened and pick it up from see if there's anything left to talk about.

So, prayers appreciated obviously for safety. That's a long trip.

And the big thing is when I travel overseas the big thing I ask folks to pray for is health.

The first time I went overseas I got sicker than the proverbial dog. And now

I've sort of found ways I've avoided that pretty much.

Sometimes I get a little something but especially those 14, 15 hours in a sealed tube with 300 other people it's

Phil Johnson refers to the miasma of the atmosphere inside a plane at that point.

You're just sharing everything. It's wonderful. So, prayers for health.

I hate to travel that far and then be sick and not be as effective and efficient as I could be. So, appreciate prayers for those things and Lord willing we'll see you back here somewhere after the 7th of November.