Reliability of the New Testament-Session 2

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Social media, it's always a lot of fun. So looking at our schedule, this hour and a half, you've got plenty of time for lunch this afternoon.
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And then we have the tough part, because I'm going to tell you something. Especially on Sundays, but pretty much every other day, right around 2 o 'clock, my body says, wouldn't a nap be wonderful right now?
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Wouldn't it be great? And so you eat lunch, and you come back, and you sit down, and you try to survive two hours.
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And it's just, if you think it's rough on you, you've got to try to be thinking and speaking at the same time.
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But we have the afternoon torture session, and then our session this evening.
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And so normally, what I did about five years ago, and we did the same similar topic, was
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I sort of elongated and stretched out this particular presentation.
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But something has changed. It had already changed, honestly, in certain levels of scholarship.
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But since that time, I have been introduced to the new developments that are taking place in the area of New Testament textual criticism.
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And I have over on the bench over there two of my volumes representing this new material.
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And so I need to find a place to put that.
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I hesitate, honestly, to try to do that in that afternoon session, because I don't know if I can survive it.
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If you pick up even half of what I'll be presenting, you'll be way ahead of,
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I would say, the vast majority of seminary graduates today. Because honestly,
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I can only think of, at most, maybe 100 people, maybe 200 now, around the world that have a real handle on what's called
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CBGM, coherence -based genealogical method.
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Some people call it computer -based German madness. But once you try to explain it, it does seem to function in that way.
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But we will, at some point, need to be looking at this. Because your New Testament is changing as a result of CBGM.
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The problem is, like I said, a couple hundred people that really have a handle on why that's happening, how that actually works.
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And so I think it I had predicted for a while that when that top volume, which is the
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Gospel of Mark, when that top volume came out, that it would start getting more mainstream attention.
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I was wrong. There's too many other things going on. And it really didn't make a splash yet.
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Maybe when John is done, when you impact the Gospel of John, that might get some attention, finally.
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But we will attempt to at least give you the outlines, without getting too deep into the weeds, on what's going on with that.
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Because the bottom volume there is half of Acts. The top is
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Mark. So if you can imagine what the entire New Testament is going to look like, because there is three more volumes for each one of those, just for Acts and Mark.
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So once you do all of the New Testament, it certainly wouldn't fit on that bench when it gets done.
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It will be a huge, huge project. And it will be the most exhaustive
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Greek New Testament ever put in print. Or, obviously, you can access all of this online, too.
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I mean, that's how almost everything is being done. And that, in and of itself, is an amazing move.
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I can very clearly remember, in my younger days, when the preacher would say, now turn with me over to Acts chapter 15, what would you expect to hear?
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The ruffling of pages all across the. Now, you'll hear a couple.
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There's still a couple of old fogies that like the feel of paper in your hand and stuff like that.
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I get it. But especially at my church, where I'm one of the oldest people in the congregation, you say, let's turn to Acts chapter 15.
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And if there's any sound at all, it's people dropping their iPhone or something along those lines.
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Going, oh, my battery's dead, or something like that. Because they're tapping over to it.
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Which also means, very frequently, you may have more than one translation on your screen.
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That has changed things a lot. It's hard for us to realize that not very long ago, everybody had the same translation.
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And there wasn't any discussion of translational differences, because everybody had the same translation. It was never quite to the point.
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I have spoken on Islam here before. And I've told the story then of a
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Muslim scholar that I know. And I would listen to his lectures a lot. He speaks not only very good
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Arabic, but he was raised in the United States. So he's very easy to understand. And he is an individual who has memorized the
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Quran. And you might go, wow, that's amazing. It is, but the
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Quran is just over half the length of the New Testament. So it's not a huge book.
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But normally, he would just simply whip off a reference and quote it in Arabic, and then give it the English, and so on and so forth.
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But maybe it was an early morning. Maybe his friends didn't bring him any donuts before he started the lecture, which generally means you speak more slowly.
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Your mind isn't working as well. Some of us can't do coffee. And so coffee, no, no.
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So anyways, he was having a rough time that morning. And so he tried to quote this text from the
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Quran. It just wouldn't come. And so finally, he gave up. And he said, well, it's in, then he named the surah.
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And he said, right -hand page at the top. Right -hand page at the top.
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Now think about what that means, because that was a relevant reference. That was relevant to his community, because everybody in his community would have the exact same printed
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Arabic Quran. They're all the same. They're all the same printing. And so everybody in that surah, right -hand page at the top, has that reference.
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I mean, that's unanimity. That's really, that's having everything that you need right there.
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And I suppose there has been a few times in some places that that might have been something.
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But most of the time, even when you have different King, if everybody had the King James version of the Bible, it's still different printings.
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There's different kinds of the King James. You've got the Oxford. You've got the Cambridge. They are not identical with one another.
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They have different wording in a couple of different places. Not many, but a couple. And printings galore.
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And they're all going to be formatted different. And we have different font sizes. And we just don't have that kind of a situation.
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And so there are a lot of Christians who come into the church.
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And they're handed a Bible. And they don't know why they're handed the translation that they are. They don't know that there are other translations.
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And the church has not done its duty, to be honest with you, in the vast majority of instances, to prepare new believers to understand where the scriptures came from.
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And that is one thing, hopefully, we will be able to start dealing with here.
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Now, you'll notice I'm not going to do John 5, 4, because we burned that one last night.
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If you weren't here, how many of you were not here last night? Oh. Oh. OK.
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So those who were, shh. So if you were not here last night, and you have not seen this presentation before, and you have an
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English standard version, anybody who was not here last night has not seen this before and has an
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ESV. All right, we got our sacrificial victim back here.
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I'm sorry? Oh, that's all right. And if you were not here, and you have a
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King James or a New King James, anyone? See, I knew that was going to be tough.
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I knew that was going to be tough. But someone with a King James, a New King James up, look up John chapter 5,
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Gospel of John chapter 5, verse 4. You already did it? You already have it on your phone? OK, so you already know.
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It's not there. That's right. If you look it up, and I loved the look on your face, because there's this slow, and at first, the thought in your mind is,
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I'm just not seeing it. It's there someplace. You go back over it again. You go back over it again.
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And then all of a sudden, there's this horrible realization, I don't have John 5, 4.
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I have 5, 5. I have 5, 3. I don't have John 5, 4. And so for those of you who weren't here last night, we did that whole thing.
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And we talked a little bit about where this came from. What I wasn't able to do was to show you all the textual data.
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There it is. Clear as mud, isn't it? That's all you ever needed to know about John 5, 4. Well, actually,
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I just realized, did I leave that in here, or did
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I lose it? I don't know. We're going to find out. When you travel all over the place, you end up with all sorts of interesting things in your travel bag.
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But whether you have what you're actually going to be looking for or not. You know what?
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I just found my power cord. And in a very short number of minutes, that would have become rather relevant one way or the other when my computer stopped working.
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But I'm looking for my laser. And I'm not sure that I have it easily accessible here.
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So it's probably in here somewhere. You know how that works. You put your fingers down everywhere.
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You find your grandkids spit out gum. And all sorts of fun stuff in the process.
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But I'm not sure where that has gone to. But the laser would have been nice to point to things.
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Yes, Lord. All right. Power, there we go.
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All right, so what you have up here, and I guess I can use. No, I can't use my.
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Nope, don't even have a. If I put it up in my Bible program, my cursor would show up here.
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But you'll notice over on the left -hand side, you have John 5 .3. Then there's a dash in John 5 .5.
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This is what you would look at if you're looking at a Greek New Testament, such as the Nessie -Aland text. And then over on the right -hand side, all of the various variants and manuscripts that contain for an angel at a certain time would come down, stir the waters, and first went into the water, so on and so forth.
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And the point of all this is down at the bottom, the very bottom on the right -hand side, you'll see
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TXT. And then P66 is a funny -looking P. That's the symbol for a papyrus, the early forms of the manuscripts of the
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New Testament. You have P66, P75, and then you have the Hebrew letter Aleph, B, C, with an asterisk,
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DTW, so on and so forth. This is a gift to the
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Christian people. And you go, why? We are wide open in dealing with the history of our text.
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We don't hide things. We don't have a priest class that is the only ones that have access to these things.
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And you may go, well, I'm never really going to be all that interested in it after this particular weekend. But the fact is, the information is there.
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You are not dependent upon someone else. If you want to check the facts out, you can.
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And so if you take the time, you can purchase a Nessie Olland Greek text.
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And it will tell you that, for example, P66 and P75 are the two earliest manuscripts that we have of the
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Gospel of John. They're dated between 175 and 200. We're going to look at them a little bit later on.
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You'll get to see them with your own eyes. It'll tell you where the manuscript's found. Both of them have been completely photographed in high quality digital photography and are available online.
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You can go look at them yourself. You can verify the readings, whatever you want to do. But the point is, the two earliest manuscripts.
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Now, when I say manuscript, like P66, P66 does contain the beginning of John all the way through to the last chapter.
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And then the last chapter is fragmentary. Why might that be? Well, whenever anybody looks at the papyri and they complain about they have holes in them and sometimes the end of a book has fallen off and stuff like that, like, oh, man,
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I wish it was the whole thing. I just look at people and say, what are you going to look like in 1 ,800 years? They're doing a lot better than you are, or will.
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Maybe even are. And so when you say the two earliest, there will be times when you'll have things missing.
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Like one of the manuscripts I've spent a lot of time with is P45, and it contains portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.
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It's the only manuscript from the early church that contains those five books. We're just sort of used to Acts always being the next book in line, right?
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That was very unusual. Acts was almost never found together with the Gospels.
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It was found elsewhere. But it's very fragmentary, so it only has portions of a few chapters in Mark and a few chapters in Matthew and a very small portion of John, because bugs, fire, water, all sorts of things will ravage things over time.
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The point here is that both P66 and P75 do contain John chapter 5, and they go from 5 -3 to 5 -5, and there is no 5 -4.
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And what you need to do in your mind is don't go, oh, they deleted it.
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No, no, no, that's where we really get into problems.
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The verse numbers that we have today, as I mentioned last night, were introduced in late 1550 and first published in 1551.
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And so the issue is not deletion, addition.
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The question that will determine how you handle this topic is, what did
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John write? Not what did a scribe 300 years later think
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John should have written, not what became popular 1 ,000 years after Christ, but what did
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John write? And it's not just important in John 5 -4. There is a text in Revelation chapter 16, verse 5, where all the manuscripts that we've ever seen down through history, in Revelation 16 -5, always said the same thing, who is and who was the
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Holy One. At the end of the 16th century, John Calvin's successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, looking at that phrase, felt that it was awkward.
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And elsewhere in the Book of Revelation, what does it normally say? Who is and who was, and who is to come.
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Now, the Holy One is hasios in Greek. And who is to come is esaminos in Greek.
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And so Beza assumed he made what's called a conjectural emendation.
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And in his printed edition of the Greek New Testament, he changed hasios to esaminos, even though he had no
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Greek manuscripts that said esaminos. All of them said hasios.
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Now, he only had a few. The fact that we can have that level of information as to numbers of manuscripts, things like that, has only been available for 100 years.
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OK? No, you are seeing more scholarly information about John 5 -4 on the screen right now than any
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Christian had up into the 1900s. OK, that's how much things have changed.
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And so we have to keep in mind, hey, we have so much more information to be going on than people in the past did.
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That's important to keep in mind. Well, the level of the group just went down a good bit.
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Oh, hey, Dean, how you doing? Sorry, some of you are going, what? How could you be so mean?
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Well, you don't know Dean. And those who do know that that was just, hey, how you doing, man?
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That's how Dean rolls. Normally, when Dean walks in,
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I'm figuring the cop cars are not too far behind. They just couldn't catch up before he got here. And hey, the only reason we started doing this stuff 21 stinking years ago was because of the fellow in the orange shirt right there.
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So you can either thank him or this afternoon blame him, one of the two, for what we're doing.
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So anyhow, John 5 -4. So what we have here, then, is a massive amount of information that's helping us to understand what manuscripts read certain ways.
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So man, I'm going to tear that apart during lunch and see if I can't find it.
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Because in the third line from the bottom, you'll see a funny -looking, what looks like an
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M. That's a fractur M, capital M. And that refers to the majority text.
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So the majority of manuscripts do contain this reading of John 5 -4.
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The one in Revelation, when Theodore Beza decided to change
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Hoseos to Asamenos, guess which printed Greek New Testament the
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King James translators relied on most? Theodore Beza's 1598. Now, all the printed
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Greek New Testaments that came before, all of Erasmus', Stephanos', they all said Hoseos. Like I said last night,
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I have a 1550 Stephanos. And I can show you the text. There it says, Hoseos.
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Beza changed it to Asamenos. And when you read Revelation 16 -5 in the New King James version of the
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Bible, guess what it says? Who is, and who was, and who is to come. No Christian before 1598 had ever seen that, had ever seen that.
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You see why it's important to have access to all the information? What if you have a powerful centralized government that says, we're only gonna have this version.
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And any other version we're gonna destroy. You say, ah, that would never happen. It happened to the
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Quran. It happened to the Quran. And so what happens when you have a powerful organization that can make changes?
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You may never know what the original was. If you have people early on burning manuscripts, that may destroy your ability to ever know what the original reading was.
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Now, it'll give you, it'll make you feel good, because everybody has the same reading. And let's, be honest with me, be honest with me.
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You all have seen those little notes in the margin of your Bible, right? Down there at the bottom of the page, that say some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that.
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In all honesty, how many of you have ever been bothered by having noted one of those notes in your
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Bible? You sort of went, eh. Honestly, okay? Most people are, most people are like.
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And most people would rather they weren't there. But you should be very thankful that they are there.
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Because the Muslims don't have any of those. But they should, because their text has a history just like anybody else's text has a history.
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And you need to know what that history is. Truth can withstand examination, which is something we should be telling
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Spotify, Google, YouTube, and everybody else these days. Censorship is the last bastion of cowards.
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It's the last bastion of people who cannot defend their position. If you want to refute a position, if you want to refute a position, demonstrate it with argumentation.
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Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ah, I love the green one, yeah.
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Ah, so what I was saying is, oh, gee. Whoa, wall melts.
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Ah, yeah, okay, that's, I have some of those. I have those ones that, you know, they put you in jail for 50 years for shooting down aircraft with it.
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So there's your majority text sign right there for those of you over looking at that one. Here's P66, P75.
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So what this is telling you here is these are the manuscripts, very, very early manuscripts that do not contain
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John 5 -4. And then all of this stuff up here, yes, these all contain it, but notice how many variants there are, how different they are from one another.
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That's a telltale sign of a later edition is there's all sorts of differences between even these manuscripts and how they read up here as well.
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Point is, you want to have that information. You want to have as much information as possible because there are two ways in which a text can be transmitted.
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You have the free transmission of the text or you have a controlled transmission of the text. A controlled transmission is where you have an authority such as the
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Islamic Caliphate controlling the production of the text. And that's what happened in Islamic history.
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A free transmission is what happens in the New Testament. And we're gonna look at how that happened with some really cool graphics that I made here in a little bit.
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All right, so let's run through this real quick. This is the presentation I've done for years. We're gonna get through it as quickly as we can because we've got
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CBGM to do and a few other things to apply to it as well. But even if you have seen this before, it's been a while since you looked at a manuscript,
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I'm sure. And I'm one of those weird people that actually shows people what the manuscripts look like so that you have a connection in your mind.
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That little note at the bottom of your page says some manuscripts. Some manuscripts, what does that mean?
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Now you're gonna be able to go, oh, yeah, the papyri looked like that and the vellum manuscripts looked like that and this is what happened in history.
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It makes those notes a little bit more meaningful to you. Of course, naturalistic materialism rules today in academia.
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Anything that does not presuppose an uncreated universe that can be explained solely on the basis of naturalism, rejected a priori.
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There cannot be any supernatural idea. So the unbeliever approaches the transmission of the text of the
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New Testament without any possibility that God could providentially protect that text.
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It is interesting, though. We're gonna see later on, we're gonna see a fellow by the name of Bart Ehrman admit that of all the works of antiquity, the earliest and best attested is what?
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The New Testament. See, New Testament. We're not dealing with the
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Old Testament so much here because, honestly, we wouldn't have time to and think about how vastly different the
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New Testament is from, say, the Pentateuch, the works of Moses. Think about just how much older the
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Pentateuch is than the New Testament. You're talking 1 ,400 years. Some people date the
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Pentateuch to 1 ,200. I would take the 1 ,400 date. That's a huge amount of time.
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The Pentateuch is definitely the oldest complete work in the sense of having a coherence to it that we have in antiquity, but its means of being passed down to us was very different.
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You did not have the Jewish Bible Society making bunches of copies of the works of Moses to distribute amongst the
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Babylonians. They did not have that call to function in that way.
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But you get to the New Testament and you have an explosion of manuscripts all across the Roman Empire. Why? Because the gospel's going to all the world.
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It's going to all the world. And so it was a covenant people that were required to possess what we call the
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Old Testament scriptures, the Tanakh, the Torah, Nevi 'im, and Ketuvim. But it was the church's goal to get the gospel out to everyone.
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And so you had all sorts of copying of the text that takes place in the New Testament.
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Christian claims are relegated to the arena of simple myth. So listen,
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I debated Bart Ehrman in 2009. You might find it interesting to watch the debate.
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Dr. Ehrman made the exact same presentation that he had made in debating Dan Wallace to the point where he still had the same misspellings in his presentation that he had against Dan Wallace.
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He used the same jokes that he'd used in debating Dan Wallace. And he did not read or listen to a single word
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I'd ever said because Dr. Ehrman does not believe that anybody who believes what I believe has anything meaningful to say to him.
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Okay, that's just the reality. He is considered the best critic of New Testament Christianity alive today because, in the
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English -speaking world, because he was a graduate of Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and then he was
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Bruce Metzger's final PhD student at Princeton. And so he has made a career, he's a fine scholar.
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He's almost never wrong about facts. Where he's wrong is his interpretation of the facts.
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And so, I mean, when it comes to theology, Ehrman, oof, is really bad at times.
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But he really is the grandfather of much of the skepticism that is prevalent in academia today.
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And so I think the next screen is where he explains some of these things. We might have some audio if you're ready for audio back there.
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Wanna make sure everybody's ready? Okay. Welcome back to the show of Religious Studies at the
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University of North Carolina. His best -selling book is Misquoting Jesus, the Story Behind Who Changed the
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Bible and Why. Please welcome Bart Ehrman. You were someone that went through sort of a period of discovery.
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You were a literalist, I guess, or born again, it would say, and then as you studied and learned more about it, you began to question that.
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Right, I started out being interested in the Bible because I was a born -again
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Christian, a fundamentalist who thought that the very words of the Bible had been given by God. And so I studied
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Greek in college and decided to read the New Testament in Greek. Because that was the original language. It was the original language it was written in.
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And so the more I studied, though, the more I saw there's an enormous problem. We don't have the original
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Greek copies of any of these books. All we have are these thousands of manuscripts from centuries later that have all these changes in it.
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And so realizing that we didn't have the original and that some places we don't know what the original said, that had quite a profound effect on my faith that these words had been given by God.
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Now, what does that do? Because to my mind, as I read your book and learned more about it, the
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Bible suddenly became more interesting to me in that I felt like that information doesn't denigrate the
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Bible in any way, but brings it to life in a manner. It suddenly becomes a living document. It is changed by whoever it passes through, which suddenly makes it seem more, almost more godly in some respects.
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Well, yeah, that's an interesting point because for me, the Bible takes on new life when you see that the
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Bible is a living thing, that it isn't a dead document that was written 2 ,000 years ago.
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But as scribes copied the text, in a sense they were interpreting the text and putting their interpretations into the text while they did that.
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For me, I found it to be a liberating experience to realize this, in part because I realized that the Bible was not only copied by human scribes, it was written by human authors.
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And these authors all had different points of view, different perspectives, different ideas, and they put all those different views and points of view in the text itself.
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And mostly shaped it during that 300 years between sort of Christ's death and when,
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I guess, Constantine converted and Rome converted and Christianity became sort of the law of the land.
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Right, so the authors of the New Testament were writing mainly in the first century, but then their books were copied by these scribes over those centuries.
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And those are the Gospels. Those are the Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Okay, so there you get the idea, and I've got a connection issue there,
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I have to sort of pull it up to make it fit right. But anyway, there you get the idea of Bart's presentation.
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We don't know, in some places, what was originally written.
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Now, it's funny, when we debated, I basically asked him, where? I asked him, where would you say the manuscripts of the
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New Testament no longer contain the original reading? He came up with one place in 2
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Peter. One place. Whether it says enic or and, or something like that.
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Zero impact upon the teaching of scripture or anything like that. But there you go, that's what you get.
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And so you have this idea of copies of copies of copies of copies. So he frequently presents the idea of how the
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New Testament came to us as like the old Chinese whispers game, where you'd whisper something in somebody's ear and they'd whisper it in the next person.
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By the time it gets around the circle, by the time it gets back, it's humorously changed and altered and stuff like that. So this is the kind of, and misquoting
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Jesus was a New York Times bestseller. Most of his popular -level books have been New York Times bestsellers.
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And honestly, when you look at everything he's addressed, he has spent his adult life explaining away his apostasy.
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Because he is an apostate. He made a profession of faith. He no longer professes to believe what is found in scripture.
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And so there's a technical term for that, and it's called apostasy. And so when you look at his popular -level books, they are laying out the case to not be a
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Christian by a person who formally claimed to have been one. And you will find his influence all over the place.
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You really, really will. What's interesting is I did a debate with a Muslim at Duke University a number of years ago.
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And he had four books on his table. Three of the four were by Bart Ehrman.
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And so his influence is not just in that context. It's everyone who would have reason to question the
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New Testament. This next little clip I want to play for you real fast is from my first debate with a, well, it's my first Muslim debate.
35:41
And it was not my first debate with a Muslim. So in 1999,
35:46
I debated Hamza Abdel -Malik on the deity of Christ, but I wasn't debating the issue of Islam.
35:53
The first debate where Islam was the primary focus was at Biola University in 2006 with Shabbir Ali.
36:03
And so I want you to ask yourself as you listen to this, if you were in my shoes, how would you respond to the things that Shabbir said?
36:17
Because this is the kind of stuff you're gonna be running into in the forms of skepticism that we have today.
36:24
But listen to a well -read Muslim approaching this subject as well.
36:33
Do we not have it? It's running.
37:00
You gotta turn it up way high. Whatever of the
37:05
Bible agrees with the Quran, that obviously is inspired. What is contradictory? Is there any way that you can give to us this evening to explain to us how we can determine what is still inspired in the
37:19
New Testament and what is not? Well, I believe that Muslims have a simple answer to this in saying that whatever is in the
37:26
Quran, that would be a judge of whatever is there in the Bible. So whatever of the
37:32
Bible agrees with the Quran, that obviously is inspired. What is contradictory is obviously not from God.
37:39
And that which is neutral and neither in agreement nor in disagreement may be treated with some bit of silence.
37:47
Usually the classical scholars have recommended silence, but I believe that Muslims who are quite familiar with the
37:53
Gospels and familiar with the development of the text over time can make some judgments, though these judgments will be tentative.
38:02
So everything about the cross, resurrection, atonement, deity of Christ, Jesus is the son of God, the
38:08
Holy Spirit is a divine person, not an angel, Gabriel. All of that stuff is uninspired and a corruption of the original intention of the
38:16
New Testament in light of the Quran. A Muslim would say that the Quranic revelation is here now as a pristine word of God.
38:23
That teaches us that there is only one God, that Jesus is his Messiah, but nevertheless a servant and messenger of the one true
38:30
God. And so anything that is contrary to that, something that teaches, for example, that human responsibility as described in the
38:37
Quran is to be somehow evaded, that would be contrary and would be thought to be a later development.
38:45
Now, of course, that could be studied from another angle. One can look at the history and development of Christian teaching over time.
38:50
One can look at the Gospels even without Islamic presuppositions. And it seems to me that many biblical scholars are coming to conclusions which are very close to the main conclusions which
39:02
Muslims insist on, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet like the prophets of the
39:07
Old Testament. He preached the belief in God, similar to the belief that was known from the
39:15
Jewish prophets since he himself was Jewish, he lived in a Jewish milieu. You mean people like the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Cross and Marcus Borg.
39:22
It doesn't have to be them. The scholars are so numerous, it'll be hard for us to list them and to name them now.
39:28
So is there any New Testament book that Mark, for example, which you've referred to many times,
39:36
Mark clearly identifies Jesus as the son of God, puts words in his mouth that you would never be able to accept as a Muslim, isn't that correct?
39:41
Well, it is clear that even Mark must have suffered from a similar sort of phenomenon that we described in the case of Matthew and John Bowden has made specifically that point in his book,
39:53
Jesus, The Unanswered Questions. If we look at Mark chapter one, verse one, which in many Bibles begin the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God, it is noted in the
40:01
NIV, for example, that the title, the son of God in this particular verse is not found in some of the most ancient and reliable manuscripts.
40:10
So I'm not saying that the gospel according to Mark does not present Jesus as the son of God, but we have to be aware of scribal changes that have affected the gospel according to Mark in places as well.
40:20
And in fact, we are working with the gospel according to Mark only as it has come down to us. Knowing the history of scribal changes, we would not be out of our grounds to wonder if in fact we do really have the original
40:31
Markan gospel. Would you admit that you do not have any hard manuscript evidence from the first or second centuries that gives to us a
40:40
New Testament that looks like a Muslim would expect it to look like? We do not have such a document. We do not have such a document.
40:48
That's a good admission, I think, on Shabir's part. The point there being that from the
40:53
Muslim perspective, Mark, as Mark exists today, does not present a
41:00
Muslim Jesus. And so what I was pressing on was to admit that, and we don't have any evidence that Mark was ever anything other than that.
41:12
He as a Muslim is reading the New Testament from the perspective of the
41:18
Quran, which comes 600 years later. That's one of the big problems in dealing with Islam is they have this lens that comes 600 years later, they read the
41:28
New Testament through. But did you hear he mentioned Mark 1 .1? Keep that in mind because just,
41:36
I don't know, four months ago, that came out, maybe five months ago now, which is the new
41:41
ECM volume on Mark, which has applied the CBGM analysis to Mark 1 .1.
41:50
And we'll talk about that when we get to that. So scholars spin the evidence, particularly in media appearances.
41:57
No one in the media would ever spin anything, no. They emphasize that all we have are copies and copies and copies from hundreds of years after the originals, and so that's what you're gonna be told.
42:09
Now, those of you who have seen this before, please, please, show some self -control.
42:17
It's amazing how many people will just immediately blurt out the answer to this question.
42:25
But I do want you to think. The New Testament, 27 books, approximately 138 ,000 words.
42:39
Handwritten and hand -copied for more than 1 ,500 years, because yes,
42:45
I know, middle of the 15th century, 1453, Gutenberg prints the
42:51
Latin Vulgate, first printed edition in the West. The Chinese beat us to printing by a long shot, but in the
42:58
West. And you would think, okay, there will be no more handwritten manuscripts after that.
43:05
No. Technology today may explode and take over in a matter of months, but that was not the case back then.
43:15
Most people thought this newfangled thing called a printing press was just a passing fad.
43:22
And besides that, it takes time for that technology to be created and to be passed around and people learn how to do it.
43:29
And of course, printing is not an infallible mechanism of reproduction either.
43:35
Have you ever found a mistake in a printed book? Yeah, even to this day. And back then, you had to literally take each letter and put it into a block to then print that page over and over again.
43:48
And you could make big mistakes. You all know about the adulterer's Bible? Yeah, the adulterer's
43:55
Bible was a, there was a, the King of England had his own printer. And so when the
44:01
King James was translated, he got to, he didn't have to have competition. He was the
44:07
King's printer. And so there wasn't a concept of copyright back then, but since the
44:14
King had paid for the translation, only that guy got to print the King James version of the Bible.
44:20
And so he printed an edition and someone's reading it and found out that when he had typeset one of the two sets of the 10
44:30
Commandments, he had forgotten the word not. And thou shalt not commit adultery.
44:39
And so it literally said, thou shalt commit adultery. And if you wanna know what happened to people as a result of that back then, the
44:49
King had him chucked in the dungeon for having done that. So the point is, it's not that, now it's funny because some people would go, well, then we're not really sure what that actually said.
45:01
No, we know what it said. Just because a 17th century printing messes it up in a different language, does that mean there's any question about what it originally said?
45:13
Though there are some people that honestly would make that kind of an argument. So when you think of how many words there are, how long it was copied by hand.
45:24
And then you ask, what is a variant? Well, we just saw a variant. John 5, 4 is a variant of an entire verse.
45:31
That's pretty big. The vast majority of variants in the New Testament are word order, whether a word is there or not there, whether the
45:39
Greek article is there. And the large majority of them have something to do with what's called the movable new.
45:47
Do you have this turned down? Because I can go ahead and pull it out. So we don't have to worry about it that way.
45:54
Because I think I've only got one more and I will plug it in and we'll. Okay, good,
45:59
I didn't wanna make that terrible, horrible noise again. The movable new, I remember when
46:05
I took Greek, my first year, we had Medskines was his name.
46:12
Isn't it funny how I can walk into a Target today and I can't remember what in the world
46:18
I was supposed to pick up. Literally, I stood in the Target down here yesterday and I was leaning on my cart and I was just going, okay, all right,
46:29
I know there's something else. And you're sitting there going through the, I'm looking through my
46:34
RV in my mind going, was it in the refrigerator or was it in the bathroom? And I don't know, but I can remember
46:41
Medskine's name from 1983 or four or somewhere around there.
46:49
Oh, yep, I can. And I can remember what Medskine's difficulty in life was, the movable new.
46:57
Yes, the movable new. You know what the movable new is. You are supposed to, now you guys in Missouri are right on the line, you're not really down into the south yet, but you're right on that line.
47:08
And so you're supposed to say an apple, not a apple.
47:16
Because you're not supposed to have two vowels running into each other and you put something in there, it's a pronunciation thing, but it's proper speaking, an apple, any time you've got the indefinite with a word that begins with a vowel.
47:34
And so you're just supposed to stick it in there. Well, the Greek had the exact same thing, for the exact same purpose.
47:40
But a lot of scribes just didn't get it, just like Medskine's. If Med had been a medieval scribe, he would have messed up in copying his
47:49
Greek because he didn't get the movable new either. Now, it doesn't change any meaning at all.
47:58
If you didn't read Greek, you wouldn't even notice it. And translation does not make a lick of difference, but there were a lot of textual variants.
48:07
There were a lot of variants where some manuscripts had it and some didn't, and it was just simply scribes that didn't quite understand how the whole thing worked.
48:15
So if you've got 138 ,000 some odd words, you've got 5 ,800 plus manuscripts, and 1 ,700 years of handwritten transmission, how many variants would you expect?
48:34
Now, it's funny, I will ask audiences, and even after going through all that,
48:39
I'll have people say, six. Then somebody will go, dozen, ooh, doubled it, ooh.
48:51
It's obviously a bigger number than that when you think about it. But most people are a little hesitant to commit themselves.
49:04
Now, Dean, you've heard this presentation over and over and over again. So why don't you let us know, about how many variants are there?
49:14
Six. I knew I could trust him. I knew
49:20
I could trust Dean to come through for me. I really, really did. You're so consistent.
49:26
For 20 some odd years, you've been a complete pain in the tush so it's great, I love it. Yeah, okay, so about 400 ,000.
49:39
About 400 ,000. And when people hear that, it could be half a million.
49:46
Which sounds bigger, 400 ,000 or half a million? I'm not really sure. These days, when we're spending trillions of dollars we don't have, does it really matter?
49:54
I mean, honestly, these numbers are now so big we can't really figure them out.
50:00
So 138 ,213 words in the New Testament, if you wanna know that exactly.
50:07
Now, you might go, how do you know that? Well, I use Accordance Bible Software, best
50:13
Bible software out there in my opinion and it's real easy to ask Accordance how many words are in this document and if you use the, and that's the
50:21
All in 28th edition of the Greek New Testament, says 138 ,213 words. So you'll be told if you go to your local university, local college, that's nearly three variants per word.
50:34
And so the idea is that three options for every word in the
50:41
New Testament, that is not even close to being true. But that's how it's presented.
50:47
And if you're talking to somebody at Starbucks that took a class on religion at the local college, who are they gonna trust, their professor or you?
51:00
You're just a mind -numbed cultist, right? But that's what they've been told.
51:05
It's not even close to true, but that's what they've been told. So no one can have any confidence that the text they read today accurately reflects what was originally written.
51:14
That is the assertion that is being made. In fact, here graphically, you can see here's the number of words in the
51:23
New Testament and here's the number of variants in the New Testament. Wow, that looks like a really corrupt document to me.
51:31
But you need to know what they don't tell you. 99 % of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text at all.
51:39
Variations in spelling and word order make up the vast bulk of the variations. It's immovable new. If you did not know the original language, you would not even be able to explain to someone how the variant is relevant, because it isn't to the transmission of the meaning of the text at all.
51:55
So 1 % of 400 ,000 is 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants.
52:00
In other words, that actually do impact the translation of the meaning of the text. Out of 138 ,213 words is 2 .9%,
52:08
or one meaningful variant every three pages. Not three options for every word, but one meaningful variant every three pages.
52:20
But only half of these are viable. What does viable mean? Well, here's another example.
52:29
If this stuff really just floats your boat and fascinates you, or you just realize, you know, so much weird stuff's going on in the world, and when
52:39
I'm thinking about this, I'm not thinking about weird stuff in the world, so I'd like to continue thinking about this. So I did a debate during the lockdown period with a fellow
52:49
Reformed Baptist pastor, actually, who is an advocate of what's called the Texas Receptus. We'll talk about that a little bit later on.
52:56
And we debated Ephesians 3 .9, Ephesians 3 .9.
53:03
In all of the manuscripts for the first 1 ,200 years of history,
53:10
Ephesians 3 .9 refers to the administration of the mystery, the administration of the mystery.
53:18
And yet, if you've memorized that in the King James version, you know it says the fellowship of the mystery. And we have found the manuscript that this came from.
53:32
Remember, the King James is based on something called the Texas Receptus. And the Texas Receptus comes from the work of a man by the name of Desiderius Erasmus, who you may have heard of before.
53:43
Erasmus was a Dutch humanist scholar. Humanist back then did not mean what it means today. Erasmus was one of the most irascible men that I've ever run into.
53:55
He could write sarcasm like nobody's business. You may have heard of him, not because of his textual critical work, but because he engaged in the first written debate of the
54:06
Reformation. He was a Roman Catholic priest. Not a very good one, but he was a Roman Catholic priest.
54:12
And you may know that the first written debate of the Reformation was between himself and Martin Luther on the freedom or bondage of the will.
54:21
And Luther wrote his book on the bondage of the will in response to Erasmus, who taught on the freedom of the will.
54:31
And so Erasmus, when he did his first edition of the
54:37
Greek New Testament, he was primarily focused upon the fact that what he was producing, give you a little history here, was a diglot.
54:44
So it had the Latin on one page and the Greek on the facing page. No one had yet printed the
54:50
Greek New Testament. This is 1516. And he moved to Basel, Switzerland because he thought the university there would have lots of manuscripts.
54:59
They didn't. He had about half a dozen manuscripts. We know which manuscripts he had.
55:07
And the best manuscripts he had, he didn't trust. The oldest manuscripts, he didn't trust.
55:14
And so he produced a text that pretty much represented the state of the text around 1200
55:20
AD. Anyways, the point is, one of his manuscripts that contained the book of Ephesians, that scribe had messed up at Ephesians 3.
55:35
And so he had put, instead of administration, he had put fellowship.
55:43
And so that's all Erasmus had. That's what Erasmus went with. And that's what we have in the
55:49
King James Version of the Bible. Because of that. You say, but didn't other people edit these things? They did, but they didn't have any more manuscripts than Erasmus did.
55:59
In fact, let me tell you a story. It reminded me to get back to defining viable.
56:06
The reading there in Ephesians 3 .9 in the TR is not viable. When all you have is one manuscript, 1200 years down the road, no early translations.
56:17
The Latin doesn't have it. The Ethiopic doesn't have it. The Boheric doesn't have it. The Sahidic doesn't have it.
56:23
No one, no early church father ever quoted it that way. It's just one manuscript, 1200 years down the road.
56:29
That's not a viable reading. That's just a guy who didn't get his coffee that morning, or his doughnuts, for that matter.
56:36
And so he made a mistake. And so it's not a viable reading. So the point here is only about half of those 4 ,000s are viable.
56:44
So it's about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable, meaningful New Testament textual variants.
56:50
That's a very, very different picture than 400 ,003 variants for every word.
56:56
Very, very different picture. But the story I was gonna tell you is
57:01
Erasmus had a printer by the name of John Froben.
57:11
And Froben knew that Cardinal Jimenez had already finished work on, and the printing had already been done on, a six -volume work called the
57:25
Complutensian Polyglot, which had the Greek, and it had the Latin, and I think it had some other languages along the way.
57:31
Six volumes. Six volumes. But back then, and we may be heading back to these days in our own days, back then you didn't print anything without getting the approval of the church first.
57:47
That could get you tied to a stake and turned into a crispy critter. And so what happens is, they're waiting for papal approval.
58:03
So all those wonderfully bound six volumes are sittin' in a warehouse waiting for the red tape to be cleared at the
58:13
Vatican. And so Froben knows they've got a chance here.
58:19
They're not doin' six volumes. They're gonna do a single, easily carried volume that will have the
58:26
Greek on one side, and then all Erasmus was really concerned about was he was doing the
58:31
Latin translation. He was doing something other than the Latin Vulgate. Now you gotta realize something. The Latin Vulgate had been translated by Jerome 1 ,100 years earlier.
58:43
So Erasmus was taking a huge risk to mess with anything in the
58:50
Vulgate. It's like talkin' to King James Only as when you change to King James.
58:56
It's like, you're changing the word of God, and that's exactly what Erasmus would be charged with when he rendered things in Latin differently.
59:05
The Greek was a secondary thought to him. He was not overly concerned about it.
59:12
And so he comes to the Book of Revelation. Here's the problem. Erasmus really didn't think much of the Book of Revelation. He, I think in his more honest moments, he would've said,
59:20
I don't think that belongs in the New Testament. It's just too weird.
59:26
Seven -headed monsters, 10 -headed monsters, seven eyes. And he just did not have much in the way of respect for the
59:35
Book of Revelation, probably because he had no earthy idea what its historical context actually was. So he looks around, and guess which book?
59:46
You're gonna guess this pretty easy. Guess which book in the New Testament has the fewest surviving manuscripts from the ancient world?
59:56
Revelation. You may go, why? Because it struggled for inclusion in the canon.
01:00:02
There were many places where it was not accepted in the canon for quite some time. And so we have the fewest manuscripts of Revelation in any other book of the
01:00:11
New Testament. And Erasmus is looking around, he can't find any.
01:00:16
He cannot find anything to give him the Greek text of Revelation to put it into his book.
01:00:24
And so finally, he has a friend by the name of Johannes Reuchlin. Can you tell
01:00:31
I teach church history? Reuchlin was the brave man who risked his life to learn to read
01:00:43
Hebrew. You say, why would risk your life to learn, why would that be risking your life?
01:00:51
Think about the context. The Jews are heretics. This is a period of time when
01:00:56
Jews are being persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church. I mean, only a few hundred years earlier during the plague.
01:01:05
You know that in Switzerland, it was very common to blame the Jews for spreading the plague.
01:01:13
And so in Switzerland, they actually rounded up all the Jews in one city, put them out on an island in a building and burned them all to death to try to get rid of the plague.
01:01:26
Didn't have any impact, obviously, but that's the point. And so Reuchlin wanted to learn
01:01:33
Hebrew because he knew that that was the original language of the Old Testament. And so he had to convince a rabbi, and can you imagine how that was?
01:01:45
He goes to a rabbi, I wanna learn Hebrew. Sure you do. Right, uh -huh.
01:01:53
But he does, he learns Hebrew, and he's the first one to put together a
01:01:59
Hebrew lexicon, a Hebrew dictionary. And so everybody today who reads
01:02:06
Hebrew, I've taught Hebrew, I'm not nearly as good as Greek when I taught that, but you have that ability because that guy risked his life and the
01:02:15
Jewish rabbi risked his life. That's how things were at this time. And so Erasmus knows
01:02:24
Reuchlin, and he either corresponds with him, I forget exactly how he got it, but Reuchlin said, well,
01:02:30
I have a commentary on Revelation and it has the Greek text in it, it's interspersed in the commentary, but it's there, but it's in Latin.
01:02:40
But the Greek is there, but then the commentary is in Latin. So Erasmus has to borrow
01:02:46
Reuchlin's manuscript, this commentary, and then he has to extract the
01:02:51
Greek out from this commentary. Makes all sorts of errors in the way.
01:03:02
There are all sorts of weird readings because of this. And then he gets to the last chapter and the last pages have fallen off the manuscript.
01:03:13
He doesn't have the last six verses, even in the commentary.
01:03:19
And John Froben's going, come on, come on, come on. Erasmus described his first edition as precipitated rather than edited.
01:03:30
And so you know what he did? Erasmus is like, again, he doesn't have a whole lot of respect for Revelation, he's already spent more time on it than he really wanted to.
01:03:38
And so he translates from his own Latin version backwards into Greek for the last six verses of the book of Revelation.
01:03:52
And the process produces some readings that have never, ever, ever been seen in a
01:03:59
Greek manuscript anywhere. And your King James and your new King James to this day have all those readings.
01:04:07
They've never been fixed. They're still in there. The TR still has them.
01:04:14
Now for years, I would tell that story and in the back of my mind
01:04:19
I'd go, why didn't they ever fix it? That was the first edition.
01:04:24
Erasmus did five editions. That was 1516, he dies in 1535.
01:04:30
The last edition comes out that same year. So he had plenty of time to fix it. Well, first of all, he didn't really care.
01:04:39
The Greek of Revelation really did not mean that much to him. He doesn't think the book of Revelation is even canonical, really.
01:04:47
But then I found out only a couple years ago, and in fact, I didn't know this the last time
01:04:53
I presented this, so even Ken and Dean are gonna learn something new this morning.
01:04:59
You ready? Putting those two together is dangerous. I personally think there needs to be a hall monitor over there.
01:05:07
You guys keeping an eye on this, you guys back there? Because I trust you guys. Okay, good, because, yeah, it's, they might be plotting things and they might have firecrackers over there.
01:05:18
There's all sorts of things. I don't even really know. But I did not know this the last time we presented this, so you're gonna learn something new.
01:05:25
I had thought about and thought about, I was reading this obscure book on conjectural emendation, and I found out that the
01:05:34
Greek of Revelation that Erasmus did want to try to fix up Revelation.
01:05:42
He did. And the year after his Greek New Testament came out, actually two years after his
01:05:49
Greek New Testament came out, someone else also put out their edition of the
01:05:55
Greek New Testament. It wasn't the Competentian Polyglot. It was another group. And so when his second edition went to print,
01:06:06
Erasmus told the printer, go get their text and follow their text in Revelation.
01:06:12
Get rid of what I had in my first edition, use theirs. Because he figured they had to have had at least a manuscript to borrow from or something, but he didn't.
01:06:22
And so he says, use theirs. And so they did. Only one problem.
01:06:28
They had used Erasmus. They had used
01:06:33
Erasmus. They couldn't find a manuscript either. So it never got fixed. All the way through Beza at the end of the century.
01:06:43
Didn't get fixed. It's still in the tiara to this day. Still in the tiara to this day. And the amazing thing is, and this concerns me,
01:06:50
I'll be honest with you, is I have Reformed Baptist brethren who defend that as being the preserved
01:06:57
Word of God, including the changes, where no manuscript in the world reads as the tiara, but they'll defend it.
01:07:09
And I find that quite troubling. All right, so back to, so here now is the number of words in New Testament, and now you can see the number of meaningful variants in comparison.
01:07:21
That is the fair representation. And you could force
01:07:28
Bart Ehrman to admit this, but his books present the other one.
01:07:34
And I'll let you decide and God decide why that would be the case.
01:07:40
So simple fact, the more manuscripts you have for a particular work, the more textual variants you will have, right?
01:07:49
If you only have one manuscript of an obscure work of Plato, how many textual variants will you have?
01:07:58
None, because you only have one manuscript. You got nothing to compare it with. But which would you rather have?
01:08:05
100 manuscripts from a bunch of different places, or just one manuscript?
01:08:11
Which is gonna give you the better opportunity of knowing, the better confidence that you have the original readings?
01:08:17
If you only have one, you've gotta trust that that one scribe got it all right, that he wasn't messing around.
01:08:25
Remember last night I told you about Codex D? Beze Canterbrigensis, the guy who was sort of editing rather than copying, and he inserted all sorts of weird stuff like the number of steps that Peter went down after the angel freed him from jail and stuff like that.
01:08:37
What if that was all we had? What if we didn't have any other manuscripts to compare that with? We wouldn't know that that was just a weird story he stuck in there.
01:08:47
So what you want is the most manuscripts you can possibly have from as wide a variety of sources as you can possibly have.
01:08:57
And that's what you have with the New Testament. Because of the persecutions of the early church, the early church had to be copying manuscripts all the time.
01:09:06
The Romans were destroying them, you had to replace them, and they're taking the message out into the whole world, which means they have to make copy after copy after copy after copy, because you send somebody out, you've had a traveling business person that's come into your fellowship and has been converted to Christ, and he's gonna be heading off into Gaul, and he's gonna be the first person to bring the message out that far.
01:09:31
Well, he needs to have the scriptures. And so you're making copies, and you're sending them out. And so there's copying and copying and copying going on all over the place, and that is a really, really, really, really good thing.
01:09:43
That's called the free transmission of the text. You didn't have just one place, and okay, you've gotta have the approved copy from us, and it's gotta have all the things signed and everything else.
01:09:55
No, when we start looking at the papyri, you're gonna see some people made copies, and their handwriting wasn't really the best in the world.
01:10:04
But that was okay, the point was you get the message out. And so that's the free transmission of the text versus a controlled transmission where you have only one group can produce manuscripts, and they keep the control of them, and no one else can make copies and stuff like that.
01:10:22
And once you have that control, then you have to trust the people in control aren't messing with anything because you got no way of knowing.
01:10:32
You can't hold them, you got nothing to compare them with. And so the more manuscripts for a particular work, the more textual variance you will have.
01:10:41
People who study other works, other than Homer, Homer has a lot of manuscripts, not as many as the New Testament, not nearly as many.
01:10:47
But outside of Homer, Socrates and Plato and all the rest of the ancient
01:10:53
Greek works, the people who study those things, they look at us that work on the New Testament and go, what are you people complaining about?
01:11:00
You've got it, easy. We'd love to have the level of manuscript evidence that you guys have.
01:11:08
But of course, we're talking about something we believe to be the inspired word of God, so there's a little bit higher standard than you would necessarily have.
01:11:18
There are more than 5 ,800 catalog manuscripts in the New Testament. Now, why can't I give you an exact number? Because it keeps changing. Why does it keep changing?
01:11:26
Primarily because of what's happening down at the CSNTM, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts down in Dallas. Dan Wallace and his guys run around the world and they go into libraries and they take high -quality, high -resolution digital pictures of all these manuscripts that these libraries have.
01:11:47
Vitally important. We lost manuscripts during the Iraq War that will never be found again.
01:11:53
They were bombed out of existence, hadn't been photographed yet. And so, a fire in a museum, whatever it might be, what
01:12:01
CSNTM is doing is very, very important. And, but what will happen is they'll go into a library and the library says, this is a manuscript of the
01:12:14
New Testament and we've dated it around so -and -so. And so, they start working on it and photographing it.
01:12:20
All of a sudden, they realize it's not one manuscript, it's two. It's two different manuscripts from two different authors that have been put together some time in the past.
01:12:28
And so, now that has to be divided out and now you know, if you had 5 ,800, now you got 5 ,801. Or they will find out that, hey, wait a minute, this looks really familiar.
01:12:39
And they'll discover that, hey, this manuscript here is the second half of a manuscript in another library we've already been at, we already took pictures of it.
01:12:46
So now, the number goes down one because it's actually just one manuscript rather than it had been listed as two. So the number keeps changing.
01:12:53
It's not that they're necessarily finding all sorts of manuscripts right now. That was last century and the century before.
01:13:01
But the number does keep changing. The average which is about 350 pages long. That's over two million pages of text, grand total, handwritten.
01:13:09
That's a lot of material right there, no question about it. So, 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful and viable variants, over two million pages of hand -copied text spanning approximately 1 ,500 years prior to the invention of printing and even afterwards is an amazingly small percentage of the text reflecting an amazingly accurate history of transmission.
01:13:31
One might say it is downright miraculous. So the real numbers represent an incredibly accurately transmitted text over against what you will hear.
01:13:44
And the person that you're talking to in our society today has probably heard the hyper -skeptical twisted stuff and not the truth.
01:13:55
That's just what we have to deal with. That's the reality around us. So let me give you some examples.
01:14:01
A number of years ago, I asked my Logos, I have Logos Bible software, I have Accordance Bible software,
01:14:07
I've got, I used to have PC Study Bible, I don't have that anymore, but Olive Tree on my iPhone and stuff like that.
01:14:14
There's some great, great, great stuff out there. A number of my books are in Logos. Accordance just added my main books and they're gonna be getting the rest of them in Accordance as well.
01:14:25
So amazing resources available to us. Just no generation before ours has ever had access to the depth and range of information we have.
01:14:35
To whom much is given, much is required. To whom much is given, much is required. So at the very time you have the most virulent attacks upon the text of the
01:14:46
New Testament, we have the most information we've ever had. So if we want to be able to respond, we can. We can.
01:14:53
The information is there. But years ago, I asked Logos to compare the two most different printed editions of the
01:15:05
Greek New Testament, and to mark the differences in green. And so here is
01:15:12
Ephesians 1, 1 through 14. You can see one there, one there, one there, there, there, there, and believe it or not, there's one right there.
01:15:20
It's really hard to see since it's only one letter. What you see here visually is the vast majority of the text.
01:15:30
There's absolutely no question whatsoever what was originally written.
01:15:36
There's no evidence in the manuscript tradition of wholesale editing, cutting stuff out, inserting stuff in, all the rest of that kind of stuff.
01:15:44
And vast majority of these, if you read the language, you know are, do not impact the meaning.
01:15:52
And so en Christo, if you know Greek, you know that Christo is locative, instrumental, dative.
01:15:59
Dative if you learn the five case, but. And so en is a clarifying word, but it's not necessary to be there.
01:16:08
It clarifies exactly what the intention of the writer is, but you could tell by the form, the grammatical form of the word.
01:16:14
There is, the most meaningful one is actually that little one right down there.
01:16:20
It's ha or has. In other words, it's the neuter or the masculine relative pronoun.
01:16:27
And it's in reference to the Holy Spirit. And so if you're familiar with Greek, pneuma is a neuter noun.
01:16:35
Spirit is neuter. But there are a number of places where a masculine's used to emphasize the personhood of the
01:16:41
Spirit. And so this one has ha, which matches grammatically with pneuma, which would be perfectly fine.
01:16:47
It's not denying that the Spirit's a person. But other manuscripts later on had has, which would emphasize the personality of the
01:16:55
Spirit. So there's Ephesians 1, 1 through 14. Revelation, a little bit different.
01:17:02
Like I said, fewest manuscripts and some real issues.
01:17:08
But again, the vast majority of the text, no questions to be found as to the vast majority of the text.
01:17:15
A lot of these are stylistic variations. The Gospels were quoted and copied many, many times.
01:17:24
So here's Mark. And by the way, here's Mark 1, 1. This is the one Shabir was talking about. And at the end of the line, you have hu -yu -the -yu,
01:17:31
Son of God. That is a textual variant. We'll talk more about it later on. Which book of the
01:17:38
New Testament do you think would have the fewest variance? Hmm.
01:17:45
Hmm. Hebrews. Hebrews. Fewest as in proportionally.
01:17:53
Hebrews. Notice, here's Hebrews 6, 8 through 20. We've got one here, one there, and one there.
01:17:58
That's it. I mean, absolutely no question whatsoever about the text.
01:18:05
You might go, well, why would Hebrews be that way? I can only theorize, but especially after the days of Origen.
01:18:16
Origen damaged a lot of stuff. And he was a brilliant, brilliant guy, but he damaged a lot of stuff.
01:18:24
And his introduction of allegorical interpretation for the Old Testament really ended up closing the
01:18:34
Old Testament off to the knowledge of the Christian people. And the book of Hebrews is gonna get really, really difficult to understand if you don't know its
01:18:43
Old Testament background. And so, just historically, sadly, it just seems to me that the book has been ignored by many, many people.
01:18:53
I think, I don't know of any other book that is more explicit and clear in its discussion of the purpose and intention of the sacrifice of Christ in the book of Hebrews.
01:19:04
But if you don't know Leviticus, and how many evangelical Christians really know
01:19:09
Leviticus? If you don't know Leviticus, there's a bunch of stuff that just goes right on by you.
01:19:15
Because the writer of the Hebrews assumes you got this stuff down. And so, so there you go.
01:19:24
Scribal errors, let's talk about scribal errors. Even the 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 number needs to be understood.
01:19:31
Even when the variant does impact the reading in the large majority of instances, the careful student of text can see which reading is original.
01:19:40
Many of these errors involve common scribal errors, mistakes we continue to make this very day when copying from one text to another.
01:19:47
You can tell how old my presentation is because most people don't copy from one text to another anymore.
01:19:53
It's cut and paste. We talked about that last night. Here is an important example from the history of the
01:19:59
New Testament itself. You might wanna look at your own Bible translation, preferred Bible translation, to see how it handles this.
01:20:07
1 John 3, 1. I seem to remember a Maranatha song based on this many, many years ago.
01:20:14
Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not.
01:20:22
That's the King James. New American Standard. See how great a love the
01:20:28
Father has bestowed on us that we would be called children of God, and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us because it did not know him.
01:20:37
Now for the few men in the audience who are colorblind, and there always are. There may be some men in this audience that don't see that this is in red, and such we are.
01:20:51
That is in the NASB, but it's not in the King James Version. Now, this is unusual.
01:20:59
The King James, and then the Texas Receptus from which it is translated, is more, is
01:21:05
I think almost 2 % longer than the NASB, and hence the
01:21:13
Nessie Island, and the UBS Greek texts. So there is an expansion.
01:21:19
That's mainly due to titles and names. We'll look at that a little bit later on. Well, actually
01:21:24
I'm not sure if I include that in this, but I could pull it up from another one of my presentations. So I have a chart that shows, we're actually supposed to be wrapping up in just a few minutes, aren't we,
01:21:41
Ken? We're supposed to be done at 11 .30 today? Okay, so I'll just stick with it here. I'll see if I can remember to pull that up a little bit later on.
01:21:49
It's unusual for the NASB to have something that the King James doesn't. It's normally the other way around.
01:21:55
But in this case, the affirmation that we are the children of God is not found in the
01:22:03
King James Version of the Bible. Now, if I were a King James only -ist, if you've ever listened to King James only preaching, they are very big on, if there's a difference in the
01:22:15
King James, it's because those modern translators don't believe this. So if we turned it around, we'd be saying it's because those nasty
01:22:22
Anglican translators of King James didn't really believe in adoption of sons of God and all the rest of that stuff. Has nothing to do with any of that.
01:22:28
Nothing to do with any of that. The underlying Greek texts are different. Why? This is a glowing example of what's called homoeteluton.
01:22:38
Now, as you're going to lunch this afternoon, if you're going to Applebee's or Chili's or whatever, why don't you start telling your waitress about homoeteluton?
01:22:52
Just show, just see how impressed he or she is at your deep knowledge of textual critical sources, and you'll probably never get your food.
01:23:02
But anyway, homoeteluton, similar endings, similar endings.
01:23:09
See, most Latin phrases are really rather simple. It just makes you sound really smart. Same thing in medicine,
01:23:15
I'm afraid. Half the really fancy sounding stuff in medicine is either a
01:23:21
Greek or a Latin phrase that just simply means squiggly part. That's pretty much how they get away with it, which is also how they sign their signatures too.
01:23:31
But anyway, think how many times you have been copying a word and this is again back in us old folks remember this.
01:23:39
Think how many times you've been copying a word ending with such combinations as ing, T -I -O -N -E -S.
01:23:46
And when looking back at what you were copying have mistakenly started with a different word that had the same ending. So even when
01:23:53
I was using my IBM Selectric, you type the word education, T -I -O -N, your eye goes back to what you're copying.
01:24:02
And you find T -I -O -N, you continue on. The problem is you just found a T -I -O -N in the line below where you had just finished.
01:24:11
And it still made sense as you're copying and you continue on and it's not until you proofread it that you realize you've skipped an entire line because of homo eteluton.
01:24:22
It's very common for our eyes to do that kind of thing to us. So that happened in the early scribes.
01:24:30
Here is 1 John 3 .1. Now this is what a Greek New Testament looks like today.
01:24:36
So when I pass around this edition of the Greek New Testament later on, you will see that this is what it looks like.
01:24:43
This is called minuscule text. So you have capitals and smaller letters.
01:24:48
You have spaces between words. You have punctuation. That's what you're taught to read in seminary or Bible college today.
01:24:56
That's not, as I said last night, what they were reading early on. But this is minuscule and right here you have a square and then right here a backslash.
01:25:07
This goes over the textual data right here. So you have henatechnotheoklethelmen in order that we might be called children of God.
01:25:15
Kai Eszman and we are, diatutahakosmos uganoskaihimos. For this reason, the world is not knowing us because it did not know him.
01:25:22
So that little mark there tells you in these manuscripts, this isn't found.
01:25:29
Kai Eszman, that phrase is not found in these manuscripts. KL04969, there's the majority text and in certain manuscripts of the
01:25:37
Latin Vulgate. So these are unsealed texts. These are somewhat early.
01:25:43
But the point is the earliest manuscripts of 1
01:25:48
John do contain this, but the majority do not. That doesn't explain why the error took place.
01:25:56
Here is why the error took place. The unseal or majuscule text of the
01:26:04
New Testament at 1 John 3 ,1 would look like that. So like I said last night, a long line of capital letters, no punctuation and no spaces between words.
01:26:20
Can you imagine copying that for hours on end? Can you imagine copying that without reading glasses, without fluorescent lights, with mosquitoes flying around, with the other scribes around you who have never ever seen deodorant?
01:26:39
They don't have a toothbrush. Just think about all the things that would distract you and I in that situation, okay?
01:26:48
So this is what you're copying. It's a long line of capital letters. I will use color to help you see where the issue is.
01:26:56
So you have Hina, Tekna. Now that's Theyu.
01:27:02
And if you know anything about Greek, you're going, but that's not how you spell Theyu, which is the genitive singular form of God, Theos.
01:27:12
One thing that's fascinating, and I'll expand upon a little bit more because we're supposed to be wrapping up, but I'll just go a couple minutes long.
01:27:18
We actually normally used to go till noon, so you're actually getting out earlier than you normally would, so enjoy it.
01:27:27
We don't know why, but Christians adopted something called the
01:27:33
Nomina Sacra, the sacred names. God, Jesus, Lord, Spirit, sometimes
01:27:41
Son. They would abbreviate down to, normally two, sometimes three letters, and put a line over top.
01:27:51
We don't know why they did it. There's all sorts of theories. If you ever want to get published, come up with a new theory.
01:27:58
We don't know why they did it. But God is one of the Nomina Sacras, and so it has been brought down to two letters,
01:28:05
Theyu. Clay -tho -men, chi -es -men.
01:28:12
Dea -tu -ta -ha -cos -mos does not. So notice, clay -tho -men, we might be called, and we are, both end with what look like in our language,
01:28:22
M -E -N. And so an early scribe, copying this manuscript, writes clay -tho -men.
01:28:30
His eyes go back to what he's copying. He finds, pretty close, it's on the same line.
01:28:37
It's only, what, one, two, three, four, five letters removed. But he starts here, and then continues copying on, and inadvertently takes out the phrase, and we are.
01:28:48
Chi -es -men. Hom -oy -tell -you -ton. Now, if we only had one manuscript of 1
01:28:55
John, and the scribe had made that error, we'd have no way of knowing.
01:29:02
We'd have no way of knowing. But we don't just have one manuscript of 1 John. We have many manuscripts of 1
01:29:09
John that come from different places, and different sources, and so we have a means of correction when a scribe makes an error, even when his manuscript becomes the majority later on down the road.
01:29:24
This is called hom -oy -tell -you -ton. And so, when people say, well, it's because, you know, the translators didn't believe this.
01:29:32
Are there translations where translators have messed around with things? Yes, there are. The New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses is the greatest example of that around.
01:29:40
Are there liberal translations that are bad? Yes, there are. But in the vast majority of instances where you have committee -done translations, it's due to a difference in the text they're translating.
01:29:52
And so, the TR, the manuscripts that Erasmus had, didn't have the reading.
01:29:58
And so, the King James doesn't have it. The New King James doesn't have it. But NASB, ESV, CSB, NIV, so on and so forth, they're translating the
01:30:07
Nessie -Aland text, and it has it, because it has access to much earlier manuscripts than Erasmus had.
01:30:14
And so, we have that there. There might be a note in the bottom of your page.
01:30:20
If you have a New King James, I can guarantee you there's a text note there that says, and you text says, and such we are, and stuff like that.
01:30:27
You've got the information there, but you can see how Homo Etelyatan works, and therefore, hopefully, you will be able to explain that either to your family or to someone at the restaurant, and they will then ask that you be removed.
01:30:44
So, there you go. All right, so we will press on with this in the afternoon session, because this will actually work out really well, timing -wise, because I get to show you the manuscripts this afternoon, and for most people, believe it or not, it's really interesting, and I will also be able to tell you the stories of my seeing these manuscripts, which will help keep me awake, too, because you want the guy talking to be somewhat conscious and engaged as well, and between two and three o 'clock, see,
01:31:20
I can't do caffeine. I had cardiac ablation back in 2011. It didn't take, so I take heart meds, and caffeine is a good way to kill me.
01:31:29
If you want my heart to go 230 beats per minute, and Ken hates these things when they happen, but if you want my heart, because I've done over 255.
01:31:39
Yeah, woo -hoo! If you wanna see my heart go absolutely crazy, there's two great ways to do it.
01:31:45
Slip me caffeine, woo, that'll do it fast. So, I don't do coffee, I don't like that. You know the other fun way to do it?
01:31:51
Make me wear a mask. That's made the past couple years not a whole lot of fun.
01:31:58
Now, you know why I'm not flying? Yeah, I wear a mask, and my heart goes insane.
01:32:04
I'm on prescription meds, and nobody cares. Just die, dude, and we'll call it a
01:32:11
COVID death while we do it. Hasn't made me overly happy, but hey, what can we say?
01:32:18
We will get along. So, that will actually work out really well for the afternoon session to run through that stuff.
01:32:25
And then, I'm not sure if the afternoon session or at the beginning of the session, I will pass these around.
01:32:33
Mark was $300, Axe was about $350. So, I'm gonna be using my laser sight to make sure that I know right where it goes.
01:32:44
And I will fry your eyeballs out if you try to steal it. But I'll send around the CBGM volumes so you get a chance to look at what's going on right now as I explain it to you.
01:32:53
And as I said, if you get a third of what I'm gonna explain about that, you will be ahead of most seminary grads because this stuff is not really being plugged in there quite yet.
01:33:05
It's starting to, thankfully. When I first started talking about this stuff, everybody's going, what? I mean, I could name a major, major, major seminary that I was teaching at, and I was with the
01:33:15
New Testament guys, and I asked them how many knew what CBGM was, and nobody did. Nobody did.
01:33:21
That's changing, but it's still a pretty new technology. And so, we will be covering all that stuff, too.
01:33:29
All right? So, I believe we start up again at two o 'clock. There's lots of cool places to eat around here.
01:33:35
I would love to have lunch with some of you. Unfortunately, I have to go pick something up someplace in 20 minutes, and so I just have to sort of work my way around that.
01:33:47
But hopefully, we'll be able to do something this afternoon after this, before dinner, before the evening session.
01:33:54
And so, we'll go from there. Hope this has been interesting to you, and we will continue in the afternoon.