NT Transmission - Codices

P46, Nomen Sacra, and the Move From Papyri to Vellum Manuscripts

Boy, someone just took the clock right off the wall. Of course, it was an hour off, but anyway, it's one of them radio-controlled clocks. My phone was off by an hour this morning. That was nice. Anyway, if you haven't been with us, we have been looking at New Testament reliability and we're pressing on with that, looking at some of the papyri.

A little quick quiz as to your memories. This is P46. It was the last thing we looked at last week. Anyone remember what P46 contains? Well, it does contain Philippians. That's true. It does contain Hebrews, so it's a collection of what?

Paul's letters. The earliest collection we have of Paul's writings, P46. Where did I see P46? No, not in Denver. That was P72. Dublin, Ireland. That's right, where we got in trouble for worshipping the manuscripts.

So, anyway. And what are those? I didn't get my little laser out here, but what are those little lines up there on the screen? Abbreviations. What are they called? These right here and here and here. What are they called?

The Nomena Sacra. The Nomena Sacra. Very good. The sacred names. And they mark early Christian manuscripts. All right, we press on. Here are some pictures of P91. That's not me. I am ancient, but I'm not that ancient.

P91 is there on the corner here. I took this picture. It's actually one-third of it. The other two-thirds are in Milan, Italy. And the folks in Milan want this, and the folks here want that. I was in Sydney, Australia.

And I had half a day where I wasn't scheduled to be doing something. And they said, what would you like to go see? Would you like to go see the opera house? The Sydney Harbor Bridge? You know, when my wife came out on the next trip, she went to the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

And you put on this suit thing, and you can go over the top of it, and you have to be strapped in and all this stuff. And she did that. Of course, I would never do that anyways. But I said, okay, we've got half a day.

All right, I want to go to Macquarie State University because I knew that that was the home of this section of P91. And you can see me holding it there. And had a grand old conversation with the curator, who is a papyrologist.

And we put it under the microscope and examined the letters and had a grand old time talking about dating of papyri and stuff like that. And he seemed really excited about it. And I could sort of tell that his wife had gotten tired of talking about papyri about 30 years earlier.

So he was quite excited about the whole deal. But that's what I do when I have a little time off while I'm traveling, is I go visit papyri. So anyway, there's some of the papyri. Then after the piece of the church in A .D. 313, so if you know your church history, if, like George, you review your church history notes every morning before going to work, then you know that there was on-again, off-again persecution of the church from the time of Nero up to about 250 A .D.

And then you have consistent empire-wide persecution of Christians from 250 -260 all the way up until 313. This is the hardest, toughest period of persecution, is what takes place during that time. And then you have the piece of the church that is the Edict of Milan in 313 that ends persecution of Christians in most of the Roman Empire.

It still takes a year or two before all the rest of it is taken care of. Remember, you don't have fax machines, telephones, so on and so forth. It takes a while for news to get around. But once Christianity, and that's not when Rome became an alleged Christian empire.

That's under Theodosius much later. But that's when Christianity became a religio licita, a licit or legal religion. And at that time, then professional scribes and large scriptoriums could be used to copy the scriptures.

And this time, the great vellum or leather manuscripts. Now, when we say leather manuscripts, parchment is made out of animal skin, but is extremely, real parchment anyways, but is extremely thinly sliced.

So it looks like paper, but it's actually from animal skin. That's when the great vellum manuscripts begin to appear in opposition to papyri. Now, it's not that they didn't have vellum before. It's just that it's much more expensive.

And so these include the three greatest of the ancient manuscripts, Sinaiticus, which is abbreviated with the Hebrew letter Aleph. Vaticanus, which is the letter B. And Alexandrinus, which is letter A in the apparatus of the Greek New Testament.

Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus in the Critical Apparatus

Do you happen to have your Greek New Testament, Casey? You left it at home. You almost always have it. Here I was going to be able to say, see, we can. Oh, there's one. There's one. All right. A faithful student has.

So if you were to look at the bottom of the page there in the Greek New Testament, you would see very often these manuscripts being cited. Sinaiticus, Vaticanus may well have been among the Bibles copied with imperial money at the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

And 325, when Constantine called the Council of Nicaea to deal with the Arian controversy. One of the things he did was he gave imperial monies to the churches to copy portions of Scripture. Why did he do that?

Well, because 15 years earlier, Rome had been destroying the Christian scriptures right and left. Many, many thousands of manuscripts had been destroyed by the Romans burn. And so there was monies given.

Now, obviously, Constantine did not tell the churches what books to put in there. That is a Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown fiction. Unfortunately, most people in our society are more influenced by fiction than they are by facts.

And by the way, in passing, let me make sure you all know, once again, the Council of Nicaea had absolutely, positively nothing to do with the canon of Scripture. It was never mentioned. It did not promulgate a canon.

They didn't discuss what books should be in the Bible. You would not believe the amount of abject silliness that you will find online today about the Council of Nicaea and choosing the books of the Bible and all the rest of that stuff.

I mean, that one subject is probably the most fictionalized subject that I know of online. It's just amazing. The foolishness of the material there. But unfortunately, especially when it comes to facts of history, very few people are taught in how to deal with history and even, you know, you're all hearing about this CNN thing on Sunday nights, right?

You know, looking for Jesus, searching for whatever it is. Looking for Jesus in all the wrong places is the best way we would put it. And within the first 45 seconds, and our resident historian will laugh with me at this, within the first 45 seconds, they say something along the lines of Jesus Christ has influenced more people than any other single person, and yet, he did not leave behind a single physical fact of his existence, any evidence of his existence.

And I listen to that and I just want to go, you do realize that that is true for 99 .999 of everybody who lived at that time. If you question the existence of everybody based on that, nobody was in existence.

I'm not sure who was building all that stuff, but evidently if you do not find a cache of ancient social security cards, there's no really way of knowing that anybody was running around back then. The level of naivete is shocking, but it's the educational system.

What do you want? That's what we got. So, just in passing, sort of went off topic there, but if you ever hear anybody saying, well, you know, there were lots of other gospels at the Council of Nicaea, but they threw them out.

You're talking to someone who has an internet education, not a real one, and unfortunately they predominate these days and get very upset when you point out to them that they are utterly and completely clueless as to what in the world they're talking about.

Let's take a look at a couple of these. This is Codex Sinaiticus, or at least a major portion of Codex Sinaiticus. Ever had, well, for example, we do have an excellent example of this right here in the room with us.

We have Codex Ricotonius, and you may notice something, I can see it from here, and you may notice that its binding does not exactly look like when it came from the ancient scriptorium where it was made.

I'm sorry? Yeah, that's the original, right, also called duct tape. But anyway, if that ever shows up with a new Bible, we're all going to be like, what's next, Presbyterian? I mean, you know, it's just, but you can, in fact, some of our hymnals here, I've noticed, some of the older hymnals, some of the material up front or back sometimes disappears.

Pages disappear, little sections of pages, things like that will disappear. And this certainly happened with ancient books as well. You would have sections that would fall out. Binding methodologies were not always as good as we might have today, though I will point out that very frequently their paper manufacturing was very frequently better than ours today, not because we don't have the knowledge to do it right, we just do it cheap, which is why you buy books today and ten years later they look like they are ancient manuscripts.

It's because we don't take the acid out of the pages and they turn yellow and blah, blah, blah, blah. We know how not to do that. In fact, I'll try to remember, maybe, you know, I'm not going to make any promises.

My schedule for the next, well, basically year, just, you know, I'll know next month I'm going to Spain to debate a Jesuit and we just added a tour of Israel to November, so my whole year is absolutely insane.

I don't know how I'm ever going to get it all done. But I will try to remember to bring in my Stephanos 1550 Greek New Testament. It's from 1550, that's when it was printed. It's not a facsimile, it's the real thing, and it's amazing to look at the paper.

I have books from seminary and Bible college that look older as far as the pages go than what's in a book that's 400 and what, 465, yeah, 465 years old, something like that. So, it is amazing. This is Codex Sinaiticus, and that's pretty much what it looked like when I saw it in 2005 in the British Museum in London.

And, in fact, that's probably where it was, where this picture was taken, because I walked into the document room and there was nobody there. And I walk up to this glass case, and there's rows of cases, and this is just one of the rows, and there's Codex Sinaiticus.

And it's under glass, but right next to it was Codex Alexandrinus, which we'll see in a moment. And behind me was a Wycliffe Bible, a Tyndale, and a 1611 King James. And there was nobody there. And I'm just staying there staring at this thing going, what, really?

They have no idea the value of these treasures, I guess, because I'd expect guards standing around. No, that's just how it looked. But that doesn't tell you a whole lot looking at it there. I mean, it's a big book, obviously.

Here's what one of the pages looks like. And remember, folks, that ain't printed. That is written. Compare that with the papyri that we were looking at, and you can see the difference between professional scribes and nonprofessional scribes as far as just the beauty of the book is concerned, the lettering, the consistency of the lettering.

Now, Sinaiticus is a controversial text, more so recently than really has been, not much so in scholarship, but Sinaiticus and Vaticanus especially are greatly detested by King James-only advocates. They are detested because they were the primary basis upon which the Byzantine text type upon which King James is based was overthrown in the scholarly world.

And so they are greatly disliked. And about a year and a half, two years, well, about two years ago or so now, a Christian fellow put out a movie in which he revived an old and pretty well forgotten controversy about a particular individual who raised the assertion that he was the author of Sinaiticus.

He had written it, and that it's not from the early 4th century, but from the middle of the 19th century. And, of course, threw in a bunch of Jesuit conspiracy stuff to make it all believable. Some of you have heard my debate with this gentleman on the dividing line, but that kind of stuff is running around out there as well.

You'll also notice some things about, other than its regularity, you do have a few marginal notes. You do have a few things written between lines. As far as we can tell, and I guess I should have done this, I could have done this, I have a facsimile of Sinaiticus, a printed facsimile.

And the only thing is I didn't want to strain my back to bring it in. It literally weighs, I think, 45 pounds. And if I recall, again, maybe if I'm grabbing the Greek text, I can grab it too, I suppose.

But, I'll try to drag it in, but you can leaf through it. And Sinaiticus is fully available to us. Codexsinaiticus .org. You can access the entirety of the manuscript in two different ways. You can see up there on the screen, same text, but it looks different.

The reason is the top text is straight on light and the bottom text is called raking light, light coming from the side. So you can sort of see the actual surface of the parchment and it gives you a little different perspective.

All that's available online. What was so surprising about Sinaiticus when it was discovered, aside from the fact that it was 300, 400 years earlier than anything else we had had at that time, is that it also contains the Old Testament.

So it's one of our earliest editions of the Greek Septuagint as well. Now, it's not complete. It was originally. We can tell it originally had everything. And even as it stands today, there are portions in three or four different places.

The only place you can find it all in one place is online. The majority of it is in London, but there's still a few fragments left in St. Catherine's Monastery where it was found. And there are some in Russia, too, where it spent some time as well.

So the reason I have this particular screen up here is that you can see a textual variant has been written in. This is a manuscript that has been in use for literally hundreds of years. And so if you've got something that's been in use that long, there could be a lot of different hands that will make notations or even make emendations and corrections, things like that.

So, like, these little dots here are the indication of, well, there is a variant here. But the main reason I have this here is because of this word right here, parakletos, in the Greek, parakletos. This is from John 14, where the spirit is identified as the helper or the paraclete, as we say.

And the reason that I put that up there is that I have a tie that I've made. I didn't use Sinaiticus. I used Alexandrinus. It was prettier. But I have a tie of this text. And when my Muslim friends try to argue that the one spoken about in John 14 and 16 is actually Muhammad, that Muhammad is the one being prophesied there, and that the Greek was originally not parakletos, but parakletos, the exalted one, and that would be a Greek version of Muhammad's name, I can just sort of pick up my tie and go, you'll see that this was long before Muhammad.

It says parakletos. And they look at me and go, you're weird. And we just go on from there. But that's why it's there. You can see that particular term. And you could look at those things at Codex Sinaiticus.

Now, interestingly enough, yes. No, in fact, those are in the middle of words. Yeah, final, there would be, I think, in the larger one here. No, they didn't hyphenate. But you can see, for example, right here, at the end of the line, how small that letter is, how small that letter is.

There was a convention for some indications of the end of a line. You don't see it. Yeah, I have one right there, one right there. So you do have some like that, where the letter will be much smaller.

I think probably some of that developed during the papyri stage, where you could lose things at the end of a line. So they wanted to sort of find ways of indicating this is the end of the line. You haven't lost anything going into the next word or something like that.

But, no, there are some small amounts of punctuation in the early manuscripts. You know, I said there, I didn't say there was no punctuation. I said almost no punctuation. But, no, those are just smaller letters that they're using.

And some of these are right in the middle of a word. So, no. Up until two weeks ago, whenever I showed this slide, I would have, and I'm going to have to replace this slide now. I should do it this week, if I can remember to do it.

But I'm filling in for Janet Mefford on Monday and Wednesday, and this week's going to go by so fast, you can't imagine. Anyway, normally what I would have said at this point is, we don't really have as much access to Codex Vaticanus as we would like.

It's in the Vatican Library. But about two weeks ago, the Vatican Library put the entirety of Vaticanus online with high quality photography. So it is now fully available to us. Vaticanus is a very important and early manuscript.

It's clearly directly related to P72. Not a copy of P72, but P72 and Vaticanus have the same progenitor, the same manuscript. Whoever copied P72, that manuscript was also used in the production of Vaticanus, which is really interesting.

So we have multiple lines, which we'll talk about later on. The only problem is, sometime over the past four, five hundred years, somewhere around there, some brilliant guy who had way too much time on his hands decided that this manuscript was becoming too difficult to read, and so he retraced all of it.

Went back over all of it. Well, it makes it a whole lot easier to read, but it also means that he had to get it right in everything that he was guessing what a letter looked like or whatever else like that.

So it's been rewritten, not rewritten, but traced back over. Can you imagine that time? Because it's old in New Testament as well. Wow. Something tells me it was actually a monk who got in trouble, and his father superior or something said, You know what you get to do?

No, no, no, no, no. You're not cleaning the latrine for a week. You are retracing that entire book. It's just a theory. I really can't prove that. Well, yeah, some of you are old enough to remember the Xerox commercials from years and years ago.

Remember the Xerox commercials where you had the monk, and he had hidden a Xerox copier in his cell, and all the other monks would always be angry at him because he'd get done so fast. He was out playing volleyball and doing stuff like that, and it was because he was just taking stuff in and copying it off on his Xerox copier in his cell.

And some of you are looking at me like, No, never saw that one. Well, okay, I did. You saw that one? There you go. All right, good. That's how long ago the Xerox copier commercials were. Then we have Codex Alexandrinus, and like I said, that's the one I use to make my tie because it's a nice pretty color.

But it's much smaller. It's a much smaller volume than Sinaiticus is. It was sitting right next to it, and just in dimensions it's a good bit smaller. Okay, let's go back to just the facts. Now, aside from the 5 ,700 plus Greek texts, handwritten Greek manuscripts that we have cataloged, we have early translations of the New Testament into Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, Boheric, etc., etc., that are important witnesses to the early texts of the New Testament.

Now, on some levels, these translations are just as important as the Greek as to whether a verse was or was not there, a phrase was or was not there, but they are translations. And as a result, their testimony is secondary to the original languages because if they're translations, then, well, there were different qualities of translations that were done, things like that.

So they're important, but they're normally cited at the end of the textual data in your Greek New Testaments. Combining these with the Greek text yields over 20 ,000, some would say 25 ,000, handwritten witnesses to the New Testament.

Now, we have more than 124 Greek manuscript witnesses within the first 300 years after the writing of the New Testament. That is far more than any other work of antiquity. Now, what is a work of antiquity?

Well, for example, the Quran is not a work of antiquity. It's a medieval document because its origination even in Islamic theology, at least as far as written in history, begins around, well, 610 at the earliest and really as a body, 632 at the earliest.

So it's in the early medieval period, really late antiquity if you want to push it, I suppose, but it's over half a millennium after the New Testament, so it has a much shorter period of time where it's transmitted by hand and before a printing press.

But when we're talking about other works of antiquity, we're talking about, you know, Suetonius and Tacitus and Pliny and the Latin and Greek historians and things that were being written contemporaneously to the New Testament.

In fact, we have, and again, can't comment as of yet about the Egyptian funerary mask issue and things like that, but currently, at least as far as documented and published, we have 12 manuscripts from the 2nd century.

That is, within 100 years of the end of the writing of the New Testament, these manuscripts contain portions of all four Gospels, nine books of Paul, Acts, Hebrews and Revelation comprising the majority of the books of the New Testament we possess today.

Again, no work of antiquity even comes close to this early attestation. In fact, the average length of time between the writing of most works contemporaneous with the New Testament, such as the historical works of Pliny, Suetonius or Tacitus, and their first extant copies is between 500 and 900 years.

So you need to understand what we're saying there while I turn the volume all the way up because we've got a clip to show. I don't know if it's going to be hearable by everybody, but might as well try.

What we're saying is that when you, for other works of antiquity, on average, if the book was written in 100 A .D., then the earliest manuscript copies we would have would be between 400 and 900. If it was written 100 B .C., then the earliest manuscript copies would be between 400 and 900 A .D., five to nine hundred years down the road from when they were written.

And so that's the way things are. That's the way history has worked. We have to be very, very careful that we do not import our modern standards into this particular area. We have MP3 recorders and we've got the cloud and we've got libraries and interlibrary loan and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

And it would be wonderful to have that kind, that level of documentation in regards to historical events, but the reality is that is a very, very, very, very, very modern advantage when it comes to history.

And even in relatively modern periods, anyone who, for example, studies the Civil War, for example, will know that historians can look at the same battle and even draw from the same sources and come to rather interestingly different conclusions concerning the behavior of a particular general or a colonel or whatever, because we don't have, you know, we can't sit there and watch a satellite imagery of the movement of the troops and so on and so forth.

So we tend, it is very common for me to listen to people criticizing the New Testament stuff and what they're doing is they're saying, well, we don't have MP3 recordings of what Jesus said. Well, congratulations.

If that's your standard for doing history, we don't know anything that happened even a couple of generations ago, but that's not how it works. Now, I'm going to see if this is going to work. And again, I don't have the, I'm going to turn this off a second.

There we go. Turn that off a second so we don't have that. Let's see if we can hear my conversation with Bart Ehrman.

...Tetonius or Tacitus or Quiney and their first text of days for copies. Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. Ginormous doesn't cover it. The New Testament, they're much earlier attestation than any other book in antiquity.

Now, did you catch how he said that? For the New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book of antiquity. Now, if you didn't remember from two weeks ago, Bart Ehrman is really the leading critic of the New Testament in the English-speaking world today.

He's an apostate, and he makes lots of money writing books against New Testament Christianity. And so there you have him admitting, and if he were to really admit all the facts, which in one way or another he has in various forms, we have the earliest attestation for the New Testament, we have the widest and most attestation for the New Testament, and we have the purest or best preserved attestation for the New Testament than for any other book of antiquity.

The problem is his radical skepticism is so much that I just don't know how... It's funny. On one side, Bart Ehrman says he cannot really have any confidence that we know what Mark said unless we had ten notarized copies of Mark written within six months of the original book, which means we don't know anything that happened in history at all.

But then on the other hand, he'll write books defending the historical existence of Jesus against people who say Jesus didn't exist. The inconsistency is fairly shocking, but there you go. Now here is a graphic from a fellow down in Australia that sort of helps you to see this.

Over here we have the size of the yellow ball there indicates how many manuscripts. So Homer is the big boy here. We have 643 manuscripts of Homer. 500 years is the time period between when it was originally written and our first manuscript evidence for Homer.

He's the big boy of 643. Sophocles does pretty well. He's got 193 manuscripts, but notice this number here. 1400 years between when it was first written and our first manuscript copy. Poor Plato. He's only got seven.

No one's ever understood Plato. Plato did not understand Plato. So as popular as he may be, sorry Mr. C, Mr. C is a philosopher, but only seven manuscripts and 1 ,400 years between the two. Caesar here does a little better because he's only 1 ,000 years, but he's only got 10.

Euripides, nine, and that's 1 ,300 years. Pliny isn't too bad here. He's got 750 years between when he's written and our first manuscripts. Now the big old yellow thing on there is not the sun. That's the New Testament.

In comparison, we've got the New Testament. This graph says 24 ,000, including all the foreign language translations. It says only 40 to 70 years. That's a little bit low. I'd be in a little bit better position to defend 100, but you're still talking a ridiculously small amount of time in comparison to all these other works of antiquity, and then you look at just the size of the material, just the amount of the material, and it gives you a sense that what we're hearing so much about is the difficulty of knowing what the New Testament originally said and la, la, la, la, la.

Then what we should be hearing about, we should be hearing these very same people, if they're consistent, saying all the rest of this stuff, not even worth reading because there's no way it could possibly be original or knowable.

Yeah, Mark Berry. You've got really good, yeah, right there. Actually, yeah, Mark Berry. That's a rather small print up there in the corner. So keep that in mind when, you know, you hear people questioning the validity of...

The Phone Game Theory of New Testament Transmission

Now, I'm only going to be able to get into a part of this given the time here, but often the transmission of the text in the New Testament is likened to the phone game. It is likened to the phone game.

Wow, can you... You know, I have shown that slide for a decade and never noticed that it needs to be edited. Ha, ha, ha. It is likened to the phone game. See, we all... I just filled the word... It's textual barrier right there.

That's all there is to it. Oh, yeah, I've never seen it. Amazing. Where one person whispers something in the ear of the person next in line and so forth around the circle until the last person repeats what he has heard and it is inevitably changed in often humorous ways from what was originally said.

But is this an accurate way of thinking of how the New Testament is transmitted over time? Now, this is something that you'll especially get from Bart Ehrman or what I would call Ehrmanites who have read him and haven't read his scholarly stuff.

They've only read his popularized stuff. And he's responsible for this. He does not make it clear enough in his popularized stuff. He leaves himself some wiggle room. But this is really what you're going to get from the vast majority of folks who are teaching philosophy or religion classes in your community colleges and freshman level university classes and now down into the high school and junior high school level too is this idea of all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies and the idea, as it's explained and this is what Summer encountered from her exceptionally nasty professor at Glendale Community College a number of years ago was that what we have is probably ten generations down the line and the idea is that you've got the first one and then it gets copied and there are a couple of mistakes but it's pretty good.

But then that copy gets copied and the mistakes are copied. And then a few more mistakes are put in and then that gets copied and more mistakes and so by the time you get four, five, six generations down the line you're getting an ever increasing number of mistakes and what you're getting and then what starts happening is people start noticing it and they try to fix mistakes and sometimes they get it right but then sometimes they just don't understand what it was originally saying and they think something that is a mistake something that wasn't a mistake was a mistake and then they fix something that really wasn't a mistake and it just, you know and what they present to their audiences sounds very plausible that well, yeah, by the time I get to the it would sort of be like if I took if I just grabbed George's notes oh, I just took something from George and I took out a single page just ripped it out and gave it back to George and I gave that single page to Josh I said, copy it.

Now looking at George's handwriting I'm not getting very far at all and then looking at Josh's handwriting I know we're not getting very far at all and then he gives his copy not the original but his copy to here and all the way around so by the time we get down to Casey it is now written in Swahili and has almost nothing whatsoever to do with what was originally written that's the single line phone game transmission theory and unfortunately it's extremely popular and unfortunately most Christians have never really thought about how in the world we got the scriptures in the first place and so if that were the case it would be really, really, really hard to meaningfully defend the idea of the assertion that we know what the original writers wrote because if that's all we had that would be a rough situation to be in the reality is that's not all we have and so next time around, Lord willing one of the most important elements of this and that is the multifocality of the New Testament multiple lines, multiple authors and that really is something that needs to be understood on all of our parts but I couldn't fit that into five minutes so I've sort of given you a taste of what's coming and Lord willing, next Lord's Day we will continue on with that alright?

Let's close the Word of Prayer Father, once again we thank you for this opportunity the peace you've given to us to consider these things may we be good students of your Word we pray in Christ's name Amen.

Don't use the pattern when you cut the new board. You're in trouble. You just keep cutting from that board. By the time you're done you've got like a board of six foot five. We have a lot of people in our work that do that and they apply it and they sort of.