Reliability of the New Testament-Session 2

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. 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? 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.

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. But we have the afternoon torture session, and then our session this evening. And so normally, what I did about five years ago, and we did the same similar topic, was I sort of elongated and stretched out this particular presentation.

But something has changed. It had already changed, honestly, in certain levels of scholarship. But since that time, I have been introduced to the new developments that are taking place in the area of New Testament textual criticism.

And I have over on the bench over there two of my volumes representing this new material. And so I need to find a place to put that. I hesitate, honestly, to try to do that in that afternoon session, because I don't know if I can survive it.

If you pick up even half of what I'll be presenting, you'll be way ahead of, I would say, the vast majority of seminary graduates today. Because honestly, 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 CBGM, coherence-based genealogical method.

Some people call it computer-based German madness. But once you try to explain it, it does seem to function in that way. But we will, at some point, need to be looking at this, because your New Testament is changing as a result of CBGM.

The problem is, like I said, a couple hundred people that really have a handle on why that's happening, how that actually works. And so I think I had predicted for a while that when that top volume, which is the Gospel of Mark, when that top volume came out, that it would start getting more mainstream attention.

I was wrong. There's too many other things going on. And it really didn't make a splash yet. Maybe when John is done, when you impact the Gospel of John, that might get some attention, finally. But we will attempt to at least give you the outline, without getting too deep into the weeds, on what's going on with that.

Because the bottom volume there is half of Acts. The top is 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.

So once you do all of the New Testament, it certainly wouldn't fit on that bench when it gets done. It will be a huge, huge project. And it will be the most exhaustive Greek New Testament ever put in print.

Or, obviously, you can access all of this online, too. I mean, that's how almost everything is being done. And that, in and of itself, is an amazing move. 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?

The ruffling of pages all across the. Now, you'll hear a couple. There's still a couple of old fogies that like the feel of paper in your hand and stuff like that. 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.

And if there's any sound at all, it's people dropping their iPhone or something along those lines. Oh, my battery's dead, or something like that, because they're tapping over to it. Which also means, very frequently, you may have more than one translation on your screen.

That has changed things a lot.

It's hard for us to realize that, not very long ago, everybody had the same translation. And there wasn't any discussion of translational differences, because everybody had the same translation. It was never quite to the point.

I have spoken on Islam here before. And I've told the story then of a Muslim scholar that I know. And I would listen to his lectures a lot. He speaks not only very good 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 Quran. And you might go, wow, that's amazing. It is, but the Quran is just over half the length of the New Testament. So it's not a huge book.

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. 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.

Your mind isn't working as well. Some of us can't do coffee. And so coffee, no, no. So anyways, he was having a rough time that morning. And so he tried to quote this text from the Quran. It just wouldn't come.

And so finally, he gave up. And he said, well, it's in, then he named the surah. And he said, right-hand page at the top. Right-hand page at the top. 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 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.

I mean, that's unanimity. That's really, that's having everything that you need right there. And I suppose there has been a few times in some places that that might have been something. But most of the time, even when you have different King, if everybody had the King James version of the Bible, there's still different printings.

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. They have different wording in a couple of different places. Not many, but a couple.

And printings galore. 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. And so there are a lot of Christians who come into the church.

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. 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.

And that is one thing, hopefully, we will be able to start dealing with here. Now you'll notice, I'm not going to do John 5, 4, because we burned that one last night. If you weren't here, how many of you were not here last night?

Oh. Oh. OK.

So those who were, so if you were not here last night, and you have not seen this presentation before, and you have an English standard version, anybody who was not here last night has not seen this before and has an ESV, all right, we got our sacrificial victim.

Back here.

I'm sorry? Oh, that's all right. And if you were not here, and you have a King James or a new King James, anyone? See, I knew that was going to be tough. I knew that was going to be tough. But someone with a King James, a new King James up, look up John chapter 5, Gospel of John chapter 5, verse 4.

You already did it? You already have it on your phone? OK, so you already know. 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, I'm just not seeing it.

It's there someplace. You go back over it again, you go back over it again, and then all of a sudden, there's this horrible realization.

I don't have John 5, 4.

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, 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. There it is.

Clear as mud, isn't it? That's all you ever needed to know about John 5, 4. Well, actually, I just realized, did I leave that in here, or did 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, but whether you have what you're actually going to be looking for or not.

You know what? 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. But I'm looking for my laser, and I'm not sure that I have it easily accessible here.

So it's probably in here somewhere. You know how that works. You put your fingers down everywhere. You find your grandkids' spit out gum and all sorts of fun stuff in the process. But I'm not sure where that has gone to.

But the laser would have been nice to point to things. Yes, Lord. All right. Power, there we go. All right, so what you have up here, and I guess I can use, no, I can't use my, nope, don't even have a, if I put it up in my Bible program, my cursor would show up here.

But you'll notice over on the left-hand side, you have John 5 .3. Then there's a dash in John 5 .5. This is what you would look at if you're looking at a Greek New Testament, such as the Nessiolan 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.

And the point of all this is down at the bottom, the very bottom on the right-hand side, you'll see TXT. And then P66 is a funny-looking P. That's the symbol for a papyrus, the early forms of the manuscripts of the New Testament.

You have P66, P75, and then you have the Hebrew letter Aleph, B, C, with an asterisk, D, T, W, so on and so forth. This is a gift to the Christian people, and you go, why? We are wide open in dealing with the history of our text.

We don't hide things. We don't have a priest class that is the only ones that have access to these things. And you may go, well, I'm never really gonna be all that interested in it after this particular weekend.

But the fact is, the information is there. You are not dependent upon someone else. If you want to check the facts out, you can. And so, if you take the time, you can purchase a Nessie-Aland Greek text, and it will tell you that, for example, P66 and P75 are the two earliest manuscripts that we have of the Gospel of John.

They're dated between 175 and 200. We're gonna look at them a little bit later on. 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.

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. Now, when I say manuscript, like P66, P66 does contain the beginning of John all the way through to the last chapter, and then the last chapter's 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, I wish it was the whole thing.

I just look at people and say, what are you gonna look like in 1800 years? They're doing a lot better than you are, or will. Maybe even are. And so, when you say the two earliest, there'll be times when you'll have things missing.

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. It's the only manuscript from the early church that contains those five books.

You know, we're just sort of used to Acts always being the next book in line, right? That was very unusual. Acts was almost never found together with the Gospels. It was found elsewhere. And so, 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.

The point here is that both P66 and P75 do contain John chapter five, and they go from 5 -3 to 5 -5, and there is no 5 -4. And what you need to do in your mind is don't go, oh, they deleted it. No, no, no, that's where we really get into problems.

The verse numbers that we have today, as I mentioned last night, were introduced in late 1550 and first published in 1551. And so, the issue is not deletion, addition. The question that will determine how you handle this topic is what did John write?

Not what did a scribe 300 years later think John should have written. Not what became popular 1 ,000 years after Christ. But what did John write? And it's not just important in John 5 -4. There is a text in Revelation chapter 16, verse five, 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 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. And elsewhere in the book of Revelation, what does it normally say? Who is and who was and who is to come.

Now, the Holy One is Hoseos in Greek and who is to come is Esamonos in Greek. And so, Beza assumed he made what's called a conjectural emendation. And in his printed edition of the Greek New Testament, he changed Hoseos to Esamonos, even though he had no Greek manuscripts that said Esamonos, all of them said Hoseos.

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, okay? No, you are seeing more scholarly information about John 5 -4 on the screen right now than any Christian had up into the 1900s.

Okay, that's how much things have changed. 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. That's important to keep in mind. Well, the level of the group just went down a good bit.

Oh, hey, Dean, how you doing? Sorry, some of you are going, what? How could you be so mean? Well, you don't know Dean. And those who do know that that was just, hey, how you doing, man? That's just how Dean rolls.

Normally, when Dean walks in, I'm figuring the cop cars are not too far behind. They just couldn't catch up before he got here. Hey, the only reason we started doing this stuff 21 stinking years ago was because of the fellow in the orange shirt right there.

So, you can either thank him or this afternoon, blame him, one of the two, for what we're doing. So, anyhow, John chapter five, verse four. So, what we have here then is massive amount of information that's helping us to understand what manuscripts read certain ways.

So, man, I really wish, I'm gonna tear that apart during lunch and see if I can't find it. Because in the third line from the bottom, you'll see a funny looking, what looks like an M. That's a fracture M, capital M.

And that refers to the majority text. So, the majority of manuscripts do contain this reading at John 5, 4. The one in Revelation, when Theodore Beza decided to change Hoseos to Asamenos, guess which printed Greek New Testament the King James translators relied on most?

Theodore Beza's 1598. Now, all the printed Greek New Testaments that came before, all of Erasmus', Stephanos', they all said Hoseos. Like I said last night, I have a 1550 Stephanos and I can show you the text, there it says Hoseos.

Beza changed it to Asamenos, and when you read Revelation 16, five, in the King James and New King James version of the 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. 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, and any other version we're gonna destroy?

You say, ah, that would never happen. It happened to the Quran. It happened to the Quran. And so what happens when you have a powerful organization that can make changes? 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. 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. 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.

In all honesty, how many of you have ever been bothered by having noted one of those notes in your Bible? You sort of went, eh. Honestly, okay?

Most people are.

Most people are like, and most people would rather they weren't there. But you should be very thankful that they are there 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.

And you need to know what that history is. Truth can withstand examination, which is something we should be telling Spotify, Google, YouTube, and everybody else these days. Censorship is the last bastion of cowards.

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. Ooh, ah. I love the green one, yeah.

So, what I was saying is, oh, gee.

Walls, wall melts. 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. So, there's your majority text sign right there for those of you over looking at that one.

Here's P66, P75. So, what this is telling you here is these are the manuscripts, very, very early manuscripts that do not contain 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.

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. 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.

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 Islamic Caliphate, controlling the production of the text.

And that's what happened in Islamic history. A free transmission is what happens in the New Testament. And we're going to look at how that happened with some really cool graphics that I made here in a little bit.

All right, so let's run through this real quick. This is the presentation I've done for years. We're going to get through it as quickly as we can because we've got 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, 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.

That little note at the bottom of your page says some manuscripts. Some manuscripts, what does that mean? Now you're going to 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.

And it makes those notes a little bit more meaningful to you. Of course, naturalistic materialism rules today in academia. Anything that is not presupposed in an uncreated universe, it can be explained solely on the basis of naturalism, rejected a priori.

There cannot be any supernatural idea. So the unbeliever approaches the transmission of the text of the New Testament without any possibility that God could providentially protect that text. It is interesting, though.

We're going to see later on, we're going to see a fellow by the name of Bart Ehrman admit that of all the works of antiquity, the earliest and best attested is what? The New Testament. See, New Testament.

We're not dealing with the Old Testament so much here because, honestly, we wouldn't have time to. And think about how vastly different the New Testament is from, say, the Pentateuch, the works of Moses.

Think about just how much older the Pentateuch is than the New Testament. You're talking 1 ,400 years. Some people date the Pentateuch to 1 ,200. I would take the 1 ,400 date.

That's a huge amount of time.

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. You did not have the Jewish Bible Society making bunches of copies of the works of Moses to distribute amongst the Babylonians.

They did not have that call to function in that way. 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. It's going to all the world. And so it was a covenant people that were required to possess what we call the 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. And so you had all sorts of copying of the text that takes place in the New Testament. Christian claims are relegated to the arena of simple myth.

So listen, I debated Bart Ehrman in 2009. You might find it interesting to watch the debate. 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.

He used the same jokes that he had used in debating Dan Wallace. And he did not read or listen to a single word I had ever said because Dr. Ehrman does not believe that anybody who believes what I believe has anything meaningful to say to him.

Okay, that's just the reality. He is considered the best critic of New Testament Christianity alive today because, in the English-speaking world, because he was a graduate of Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and then he was Bruce Metzger's final PhD student at Princeton.

And so he has made a career. He's a fine scholar. He's almost never wrong about facts. Where he's wrong is his interpretation of the facts. And so, I mean, when it comes to theology, Ehrman is really bad at times.

But he really is the grandfather of much of the skepticism that is prevalent in academia today. 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.

Wanna make sure everybody's ready?

Okay.

One of his studies at the University of North Carolina. His best-selling book is Misquoting Jesus. The story behind who changed the Bible and why. Please welcome Bart Ehrman. You were someone that went through sort of a period of discovery.

You were a literalist, I guess, or a born-again, it would say. And then as you studied and learned more about it, you began to question that.

Right.

I started out being interested in the Bible because I was a born-again Christian, a fundamentalist who thought that the very words of the Bible had been given by God. And so I studied Greek in college and decided to read the New Testament in Greek.

Because that was the original language.

That was the original language it was written in. And so the more I studied, though, the more I saw there's an enormous problem. We don't have the original 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.

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.

Now, what does that do? Because to my mind, as I read your book and learned more about it, the Bible suddenly became more interesting to me. In that, I felt like that information doesn't denigrate the 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.

Well, yeah, that's an interesting point because for me, the Bible takes on new life when you see that the Bible is a living thing, that it isn't a dead document that was written 2 ,000 years ago. 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.

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. 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.

And mostly shaped it during that 300 years between sort of Christ's death and when, I guess, Constantine converted and Rome converted and Christianity became sort of the law of the land.

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.

Right, 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. I have to sort of pull it up to make it fit right. But anyway, there you get the idea of Bart's presentation. You know, we don't know in some places what was originally written.

Now, it's funny, when we debated, I basically asked him, where? I asked him, where would you say the manuscripts of the New Testament no longer contain the original reading? He came up with one place in 2 Peter.

One place. Whether it says enoch or and, or something like that. Zero impact upon the teaching of scripture or anything like that, but there you go. That's what you get. And so you have this idea of copies of copies of copies of copies.

So he frequently presents the idea of how the 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. 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 Jesus was a New York Times bestseller. Most of his popular level books have been New York Times bestsellers. And honestly, when you look at everything he's addressed, he has spent his adult life explaining away his apostasy.

Because he is an apostate. He made a profession of faith. He no longer professes to believe what is found in scripture. 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 Christian by a person who formally claimed to have been one.

And you will find his influence all over the place. You really, really will. What's interesting is I did a debate with a Muslim at Duke University a number of years ago. And he had four books on his table.

Three of the four were by Bart Ehrman. And so his influence is not just in that context. It's everyone who would have reason to question the 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.

And it was not my first debate with a Muslim. So in 1999, I debated Hamza Abdel-Malik on the deity of Christ, but I wasn't debating the issue of Islam. The first debate where Islam was the primary focus was at Biola University in 2006 with Shabbir Ali.

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? Because this is the kind of stuff you're gonna be running into in the forms of skepticism that we have today.

But listen to a well-read Muslim approaching this subject as well. Do we not have it? It's running. You gotta turn it up way high.

Whatever of the 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 New Testament and what is not?

Well, I believe that Muslims have a simple answer to this in saying that whatever is in the Quran, that would be a judge of whatever is there in the Bible. So whatever of the Bible agrees with the Quran, that obviously is inspired.

What is contradictory is obviously not from God. And that which is neutral and neither in agreement nor in disagreement may be treated with some bit of silence. Usually the classical scholars have recommended silence, but I believe that Muslims who are quite familiar with the Gospels and familiar with the development of the text over time can make some judgments, though these judgments will be tentative.

So everything about the cross, resurrection, atonement, deity of Christ, Jesus is the son of God, the 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 New Testament in light of the Quran.

A Muslim would say that the Quranic revelation is here now as a pristine word of God. That teaches us that there is only one God, that Jesus is his Messiah, but nevertheless a servant and messenger of the one true God.

And so anything that is contrary to that, something that teaches, for example, that human responsibility as described in the Quran is to be somehow evaded, that would be contrary and would be thought to be a later development.

Now, of course, that could be studied from another angle. One can look at the history and development of Christian teaching over time. 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 Muslims insist on, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet like the prophets of the Old Testament.

He preached the belief in God, similar to the belief that was known from the 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.

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.

So is there any New Testament book that Mark, for example, which you've referred to many times, 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?

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, 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 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.

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.