How Did We Get the Bible? Part 1

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How Did We Get the Bible? Part 2

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Hi friends, welcome to Discerning Truth, the webcast of the Biblical Science Institute. Today's topic, how did we get the

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Bible? That is this book that we hold in our hands, I have an English translation here. How did we get this and is this reliable?

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Does the meaning that I get when I read my English Bible, does it match the author's intention and how do we know?

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It's a topic that's not often covered in many churches and it's something that we need to deal with because the critics will make claims like, well the

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Bible has been translated so many times, it's probably not remotely reliable at all. Or they'll say the

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Bible is written by men, therefore it can't be trusted. Or they'll say the Bible was probably written by some monk during the

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Dark Ages in an attempt to control people or something along those lines. There are thousands of variations in the texts of the

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Bible, so which one's really the Bible if you have all these differences? Now just going through those claims briefly, the first claim that the

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Bible has been translated so many times, I wonder if that's really what they mean because perhaps it is, because some critics maybe have the impression that the

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Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation. It's not. If you have a modern

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Bible like the ESV or the NASB, they have been translated directly from the original languages, directly from the

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Hebrew and Greek into English as one translation. And so it's not a translation of a translation. It is based on a copy of a copy of a copy.

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The Bible has been transmitted many times, but if you have a modern

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English version it's been translated once from the parent language into English.

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And we have to deal with the idea though that it's been copied many times. How do we know if we're reading a copy of a copy of a copy, how do we know that it's reliable?

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Because after all, mistakes creep in, and they do. We know that happens. We find manuscripts of the

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Bible where you can see little copying mistakes have been made. Human beings are not perfect copy machines.

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And until the invention of the Xerox, people would make little mistakes copying the scripture.

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So how do we know that our modern Bible is reliable? Regarding the idea that the Bible can't be trusted because it's written by men, what books aren't written by men?

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Men and women. Right? I mean, all books are written by human beings. The Bible is not an exception to that.

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The Bible does claim to have a divine co -author, but there's no doubt that God used men to write his word.

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He himself says that in his word. So that shouldn't be much of an objection. The notion, well, the

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Bible was probably written by some monk during the Dark Ages. I was actually doing a debate with somebody one time, and he brought that up, and I thought to myself, mister, you don't have a clue, because that cannot be defended.

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We have documents. We have complete Bibles that predate the monks and the

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Dark Ages and things like that. So that's not going to fly. We know the Bible's older than that. But the final criticism that, well, the

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Bible's, there are thousands of variations, there are thousands of differences in wording in the

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Greek manuscripts and in the Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible. That's true. And that's something that we have to deal with.

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Does that mean we can't know what the original reading was? No, we can know what the original reading was in almost all cases, and perhaps all cases.

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So those are the things that we need to deal with. So it's helpful to start by asking, what does the

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Bible have to say about itself? What kind of document is it, and how do we get it?

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Most books that you read will give you some kind of introduction as to what to expect in the book. You know, a geology book will say, you know, this is dealing with Earth history and so on.

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It describes itself. The Bible does this too. And in 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 through 17, the

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Bible says, All Scripture is inspired by God, or God -breathed, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

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So the Bible itself tells us that Scripture is God -breathed.

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It's His Word. And so when we read this text, we're reading the words of God written by men.

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And because this is the Word of God, it is profitable. It's profitable for teaching. It's profitable for reproof.

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It's profitable for correction. It's profitable for training in righteousness. What's the purpose? So that the man of God may be adequate or complete, equipped for every good work.

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We read this book so that we know how to live a life that's pleasing to God. 2

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Peter 1, verse 21, For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the

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Holy Spirit spoke from God. So again, we're learning that the text that we read here, it's not any one man's opinion.

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It's not something that human beings generated of their own volition. It's something that God used men,

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His Holy Spirit carried them along so that what they wrote was exactly what God wanted them to write.

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And He did that in such a way that He used their personalities and their styles and their life experiences as part of that Word.

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It's a little mysterious to us, but keep in mind that God created those people and their personalities and He guided their life experiences so that when they wrote, they wrote exactly what

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He wanted them to write. And some people say, well, doesn't that mean every book's inspired by God?

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Because didn't God guide their lives and so on? He did, but He did not intend for other people to write

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His Word. That is a privilege reserved for the 40 or so authors that pen to the words of Scripture.

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The Bible is revelation from God. Revelation is divine discourse.

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It's God communicating with human beings. And God has done that from the beginning, right?

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When did God first reveal Himself to man? In the Garden of Eden. God spoke to Adam and Eve.

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That was the first divine discourse. That was the first revelation. God directly spoke to them and so they had knowledge of God.

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Critics sometimes ask, well, how did people know about God before the Bible was written?

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Because there was a period of about 2 ,000 years of human history where people did not have this or even a fraction of it.

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They didn't have a written expression of God's Word as we have today. But people have known about God from the very beginning.

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Adam and Eve talked with God and so they certainly knew about Him. No doubt they would have communicated that information to their children and their children's children and so on.

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And eventually that was written down. And eventually some of that made it into God's Word as His Holy Spirit directed.

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So when is the earliest written revelation that we have from God? Or putting it another way, which is the oldest, earliest book of the

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Bible? And we think it's actually Job. We think Job was written around 2 ,000 BC. That would put it about 350 years after the

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Great Flood, about 250 years after the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. And there are a number of internal indications that Job was written around that time.

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That would have been around the same time that Abraham lived. For one thing, his age. We know that Job lived at least 140 years and that's after the events that are recorded in that book.

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And he already had a family before that. So he could well have been more than 200 years old. That would be consistent with the ages of people that were typical around the time of Abraham.

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Job's wealth is described in terms of livestock, things like that. They were apparently still on a barter system.

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So they're not counting shekels or anything like that. Also the way that Job sacrifices.

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He offers sacrifices to God, as did Abel. But not the way that Moses did.

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You see, once God gave specific commandments to Moses, the Israelites were to worship

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God in a specific way. They had to worship, you know, they had to offer sacrifices in the temple and so on.

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Job is not following the Levitical code, which suggests that he's before the time of Moses, well before the time of Moses.

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Now Moses comes along later. Moses writes the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

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Jesus confirms that in Luke 24, 44, that Moses gave us the law, the law or the

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Torah is one way of referring to the first five books of the Bible. But Moses lived for quite some time.

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He spent 40 years in the land of Midian. And we think that's very near where, or possibly in where Job lived.

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And so Moses would have undoubtedly come across this book of Job that had been written down at some point, perhaps by Job himself.

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And so that's how Moses would have recognized that, oh, this is, this is clearly divine because we see a divine interaction between God and Job and the

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Holy Spirit informed Moses that this was to be part of his word. So that's perhaps where we got it.

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We don't know for sure that that's the way it got incorporated in, but we do know that eventually that book made it into the

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Bible. People recognized it as God's word. Now, the interesting thing about Genesis is,

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Genesis records events that happened long before Moses was alive. And so the question becomes, how did

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Moses get that information? Now since the Bible's God breathed, one possibility is that God directly and supernaturally revealed that information to Moses.

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He could have just told him, here's what happened, write this down. But God normally uses eyewitnesses to record his word.

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And so while it is possible that Moses simply received supernatural revelation, I think it's more likely that Moses had access to previous documents that had been written by the people that lived and experienced the events and then wrote those events down, the events that would eventually become recorded in Genesis.

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And this is perhaps suggested in passages like Genesis 5 .1,

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which says, this is the book of the generations of Adam. And so there's a book there, this is the book.

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And then there are 10 of these little expressions in Genesis where these are, this is the generations or these are the generations of such and such.

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And those could have been recorded by the people that are mentioned in those passages, perhaps.

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But in any case, that suggests that there were at least 10 previous documents that Moses used.

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Again, we don't know for sure. The Bible doesn't specifically say this, but it would be consistent with the fact that God normally uses eyewitnesses to record his word.

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And of course, the Holy Spirit would have guided Moses on how to compile those documents into what would become the book of Genesis.

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In any case, the point is human beings have had revelation from God from the very beginning. And as early as 2000

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BC, at least some people had written revelation from God. So let's look at the timeline of the writing of the

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Bible. So for the first 2000 years, we don't have written revelation from God, but certainly we had oral information that had been passed down.

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But perhaps some of it was written, but was not divinely inspired and so was not included in the

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Bible. But around 2000 BC, we have Job. A few hundred years after that, we have Genesis, the first Torah, the first five books of the

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Bible, the Pentateuch. And then revelation continues. God continues to inspire his prophets, his people, to write down his word, often recording events that they've experienced in their lives.

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And that continues up to and through the Babylonian captivity of Judah. That captivity happened around 600

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BC. Babylon captured Judah, took all the people and brought them over to Babylon for a period of about 70 years.

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And then they were released back. And God continued to have a little bit of revelation after that until around 400

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BC. And then the writing of the Bible stops. God did not give any additional information until the coming of Christ, sometimes called the silent years, because for 400 years,

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God didn't say anything supernaturally to anyone. And then Christ comes. And of course, the

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New Testament, written in a very short period of time, very shortly after the death and resurrection of Christ.

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And that all written in the first century AD. Of course, the Bible was not written in our modern

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English. It was written primarily in Hebrew and Greek. The New Testament was written in Greek.

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The Old Testament was written primarily in Hebrew. Some Aramaic, but mostly Hebrew. Hebrew looks like this.

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It reads from right to left. And this, by the way, is Genesis 1 .1.

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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So in Hebrew, that would be b'reshit bara Elohim et ha'shamayim v 'et ha 'aretz.

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And that's what it looks like today. Now when Hebrew was originally written, it wouldn't have looked exactly like that.

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It would have looked more like this. It's the same language. It's Hebrew. It's just the way they wrote the letters was different.

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They were effectively using a different alphabet. This is sometimes called Paleo -Hebrew or Proto -Hebrew script.

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And that was used up until around 600 BC. So all the older books of the Bible, when they were first written, they looked kind of like that.

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At least those were the letters that they used. Now Hebrew uses only consonants, no vowels.

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And that seems a little strange to us, because in English, of course, we like our vowels. But in Hebrew, perhaps that was a way of remembering something that was originally spoken.

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And so if you, something that was passed down orally, but you wanted to make sure you didn't forget it. And so you would write down just the consonants to kind of help you as a sort of a shorthand.

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But in any case, that's the way they, that's the way that the Hebrews recorded the

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Bible. And those letters changed around the time of the Babylonian captivity, where they began using what is sometimes called a square script.

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And that is still the script that is used today. And the reason for that is Aramaic, the language that was spoken in Babylon, also used that alphabet.

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So it made sense for them to use the same alphabet as their captors. But it's still

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Hebrew. It's still the same language. It looks a little different, but you can see that there's a one -to -one correspondence between every letter on the top and every letter on the bottom.

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They're identical texts, it's just the alphabet changed. So it's still Hebrew. And then another change occurred also at some point during the captivity.

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The Hebrews began using, they took three of their consonants and started using them as indications of what vowel should be used in certain locations where there might be some confusion on that issue.

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And so, for example, the yod, which would normally be a consonant in Genesis 1, is used twice as a sort of a helper vowel.

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And that indicates that the vowel there has kind of an ee sound to it. So it's breshith and it's elohim.

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And so that's the way, that, by the way, is the way the text would have looked at around the time of Christ's earthly ministry.

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So the books of the Bible that were written during and after the captivity would have had, they would have used that script. And the older books would have been updated to reflect the newer script.

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And in some cases, the newer spellings due to the use of these three consonants as vowels.

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Now another change was made around the year 600 or so, between 600 and 850

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AD. The Mazarites, they were a group of Jews. They had not received

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Christ as Savior, but nonetheless, they were very concerned about making sure that the word of God was copied accurately and they were meticulous about it.

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And so they had been copying God's word and around between 600 and 850, they began adding these little notations, these little dots and other marks above and below the letters because at this point, the letters were considered sacrosanct.

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You don't want to change that. That's God's word. But perhaps we could add some little pointings above and below those letters indicating which vowels are used.

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So that would help people to know how to pronounce those words. And I'm very grateful that they did that. And so you can see these little marks that are in blue, those indicate which vowel should be used after each letter.

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And then there are other marks as well that are in yellow that indicate whether a consonant is sort of hard or soft or which syllable the emphasis should be upon and so on.

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And there were three different systems that were in use and they ended up settling on what's sometimes called the Tiberian vocalization system.

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And that is still in use today. So between 850 AD and today, that's the way

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Hebrew, the Hebrew language looks. One of the points

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I want to make in that is that the vowel pointings themselves are not inspired by God. The Mazarites were faithful and they were trying to preserve

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God's word and show people how to pronounce it. But they did make those little additions above and below the letters so they couldn't be accused of changing

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God's word. Now aside from these changes in spelling and things of that nature, how do we know that the text has been accurately copied?

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Now one way of course is to find a very old manuscript. If we had, obviously if we had the original text that Moses actually penned, that would be called the autograph, then we would know whether or not any changes have taken place because we could look at subsequent copies.

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Unfortunately, we don't have the autographs of any book of the Bible. We don't have the original paper, papyrus or whatever, lambskin, that the authors wrote on.

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We don't have those today. Those have been lost to time. What we have are copies of copies and perhaps in some cases of copies of copies.

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We have those. And so obviously the oldest copy you can find would tend to be the most reliable because there's been less time for mistakes to creep in.

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There have been fewer generations, so older is generally better. That makes sense. Now when it comes to the

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Old Testament, the oldest complete Hebrew texts that we find of the entire

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Old Testament, the Masoretic texts, the earliest Masoretic texts we have stem from around 1008

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AD. That's called the Leningrad Codex. Codex is a group of manuscripts that are bound together in a common volume, like a book.

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So Codex is a book. And the earliest complete book of the

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Hebrew Old Testament around 1008 AD. We do find fragments that are earlier than that.

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We have fragments from the 800s AD. Now the nice thing is we can compare those with modern copies and they are pretty much identical.

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So in the last thousand years we know that the Hebrew text has not changed. There's no doubt about that because we have texts from that time period.

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But that leaves another previous thousand and four hundred years for the latest books of the

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Bible and another thousand years beyond that for the earlier books of the Bible. How do we know the text didn't change during that time period?

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The answer is we can examine different families of texts from different time periods and in different areas.

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You see as texts were copied and one text might be carried off to this part of the world and another text to be carried off to that part of the world and then those are copied and so on, different mistakes creep in in different places.

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And by mistakes I just mean, I'm not talking about intentional changes that sometimes the critics say, people intentionally added or subtracted that verse.

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That's not happening. That just isn't happening. We would know if that happened because we have so many manuscripts of the

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Bible. We could tell if somebody was trying to change it. The kinds of mistakes that creep in are just simple copying mistakes.

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Your eye skips over a word or you jump to the next line.

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Have you ever been reading a text and you either skip a line or you go back to the same line and read it twice?

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People would sometimes do that when they're copying the scriptures and so you'd end up with a duplicated verse or you'd end up with a verse that's skipped, something like that.

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Or you'll have the same word that's on two lines and there's some confusion there.

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Those are the kinds of mistakes that creep in. But because different families make different mistakes, by comparing the different families we know what the original said.

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So let me show you graphically how this works. So we have the original text that was penned by the author.

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Now we don't have that in our possession today. That has been lost to time. But let's suppose that that was copied three times so that there are now three copies in addition to the original text.

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The original text gets lost but those three copies exist and from those three copies are made and uh -oh, a mistake is made in one of them represented by the purple line there.

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And let's just suppose it's a New Testament text and the phrase in question is

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Jesus Christ whereas the mistake that's made in purple there, he accidentally switches it and says

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Christ Jesus. And by the way, most of the mistakes are like that. Most of the variations in scripture do not affect the meaning at all, right?

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Because if a text says Jesus Christ and another says Christ Jesus, that makes no difference in terms of the meaning.

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Those are the same person. Just two different ways of describing it, whether you put the Messiah title first or second.

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Anyway, those are copied and some of those we might have today.

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And because they're in very different parts of the world, you might have a copy that makes it down to Egypt and another part that makes it up really far north and so on.

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We can say, oh, these two widely different families, they both say Jesus Christ whereas this one that's found in this part of the world that says

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Christ Jesus, that's obviously a mistake. The original must have been Jesus Christ.

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And so, see, we don't need to have the original text to know what it said as long as we have enough copies that we can reconstruct the families in the way that they were copied and distributed.

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And it will be different for different verses. And this technique works even if the mistake is made very early, right?

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Because let's say one of the first three copies, the mistake is made, and then those are transmitted and so on.

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We can still, we still find that, oh, these two different text families, they have the same reading.

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That's got to be the original. And that's a biblical principle, right? Jesus said by the testimony of two witnesses, every matter is confirmed.

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That's based on an Old Testament law. Anyway, by two or three witnesses, every matter is confirmed.

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And so we have independent witnesses to the text, and when they agree, we know that's the original reading, at least back to the point where they branched, back to their common text source.

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And so you do this for different verses, and you can reconstruct the families of text. And scholars will give names to these various lines of text.

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There's like the Byzantine text family. That's a certain family that is all branched from a common source.

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And so we can, in most cases, we can figure out what the original reading is. And frankly, in most cases, it doesn't matter, because the meaning is not affected, whether it's one word or the other.

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Now since we want different families of text, that's what's important.

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So we can make comparisons. And generally where they agree, we know that's the original reading. If there's disagreement, a lot of times we can find a tiebreaker.

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We can find a third independent witness that will agree with one of the other two, and that tells us which is correct.

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So what are some of the manuscripts that we have? For the Old Testament, let's just look at that at the moment.

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We have the Masoretic text that was very meticulously copied by the Jews. And the oldest complete

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Masoretic text that we have in our possession today is called the Leningrad Codex, and that dates back to 1008

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AD. There's an earlier codex, the Aleppo Codex, that goes back to 930

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AD. Unfortunately, we don't have all of it today. At one time we did, apparently, but we possess about 60 % of it.

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Portions of it were lost in a fire in 1947. Very unfortunate. But another ancient text that's from a different family is the

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Septuagint. The Septuagint is actually a Greek translation of the

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Old Testament, and it's often abbreviated by the letters LXX, which is the

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Roman numerals for 70, because there were approximately 70 translators that translated the

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Septuagint, at least the first part of it. The Septuagint began as the

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Greek translation of the first five books of the Bible, the 200s

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BC. They wanted a copy in Egypt. They could read Greek. They couldn't read Hebrew, so they said, translate this so we can read it.

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And then the rest of the books of the Bible were translated in the 100s BC, so about a century later.

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Now, the earliest fragments of the Septuagint go back to around 150 BC, very shortly after it was written.

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But by the year 300 AD, we have complete copies of the Septuagint. So, and two in particular, the

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Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. These are the two earliest, very nearly complete copies of the

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Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And so that's an independent family that we can compare with the

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Masoretic text. Now, unfortunately, the Septuagint is not a copy of the

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Old Testament text. It is a translation of the Old Testament text. And some of the books of the

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Old Testament were translated very well in the Septuagint. Others, not so much. So it's not a perfect translation.

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Some people have in their mind that, well, if, you know, if God wants people to translate his word, he'll ensure that they translate it absolutely perfectly.

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Well, I'm sorry, but that is not the case. And we have plenty of evidence for that. We'll take a look at some of those a little bit later.

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Nonetheless, the Septuagint, the earliest complete copies we have are 700 years older than the

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Masoretic, the earliest complete Masoretic text. So it's older, but it's a translation.

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So how do you, how do you deal with that? At the very least, we can see, we can see, well, the meaning of this verse matches the meaning of this one, even though they're in different languages.

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And that tells us that both streams have been reliably transmitted. Now, for the first five books of the

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Bible, we have a tiebreaker. Because if there's a disagreement between the Septuagint and the

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Masoretic text, we have a third family, the Samaritan Pentateuch.

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The Samaritans were a group of Jews that split off from the main population around 600

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BC. And at the time of Christ, the Samaritans and the Jews did not get along very well.

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The Samaritans, they accepted the first five books of the Bible as God's word, but not the rest.

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They accepted just the Pentateuch. And so they had a reduced canon. They had their own set of manuscripts for that Pentateuch that had been copied independently of the

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Masoretic text. And so different errors are going to creep in. And so a lot of times if there's a difference between the meaning of a word in the

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Septuagint and in the Masoretic, you can take a look. If it's in the first five books of the

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Bible, you can consult the Samaritan Pentateuch as the tiebreaker. And so that gives you an idea of that. Now, the

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Samaritan Pentateuch, the oldest copies we have of that are around 1100 AD. So it doesn't go back as early as the

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Masoretic text and is generally considered not quite as reliable. But still, it gives you a tiebreaker.

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But there's another one, a remarkable discovery that was made in 1947 through 1956.

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And that was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are very ancient documents that were kept in jars and other things in a system of 11 caves in Qumran, which is very near the

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Dead Sea. So it's called the Qumran Scrolls, or more popularly, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, the thing about the

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Dead Sea Scrolls is they go back to 250 BC, up to about 100

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AD. So many of these scrolls predate Christ's earthly ministry. And many of them are

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Hebrew Old Testament texts. Now, it contains other literature as well. In fact, a lot of the

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Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing to do with the Bible. They're other documents. But we find earlier copies of the

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Hebrew scriptures that are 1 ,000 years older than the Masoretic text. And that is wonderful.

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And the beautiful thing is they are 95 % identical to the Masoretic text.

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And frankly, the remaining 5 % is mostly spelling changes, which we would expect. We already know that some of the spellings changed over time as the helper consonants were added and then the

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Masoretes then added vowel pointings later. So I wanted to show you some of the differences here.

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I wanted to compare these texts so that you can see that, yes, they are very, very similar. And so that you can have a feel for what kinds of differences have crept in.

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And I specialize in the defense of Genesis. So I'm going to take a look at Genesis chapter 1.

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And we'll compare the Masoretic text on the left with text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is on the right.

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Now, it's not like there's one Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. There are different manuscripts from different books.

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Sometimes there are multiple copies. The Isaiah Scroll. There's at least two complete

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Isaiah Scrolls in the Dead Sea Scrolls that are just incredibly well preserved. Genesis, unfortunately, the full book of Genesis is not found in the

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Dead Sea Scrolls, but fragments are. And there's more than one copy. So in Genesis 1 .1,

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for example, there's a scroll that contains the same reading as the Masoretic text. When you look at them, they are identical other than the vowel pointings.

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And we know that the Masoretes added the vowel pointings. That's not in question. But the consonants are identical between the

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Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic text in Genesis 1 .1. Now, you'll also see some brackets in that first verse and that first scroll.

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Brackets indicate that in that scroll, anything inside the brackets is extremely difficult to read and therefore uncertain.

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So they're indicating to you, we're not quite sure about these words. We think that this is the reading, but we can't be positive.

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But notice that there's at least three scrolls that contain Genesis 1 .1.

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And that's what you see in yellow. Those are indicating the identity of the scroll that contains that reading.

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So the first scroll there, the first three words are certain other than perhaps the last letter of Elohim.

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So b'reishit bara Elohim, in the beginning, God created. And then the rest of it's uncertain.

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But in the next scroll, the second word and part of the first, b'reishit bara, the created, created

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God, is uncertain. But the rest of the verse is certain. See, there's no doubt that he created the heavens and the earth.

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So those two scrolls together tell us that in the beginning, God created heaven and the earth.

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And the text is absolutely identical with the Masoretic text. Now, in the third scroll that you see down there, there is a difference.

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The first word, b'reishit, instead of saying b'reishit, it says b'reishit. Instead of saying in the beginning, it says in the beginning, which is to say it's the same word, it's just spelled differently.

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And so what I've done is I've set up the computer to highlight any differences. It highlights it in red.

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And you see there's only one red. That's because there's only one difference. And it's a spelling difference in the first verse.

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And only one of the three scrolls has that spelling difference. The other two scrolls agree with the spelling in the Masoretic text anyway.

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Verses 2, 3, and 4 are absolutely identical between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic text.

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We get our next difference in verse 5, where the text is identical until you get to the end.

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And then there's a punctuation difference. So there's a paragraph marker in the Masoretic text.

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And then the Dead Sea Scrolls lack that. But they have brackets there indicating that there's something there, but they couldn't make it out.

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So maybe it did have the paragraph marker as well. It's just been worn out with time.

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But the Consonantal text is identical in at least a couple of those scrolls.

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And then we have one difference in the third scroll that's listed there, the 4Q7 scroll.

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By the way, Genesis 1 -5, that's in God called the Light Day and the

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Dark Sea called Night. So the word day is yom, except in the scroll 4Q7 where it's yomam, which means day.

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So instead of saying day, it says day. It's a different word for day though. Yom is kind of a generic word for day.

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It can mean daylight or it can mean a rotation of the earth, a 24 -hour day. Whereas yomam is more specific.

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It means the daylight portion of an ordinary day. So the question is, did

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God call the light day or did he call it day in the sense of daylight? So it doesn't really affect the meaning, not very much.

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It's a subtle difference. And it's only in that one scroll that you have that difference. The other scrolls appear to have yom as normal, although it's in brackets.

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So we can't be sure that it's there. Now, despite the fact that the difference between yom and yomam is very slight and doesn't really affect the meaning, you might want to know academically,

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I want to know which is the original. Is it yom or is it yomam? And the cool thing is we have a tiebreaker.

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We have the Samaritan Pentateuch. And so if we take a look at the Samaritan Pentateuch in verse 5, it says yom, day.

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So that is the original reading. We have the tiebreaker there. We have two independent witnesses to that reading.

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And again, look at what's highlighted, just a punctuation difference. The Samaritan Pentateuch, identical to the

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Masoretic text in Genesis 1 .5, 1 .6, 1 .7, and so on. So these are the kinds of, when people talk about these variations in the text, this is primarily what we're looking at.

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We're looking at just very, very small changes that don't, most of which do not affect the meaning of the text.

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There are a few that do. And in those cases, it's possible to figure out which is the original by comparing the different families.

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So there are two criteria that give us confidence that our current texts are reliable copies of the original autographs.

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First of all, and most importantly, a large number of ancient manuscripts from different families. And that allows us to track the transmission.

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We can see, okay, this family, oh, there's a mistake that crept in here because all the copies of that have that mistake in it.

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Whereas these two families agree and do not have that mistake in it. So we can tell when the variations have crept in, and scholars can reconstruct what the original text must have been.

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And it's, in many cases, with certainty. In some cases, with not quite certainty, but at least it's very probable this is the original reading.

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Secondly, obviously, the oldest manuscripts are generally the best because they've been copied fewer times.

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And today we have access to some of these very old manuscripts, and thanks to technology, things like the internet, we can access those.

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I can access any of the ancient documents that I want to that have been cataloged and recorded online.

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Pretty amazing. So to reconstruct the text and to figure out the way that it was transmitted, we might call this textual transmission analysis.

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Scholars call it textual criticism, which sounds like a negative thing, like we're criticizing the text.

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What we're doing is we're analyzing the text to see how it was copied, and when we see differences, we try to figure out, okay, which one is closer to the original reading?

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Where did the difference occur? And obviously, if you can find an older copy than the two that have the difference, that will settle that dispute in many cases.

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So with regard to the Old Testament, the earliest extant Masoretic text, about 1008

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A .D. in terms of having an entire codex, the Leningrad Codex, but we find fragments from 800

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A .D., but then we have the Septuagint that goes back to, we have the complete Septuagint by 300

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A .D., 300s A .D., and Dead Sea Scrolls go back even earlier than that, and the beautiful thing is the

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Dead Sea Scrolls show tremendous agreement with the earliest Masoretic text.

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So that tells us in 2 ,000 years, the text of the Bible has not changed significantly. There are minor variations that have crept in just due to innocent copying mistakes, but most of them do not affect the meaning, and in cases where they do, we can usually reconstruct and figure out which of the original is, and that's what's been included in your modern

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Bible translation. What about the New Testament? Now the New Testament is even better.

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We have more manuscripts of the New Testament if we include translations, and the

39:29

New Testament being written first century, we have complete codexes, complete copies of the entire

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New Testament by the mid 300s A .D. So within a few centuries, we have the complete

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New Testament, and we have access to those documents today. The earliest fragments of the

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New Testament that we find go back even earlier than that. The earliest fragments go back to the second century, less than 100 years, maybe less than 50 years after the documents were actually written.

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One of the earliest New Testament papyri, that's what it was written on, is called P52, and P52 dates back to around A .D.

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125. It is a very small fragment of the text, no bigger than a credit card, and it contains sections of John chapter 18 on front and back, and there's an actual picture of it, so you can see that.

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Now the amazing thing about this, it's not what we have, it's a very small fragment. The amazing thing is it is identical in terms of the letters with later manuscripts of John, and so that tells us that even in the first few centuries, the book of John was copied very, very accurately, and we have other books as well where we have very early fragments.

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By the mid -300s, you have a complete New Testament Bible, and along with the Septuagint, the

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Greek translation of the Old Testament, and that is included in what's called Codex Vaticanus, and that's what it looks like.

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The Greek is written entirely in capital letters, and with no spaces, so it's a little tricky to read, even if you can read

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Greek. And then there's another one, Codex Sinaiticus, also written around A .D. 300s, and it's abbreviated by the

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Hebrew letter Aleph. Also, all caps, no spaces, so we have very, very early copies of the

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New Testament, and so some people try to make the claim, well, you know, people changed the

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New Testament from what it read. No, it's not possible, because we have manuscripts that are within, we have fragments that are within maybe 50 years of when the text was originally written, and we have complete

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Bibles within a couple centuries after the text was written. So there's no doubt that the text that we have access to today is an accurate representation of the original.

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The other thing is we have great numbers of copies of these manuscripts, and just for comparison, let's take a look at some of the other copies of manuscripts we find in the ancient world.

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We have, for example, the writings of Tacitus, his Annals, written around the year 70. We have 33 or so manuscripts in our possession today, and so with 33, you can make comparisons.

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We have another history book written around 411 B .C. We have 96 copies of that.

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Another history book written by Herodotus, a Greek historian who confirmed many of the events of the

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Old Testament Scriptures, written around 430 B .C. We have 109 manuscripts of that.

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That's not necessarily a complete manuscript. It could be a fragment of a manuscript. Pliny the

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Elder, his Natural History dates to AD 77. We have about 200 manuscripts of that.

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Again, that's not necessarily his complete work, but sections of it. Plato, his

42:54

Tautologies goes back to 340 B .C. We have around 210 manuscripts of that, probably less than 10 that are complete manuscripts, but 210 if you include fragments.

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Caesar, his Gallic Wars dates around 50 B .C. We have 251 ancient manuscripts of that in our possession today.

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Pretty good. It's enough that you can start to reconstruct the text families. The Iliad was a very popular book, apparently, in the ancient world.

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We have in our possession today 1 ,900 copies of the

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Iliad written by Homer. The Greek, not the Simpson. And again, that goes back to 700

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B .C. Lots of manuscripts of that. Because we have over 1 ,000 manuscripts, almost 2 ,000 manuscripts of the

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Iliad, scholars are confident in 95 % of the text, that basically 95 % of the text, they know what the original said, and there's 5 % where it's uncertain.

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That's pretty good. That's what you can do with 1 ,900 manuscripts. You can reconstruct that by figuring out the family lineages.

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In fact, aside from the Bible, the

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Iliad is the most authenticated work of the ancient world in terms of the number of manuscripts that we find.

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It's the most reliable. The Odyssey is pretty good, too. It's maybe a third that number. I've read the

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Odyssey. It's a wonderful work of fantasy fiction, but it's very well preserved.

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Pretty neat. And then we get to the Bible, and let's start with the Old Testament. And there are different estimates on this.

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But regardless of which estimate exactly you use, it dwarfs all the works of the ancient world.

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In fact, we're going to have to change the scale a little bit. One estimate puts it at around 11 ,000 ancient manuscripts of the

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Old Testament. That blows away anything else in history.

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That's amazing. What about the New Testament? Well, if you look at the original Greek writings of the

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New Testament, 5 ,800 that we have access to today that have been discovered.

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Amazing. 5 ,800 ancient manuscripts. But if we include translations, there's over 10 ,000

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Latin translations of the New Testament, ancient manuscripts that we have access to today, and over 9 ,000 in other languages.

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And so if you combine not just the Greek texts, but also translations of the

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Greek texts and those kind of manuscripts, and combine those, we have to shrink the scale again to get them to fit.

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And you find that there are over 25 ,000 copies, 25 ,000 ancient manuscripts of the

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New Testament. Again, that doesn't mean the full text. It could be a section of a book, something like that. But that blows away anything else in the ancient world.

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Clearly, the Bible is unique. And this is not disputed. Even secularists, if they know anything about manuscripts and textual criticism, they would know that the

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Bible is far superior to any other work of antiquity in terms of the number of ancient manuscripts that we have in our possession today.

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Nothing else comes close. The Bible is the most authentic book of the ancient world, by far.

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But there are variations. We looked at a couple Old Testament variations, Yom and Yomam, and we saw that there's no there's no serious doubt which is original, and it wouldn't matter much anyway, because the meaning isn't strongly affected.

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We saw a spelling difference with bray sheath and so on. Now, with the New Testament, there are a lot more variants.

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And that's partly because the New Testament was freely transmitted. It's partly because it was copied under less than ideal circumstances.

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I mean, it was illegal to be a Christian for a period of time in the Roman Empire. But, how many of these variants are meaningful?

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Because there are some changes to a slight Greek word that when you translate into English, it makes no difference at all.

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The English word comes out the same. Or where the word order is flipped.

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So instead of Jesus Christ, it's Christ Jesus, or something along those lines. That has no effect on the meaning. So only a small fraction of the variants affect the meaning.

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Some do. And we'll take a look at a few of those. Second, how many are viable? Viable means there is a chance that this variation is the original reading.

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Because there are some that are not viable. There are some where it's a very obvious mistake, where a line has been copied, something like that.

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There's actually an ancient manuscript where, you know how your Bible might have two columns?

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Sometimes ancient manuscripts did that as well. But the copyist, apparently not actually knowing

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Greek very well, thought it was a single line. And so when he made his copy, he went straight across.

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And so it's all scrambled. Now that can't be the original. We can see what he did. It's obvious.

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That's not viable. So of all these manuscripts, of all these different variations that we have in the

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New Testament, how many are both meaningful and viable? One estimate puts it at about 0 .2%.

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0 .2 % where we have some uncertainty where it affects the meaning. And there's some question as to which meaning is the original.

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Which means 99 .8 % of your Bible is completely certain in terms of the meaning.

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There's no doubt that the meaning expressed is the same as the author actually penned.

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For 99 .8 % of the Bible. And that's better than any other book of the ancient world.

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But what about that 0 .2 %? And how do I know that some doctrine that I think is very important, how do

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I know that it's in the 99 .8 % bin and not the 0 .2 % bin? So it's helpful to know where these are at.

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But even in those cases, it's often possible to reconstruct what the original must have been, just by looking at the different families.

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But how do you know, if you have a modern Bible, how do you know if this particular text is part of the 99 .8

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% that's certain, or if it's the 0 .2 % that we have some questions about it?

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And the answer is, the text tells you. If it's a modern Bible, there will be indications in the text.

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And let's just take a look at one of these. For example, in Mark chapter 9 verses 43 through 46, there is a textual variant here in verses 44 and 46.

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So verse 43, and if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than having your two hands to go into hell and the unquenchable fire.

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Then verse 44 says, where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched. And that's repeated in verse 46, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.

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But you'll notice around those two verses, there are these brackets. Brackets indicate that there is some uncertainty as to whether or not that is the original text, or there's doubt that that is the original text.

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And you'll also note, in addition to those brackets, there's a footnote, footnote 27 in this case.

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And that's going to give you more information. So let's read the footnote. What does it say? Verses 44 and 46, which are identical with verse 48, are not found in the best ancient manuscripts.

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So what they're telling you is that the oldest copies of the book of Mark that we have access to today do not contain those verses.

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It's not there. That reading where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched is not found after verse 43.

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And again, after verse 45. So some of the later manuscripts have it, but not the earlier ones.

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And in their opinion, they say the best ancient manuscripts, in their opinion, the ones that are the most reliable.

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And so they're giving you their scholarly opinion that in their opinion, those verses

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Mark did not write them. They included them just in case you want to make your own decision, and they gave you the information, and you can do further research if you want to.

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Brackets indicate that there is some doubt that the verse is original, leaving you to either trust in the scholarship of the person who put in the footnotes, or to go back and do your own research.

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The oldest copies of Mark do not have this. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus do not have those insertions.

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And so that suggests that those were inserted later. The interesting thing is if you read on in Mark, verse 47, and if your eye causes you to stumble, cast it out.

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It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than having two eyes to be cast into hell. Verse 48, where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched.

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Oh, same as verse 44 and 46. But what do you see in verse 48?

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Or rather what you don't see are brackets, which means there's no doubt that that is in the original reading of Mark.

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If you go back to Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, it is there. The oldest manuscripts do have verse 48, where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched.

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That is in the original. It's just a question of whether Jesus said it three times or once, or more specifically, whether Mark recorded it three times or once.

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And the evidence would seem to favor the fact that Mark wrote it once in verse 48.

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But how did that get inserted then? If indeed it's an insertion, if it's not part of the original and the oldest manuscripts don't have it, how did it get inserted?

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Well, take a look at the last words of verse 47. To be cast into hell, and then where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.

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Now look at the last words of verse 45. To be cast into hell. You can see how it would be very easy, because that sentence ends the same way as verse 47, to accidentally skip down to the next line and include where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched.

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Now the wording is slightly different in 43, but nonetheless, you can see how a person could accidentally include that.

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The other possibility is that it's a marginal gloss that somebody wrote in the margins.

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And we know people did this because we have ancient manuscripts where people would put little notes in the margins of the

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Bible, giving people perhaps their opinion on the text or additional information that can be very helpful.

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But sometimes when people were copying the Bible and they'd make a mistake and they'd go back and they'd realize they made a mistake, they had left out some words, and they would put those the words of the text in the margin because they had left them out.

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So margins can contain the scribe's opinion about something that's significant, or they can contain the actual text of scripture if the person had accidentally left it out and then puts it in the margins.

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And so the problem is the next scholar who gets that document, he looks at the margin, he doesn't know if that's the text of scripture that the person simply forgot to include or if it's a marginal note.

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And so what do you do? If you're not sure if that's scripture or not, best to include it. Don't want to leave out scripture, right?

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And so we find that later manuscripts, they tend to have some additional little bits of information, some of which were perhaps in the margins at one point.

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We know some examples where that happens. But again, notice that whether or not verse 44 and 46 are in the original, it makes no difference to your theology because verse 48 says the same thing.

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There's no doubt Jesus said, where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched. He did say that.

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It's just a question of whether he said it three times or once. And he's quoting Isaiah 66, 24 anyway.

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So that's in the Old Testament as well. So it doesn't affect the theology. Most of these don't. Another example,

55:16

Mark 10, verses six through eight. The religious leaders were asking

55:22

Jesus about divorce to explain marriage. He quotes Genesis one and two, verse six. But from the beginning of creation,

55:28

God made them male and female. Verse seven, for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother, verse eight, and the two shall become one flesh.

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Now you'll notice at the end of verse seven, there's a footnote, footnote 28. What does that say?

55:43

It says, some manuscripts add and shall cleave to his wife. Okay, so there's some manuscripts that say, where Jesus says, for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife in Mark.

55:56

Now the oldest copies of Mark do not have that phrase. It's just a man shall leave his father and mother and the two shall be one flesh.

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Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the oldest complete copies of the

56:11

New Testament, they do not have that, that insertion. And apparently most of the ancient manuscripts don't.

56:17

So the translators here in giving that footnote, some manuscripts add, they're giving you the information that, hey, there are some manuscripts that have this extra phrase.

56:25

You can decide for yourself. But they didn't include it in the text because they're fairly confident that Mark did not originally write that phrase in that text.

56:36

Now, how did it get in there then? Well, when you read Genesis 2 .24,

56:43

for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother, it does say, and shall cleave unto his wife. Furthermore, when you read the parallel account in Matthew chapter 19, and Jesus quotes this, it gives a slightly different summation.

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Jesus says, for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother and join to his wife. So he does add that in Matthew's account.

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So Jesus apparently did say that. It's just Mark apparently did not record it because the earliest copies of Mark don't have it.

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But suppose you had a later manuscript of Mark that did have it. Is that going to ruin your theology? Of course not.

57:20

Because that phrase is mentioned in Genesis and it is mentioned in Matthew chapter 19. There's no doubt

57:25

Jesus said that. It's just Mark didn't record it.

57:32

Matthew did. And it's nice to get that different perspective from the different gospels. Each gospel author recorded some of the things that Jesus said and did and omitted other things.

57:43

And that's fine. So again, it's not going to affect your theology. One that could potentially affect your theology in isolation is

57:50

John 1 .18. The New American Standard Translation says, no one has seen God at any time.

57:56

The only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained him. Now, the interesting thing about that is some manuscripts, instead of saying the only begotten

58:04

God, say the only begotten Son. And frankly, that sounds a lot more natural, doesn't it? And so you could imagine how that got changed, assuming that God is in the original.

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And we think it probably is. The weight of the evidence seems to suggest that the original manuscript that John penned, he wrote, he's referring to Jesus as the only begotten

58:25

God. But that's such a weird phrase. You could imagine somebody writing down only begotten.

58:31

It would just be natural to write Son because we hear about Jesus being the only begotten Son. And there are other scriptures where it does say that, where he's the only begotten

58:37

Son. And so there are some manuscripts where in John 118, it says the only begotten Son.

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And it's not that people are trying to, you know, some people say, well, they're trying to reduce the divinity of Jesus.

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They wanna, you know, they're trying to erase the fact that he's God. No, it's just a simple copying mistake.

58:56

You've heard that phrase, only begotten Son. We know it says that elsewhere. It's just very tempting to write that.

59:02

It's a simple mistake, assuming that God is the original. And of course you can dispute that.

59:08

You can say, well, I think the Son is the original reading and what have you. But it doesn't really affect your theology because even if Son is the original here and it's not calling

59:18

Jesus God here, it does call Jesus God elsewhere. In Hebrews 1 .8, for example. There are other places where there are no variations, where there's no doubt that Jesus is

59:27

God. Another section that I think is really interesting and almost certainly a marginal gloss is in John 5, verses three and four.

59:37

This is the account of the pool of Bethesda where Jesus heals the lame man.

59:43

So beginning in verse three, and these lay a multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, and withered.

59:49

And then there's this weird little account. It says, waiting for the movement of the waters for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred up the water.

59:56

And whoever then first, after the stirring of the water stepped in was made well from whatever disease when he was afflicted.

01:00:03

And I've always, I remember reading that when I was very young and thinking, that's so strange. There was this little game that God played where he'd send an angel down, they'd stir up the water and then the first person to jump in gets healed.

01:00:14

And really interesting. And that apparently was the explanation for why there are all these sick people lying around this pool.

01:00:23

But the oldest texts of John do not have that. The oldest texts of John just say it goes directly from verse three to verse five.

01:00:30

Now, keep in mind, the verse numbers were not there. When the Bible was written, there were no verse numbers. Those were added in 1551.

01:00:37

So the original text doesn't have those. But it just goes directly from there to the next, to what would in our modern

01:00:44

Bibles would be verse five. And many modern translations, the NIV, for example, it doesn't have verse four because we're fairly confident that that is not the original text of scripture.

01:00:56

The nice thing about a translation like the New American Standard is it puts it in brackets and gives you a footnote saying that, you know, we're pretty confident this is not in the original.

01:01:06

The oldest copies of John do not have this, but we're including it and we're putting it in brackets so you can decide for yourself.

01:01:13

I appreciate that. Some other, like the NIV, it just leaves it out.

01:01:19

But, and there are some other translations that just put it in, but they don't tell you that it's questionable. Maybe because they didn't know.

01:01:25

If you go back to the King James, that verse will be there, but they didn't know, they didn't have these ancient manuscripts back then.

01:01:31

They were relying on copies of copies of copies. And so they didn't know any better. So this apparently is a marginal gloss because somebody apparently wrote in the margins, he's giving an explanation for why these people were sick.

01:01:46

Perhaps he's appealing to an old tradition. And then the next scholar who's copying that thinks, oh, he left that out and added it in the margin because it's actually the text of scripture.

01:01:56

So you can see how that would be included. But this section is not found in Sinaiticus or Vaticanus. It's not found in the original

01:02:03

Alexandrius or even in P66, which is a mid second century around 150

01:02:08

AD or P75, which is late second and third century documents. It's not there.

01:02:14

So the oldest copies of John do not have this. Early Greek manuscripts up until the ninth century lack this reading.

01:02:23

There's some that will have portions of it, but not the whole thing. So for the first thousand years of church history, nobody had seen that little section about the angel going and stirring up the waters.

01:02:34

That was not in their Bible, at least not in their Greek Bible. There are some Latin Vulgate versions that have it as early as the fourth century.

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So that seems to be where it crept in. It was a marginal gloss in the Latin Vulgate. Again, that bothers people that there are these variants, but there they are.

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And you got to deal with that. Some copies have that. Some copies don't. There are three significant variants that I want you to know about that are the most significant, the most well -known.

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And I want you to know that because the critics know about them. And so you should know about them too. So you can study up and decide for yourself if they're original or if they are later insertions.

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One of them is called the Comma Johannium. That's in 1 John 5, 7. And basically it's this little phrase.

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There are three that bear record in heaven. The Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one. And that's a great little phrase.

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It's a nice summary of the Trinity because the Father, the Word, Jesus is the Word, right? And the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit.

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Those are the three persons of the Trinity. And they're one. They're one God. But you will not find that in any of the

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Greek Bibles. It appears to be a marginal gloss.

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It began appearing in the Latin Vulgate around the year 800. So again, for the first, you know, 700, 800 years of church history, nobody had that in their

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Bible. As far as the evidence indicates. All the manuscripts are missing that little phrase.

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The Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. There are three that bear record in heaven. The Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.

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It just wasn't there. That appeared in the Latin Vulgate around 800. It's perhaps an explanation for the next phrase, which mentions three things.

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And perhaps he's linking that together. And we know that because we know there are some

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Latin versions where that's in the margins, but it's not in the text. And so apparently it got moved into the text at some point.

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And sometimes people would leave indications where they're, you know, indicating we're not sure if that's original or not.

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So the first Greek manuscript to have it was actually a Greek Latin copy where it had both dated to 1362.

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And the first pure Greek text to have that reading was in the 1500s. So there's no doubt, in my mind, there's no doubt that the original copy of 1

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John did not have that phrase there. And it shouldn't be in modern Bibles because it's something that was, it's a copying mistake.

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It's a marginal gloss that got moved into the text. So I'm very confident that's not original.

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You can disagree with me. You can say, well, here's my reasons for thinking it's original. That's fine. But you would have, I think you'd have a difficult time with that one.

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Now, the other two, you could make a little better of an argument that they're original. The next one is

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John 7, 53 through 8, 11. So it's just 12 little verses. It's called the Pericope Adultery.

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This is the story of the woman caught in adultery where Jesus writes on the ground and, you know, she'll be stoner.

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And he eventually says, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. That's a great story.

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But it is not found in the earliest copies of John. It's not found in these very ancient manuscripts like P66 or P75.

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It's not in Sinaiticus. It's not in Vaticanus, the earliest copies of the entire New Testament.

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It appears in the fourth, late fourth, early fifth century in some manuscripts.

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Some have it, some don't. The interesting thing too is there are some manuscripts that will put that story in a different place.

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There's some that put it at the end of John. Like we, this is a great story. This, we got to get this in here, but they don't know where to put it because it doesn't really flow naturally in the place where it's inserted in between verse 52 and then chapter 8.

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Some manuscripts even put it in the Gospel of Luke after chapter 21, verse 38.

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They'll insert it right there. Some of it put it in at the end of John, but just before the last verse, which makes no contextual sense.

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So it's interesting. It kind of, it kind of floats around because it's such a great story and that event may well have happened.

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The point is there's good evidence that John did not record that event in his gospel. And so you can do what you want with that information.

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But the oldest manuscripts we have of the Gospel of John do not have the pericope adultery. I wouldn't base any of my theology on that passage.

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And by the way, you don't need to. Because there's nothing in that passage you can't get elsewhere in scripture. The idea that Jesus is saying, well, yeah, you know, you who have not sinned, you cast the first stone.

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That's an application of an Old Testament law that you had to be, in order to accuse somebody of a crime, you had to be innocent of that crime.

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And so Jesus is simply applying the Old Testament law. And there had to be eyewitnesses.

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Two or more eyewitnesses where was the man that she was supposedly having adultery with? Because both of them are supposed to be stoned.

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So there's nothing that Jesus does in that passage that would be inconsistent with Old Testament laws.

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And then finally, we have the longer ending of Mark. And this is probably the most contentious because we have the earliest evidence of it.

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Although the very early versions of Mark do not have it. Basically Mark chapter 16 verses 9 through 20 do not exist in the oldest copies of the

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Gospel of Mark that we have. And you can do with that what you will.

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The earliest manuscripts of Mark end at verse 8. Sinaiticus, Vaticanus end at verse 8.

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That's it. And then there's also a medium ending where they add some of that. Sometimes they'll add the last paragraph of verse 20, but they'll put it after verse 8.

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There's just a little bit of a longer ending. There's a medium ending and then there's the full ending that many of us grew up reading.

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The oldest copies of Mark don't have it. You can do what you want with that. You can say, well, there was an older copy.

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It's just been lost with time. But the evidence would seem to indicate that Mark ended originally at verse 8. You might disagree with that, but at least you have the information.

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And if you have a modern Bible, it'll put those verses in brackets and it'll give you some information about the oldest copies not having that.

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And then you can do your own homework to find out, to decide for yourself if it's the original reading or not.

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Now, these are the three most significant variants. And it bothers people that there are these variants in Scripture.

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I don't think that there's a lot of doubt as to what the original reading was. It's just you have to do your homework for these.

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Many modern Bibles include that kind of textual information. They'll tell you if a verse is questionable by putting in brackets and or a footnote giving you possible alternatives that are included in other manuscripts.

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And then you can do further research. You can decide for yourself which one's the original. One of them will be the original text, obviously.

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It's just a question of which one. You have to do a little homework in some cases. If you want to know if the Bible you use is providing this information, just turn to John chapter 8.

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Look at the first 11 verses. Are they in brackets? Do they have a footnote indicating that the oldest manuscripts don't have this section?

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If so, then you're using a study Bible that includes informational and textual variants.

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And if you have that Bible, then you can take a look and research further if there's any doubt as to what the original reading was.

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They'll include it. And so I mentioned these three significant variations for a reason.

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They are the most significant variations. I mean, with two of them, you have 12 verses that are in question and perhaps not in the original.

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And you can do your own homework on that. You might come to a different conclusion than me. You might say, well, I'm pretty confident these were in the original for whatever reason.

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That's fine. The point is, if you have a study Bible, it gives you the information so that you know if this is something that everybody agrees on.

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It's in all the manuscripts. At least there's no serious variation. Or if there's some question about it. And as I alluded to previously, 99 .8

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% of the modern Bible that we have, there's no doubt in terms of the meaning of the original text that the author wrote.

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We have that today. And for the remaining 0 .2%, we do have that and we have an alternative.

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And we're not sure sometimes which is the original. So my point is, if you hold in your hand a modern English Bible that has this textual information in it, you have the word of God.

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It'll either be in the text or in the footnotes, right? And most of it is just straightforward text.

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There's no doubt as to what the original is. And for the remaining 0 .2%, one of the two readings that it provides will be the original.

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It's just, you might have to do a little additional homework there or you can rely on the scholarship of others. Nothing wrong with that.

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But I mentioned those three significant variations because the critics are aware of them and so that you can have encouragement.

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Because if you just turn to a random page in your Bible and look at all the places where there aren't any brackets and there aren't any footnotes indicating any possible differences.

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And that should tell you this is amazingly faithful to the original text that the authors penned.

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In the vast majority of verses in Bible, there's no doubt whatsoever that that is the original reading.

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And again, in 0 .2%, you'll have to do a little additional homework. But one of the two, either in the text or in the footnotes, one of those will be the original reading.

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It's just you have to do a little research there. Some people would prefer that that's not the case, but God has allowed minor variations to accumulate in his word.

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And that allows us to track the families of texts. It doesn't affect any major theology, so there's no problem there.

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That's superior to the way that many people would have preferred that God preserved his word where he wouldn't maybe allow any mistakes at all because then we wouldn't be able to track the manuscript families.

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We would have no idea where they're coming from. And then we wouldn't have confidence that they're true to the original.

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So it's a little counterintuitive by allowing variations that actually gives us confidence that we know what the original text said.

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And so, again, if you're holding a modern English Bible, you're holding in your hand the word of God. There's no doubt about that.

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This is faithful to the original. Those critics who say, well, you know, the Bible's been copied so many times.

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Who knows if it's remotely true to the original? They have not done even the least bit of homework on this issue.

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They have not spent a half an hour in a library or even Googling the issue for that matter, because the

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Bible is the most authentic, reliable work of the ancient world by far.

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And we saw that in terms of the number of manuscripts that we have. And that allows us to, by comparing the variants, take a look at the different families and know what the original said.

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So very encouraging. It should be very encouraging to you that the Bible is unique in this way. And although that doesn't prove that it's

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God's word, it's certainly consistent with the fact that it's God's word, that God has preserved it in a way that is a little different than most people suspect, but nonetheless allows us to have confidence that what we hold in our hand today is the word of God.

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Now, the remaining issue that we haven't covered today is, if I'm reading an English translation of the

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Bible, is the translation faithful to the Hebrew and Greek texts?

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So we need to remember that we're reading a translation of God's word. Is the translation reliable?

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And so, Lord willing, on the next webcast, we'll take a look at how did we get our modern

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English translations and are they reliable? And I'll jump to the end.

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They are. But we'll take a look at the details of that next time, Lord willing. So I hope this has been helpful to you.