Is the New Testament a Reliable Record of Jesus' Teachings? White vs Ismail

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James White debates Islamic scholar Yusuf Ismail on the reliability of the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus. This debate was part 1 of a 2 part debate held on October 1, 2013 in Potchefstroom South Africa.

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United States and its international treaties. Copying or distribution of this production without the expressed written permission of Alpha and Omega Ministries Incorporated is prohibited.
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Very welcome to all of you. You have to excuse my English. I'm a real
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Afrikaner and a real puck. In my five years here, I have learned to speak a good
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Afrikaner English. But welcome to tonight's debate, and I hope you enjoy it a lot.
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If you have any questions, you can post it on Facebook, on Raju Kristi's Facebook page, or you can tweet it on Raju Kristi's Twitter page.
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Okay, and then I'm going to ask Prof. Flip to speak.
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He's going to be the moderator for the evening, and he's going to handle the rest of the things.
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Have a nice evening, guys. From my side also, a hearty welcome to everybody, specifically to our two speakers tonight.
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You will see that they are extremely competent and sharp people. You will have to be wide awake that you can really keep up with them.
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Let me first say a word of hearty welcome to Yusuf Ismail. He's an attorney from Durban, and more specifically, he's an
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Islamic scholar, a public speaker, and a debater on religion and contemporary society, having debated many prominent apologists and philosophers.
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He has debated arguably the best Christian philosopher of the century,
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William Lane—William Lane Craig, Mike Licona, Jay Smith, John Gilchrist, and many others on a variety and a range of topics and issues covering the relevancy of religion in the 21st century, the authenticity of scriptures, and the issue of peace and violence in world religions.
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I had the privilege to—this is the second time I have to moderate a debate where he is a speaker.
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I can assure you he's got a very sharp mind, and when I listened to him the first time,
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I thought, wow, I wish the students, the theology students, would know such a lot of theological resources, but also know how to answer the questions that are raised by these theologians he is quoting.
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Let's give a hand to Dr .—to Mr. Yusuf Ismail. Then we are greatly privileged to have
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Dr. James White with us. He's the director of the Alpha and Omega Ministries, that is a presuppositional apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.
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He received his BA from Grand Canyon College, his master's from Fuller Theological Seminary, and then he also received a
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THM, a THD, and a DEMUN degree from Columbia Evangelical Seminary.
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He has served as a professor of Greek, of Hebrew, of systematic theology, and various apologetic topics at the
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Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary Extension Campus in Arizona and the
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Columbia Evangelical Seminary. He's also a critical consultant for the
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Lockman Foundation, and he has written over 24 books.
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Dr. White has participated in over 130 public moderated debates covering topics such as Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, the
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King James Only Movement, Jehovah's Witnesses, and atheism. His debate opponents have included scholars such as Bart Ehrman, John Dominique Crossan, and Marcus Bogg, and popularizers such as Dan Barker and John Selby Spong.
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Dr. White has also been an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona since 1998.
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He's married to Kelly, and they have two children, a son called Joshua and a daughter called
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Summer. He's got one grandchild. Now, what we will be doing tonight is,
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Dr. White will be the first speaker on the question, is the New Testament a reliable record of Jesus' teachings?
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And he will have 30 minutes, and then after him, Yusuf Ismail will also have 30 minutes.
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Then I will give them each 10 minutes for rebuttals, and then
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Yusuf Ismail will speak first of all on, is the Quran reliable, is it a reliable record of Muhammad's teachings?
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He will then again have 30 minutes. Dr. James White will have 30 minutes to respond on that, and then there will be 10 minutes, 10 minutes rebuttals again.
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And then, if we can fit it in, we will have a few minutes for Q &A, questions and answers, but I will give them each five minutes for concluding remarks.
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The goal of this discussion is to learn what are Muslim viewpoints of the
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Christians' understanding of the Bible, and vice versa, what are
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Christians' viewpoints of the Quran. How reliable are these documents?
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The speakers will not be abrasive. They will respect each other, and if not,
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I will stop them. And we plead with the audience to be the same.
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Dr. White, you are first. All right, it is an honor to be with you here this evening.
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We'll be discussing some things that the Muslims in the audience have probably never heard of before, and the
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Christians in the audience have probably never heard of before. And so, I hope you will give equal attention to both sides, no matter what side you might favor right now.
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I hope you will, if you're on my side, I hope you will listen very carefully to what Yusuf Ismail has to say, and vice versa as well.
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I hope you'll listen to what I have to say, even if you come here this evening as a Muslim. Now, real issue.
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I really want us to understand what the real issue tonight is. Few today understand the history of ancient documents.
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Most people sitting here probably think that the Bible you have in your hands, or the Quran you have in your hands, just arrived in the form that it was.
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The Bible's always had a leather cover, it's always had gold pages, and it's always had a thumb index. That's actually not the case.
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The process of transmission in antiquity is vastly different than it is today.
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Today, we can just hit print, and out comes something from our computer. That is a very, very modern thing,
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I assure you. Hand copying was the only way to produce documents for distribution until relatively recent times.
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Every document produced prior to printing, and actually even after printing, has been corrupted, quote, unquote, in its transmission.
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I need to define the term corruption. Corruption is any variation or alteration in the text, no matter how minor it might be.
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Some of you have heard about the Adulterer's Bible. It was one of the early printings, the King James Version, and as they set the type for the
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Ten Commandments, they forgot the word not, and thou shalt not commit adultery. And many hundreds of copies were printed before someone noticed the problem, so it became known as the
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Adulterer's Bible. So, even in the invention of printing, you still have corruption of the text due to the fact that, well, we human beings, we do some rather intriguing and interesting things.
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Now, there are over 5 ,700 catalogued Greek manuscripts of the
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New Testament, comprising ancient papyri containing only a few lines of text, all the way to complete manuscripts from as late as the 15th or even 16th centuries, because some people thought that, just like the iPad, printing really wasn't going to catch on.
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Well, they were wrong as well. And so, people continued to do hand copying even well after the invention of printing because printing presses were just not all that prevalent for a lengthy period of time.
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Now, including ancient translations, such as those into Latin or Coptic or Sahitic, or the languages such as that, more than 24 ,000 manuscripts of the
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New Testament are known. Now, I'm speaking only of the New Testament this evening. We would not even have time in 30 minutes to even begin touching the subject of the
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Old Testament. We're looking primarily at the New Testament this evening. Now, no ancient work comes even close to the
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New Testament with reference to the number of witnesses and the number of early witnesses.
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Now, I'm not including the Quran when I speak of ancient works. The Quran is not a work of antiquity. It's a work of the medieval period.
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And so, it's not really in the comparison at this particular point in time, though I will probably later on make some comparisons between the two that I think are extremely educational.
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Now, here is a graphic that gives you an idea. On the graphic, you will see a center point.
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And then, radiating out from the center point are various yellow circles. For example, the largest yellow circle on this side, right here, represents the works of Homer.
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The size of the circle indicates how many manuscripts we have. And the distance from the center tells us how much time has elapsed between when a work was written and the first manuscripts we have of that particular work.
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And so, in this case, Homer is the largest with 643 manuscripts. And there's about 500 years between when
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Homer was written and the first manuscripts we have of that particular work. The next one is
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Sophocles, out toward the outside a little bit. We have 193 manuscripts.
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But there's 1 ,400 years between when it was originally written and the first manuscript copies we have.
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Now, the big yellow sun on the left is not the sun at all. That's the New Testament.
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That is the number of manuscripts we have, including translations into other languages, of the
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New Testament. And you'll notice it gets very, very close to the original source. That is because it is by far the earliest attested of any work of antiquity in our possession today.
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That means we have manuscripts of at least portions of the New Testament that date to within— well, some would argue we have a couple scraps that go into the first century, and we have a number that go into the second century as well, making it very early attested.
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And, of course, the sheer number of these manuscripts really presents one of the problems for scholars who work in this area because we have so much information.
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In comparison to someone—if someone here is a—do we have any scholars of Sophocles here? You all would probably love to have the problems that we have in regards to the number of manuscripts we have of the
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New Testament. That is an interesting, I think, comparison. Now, I want you to think with me about something. The more witnesses that one has, the more manuscripts that one has, the more variants one will have.
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If you only have one witness, how many textual variants can you have? None, because there's nothing else to compare it to.
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Once you have two manuscripts, then there's going to be a difference between the two. Once you have ten, then you're going to have the differences between the ten, etc.,
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etc. So, if you only have one witness, you'll have no textual variants, but you likewise will have little basis upon which to believe you have the original text.
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You'd have to trust. If you only had one version, you only had one example, you'd have to trust that whoever produced that one got it exactly right.
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Most of us can intuitively recognize it would be far better to have ten copies than to have one copy.
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But what does that introduce? It introduces textual variation between them, and we have to compare them one to another. The more witnesses you have, the confidence you have that you possess the original text increases.
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It increases, and that's a very important thing to remember this evening. Now, taking the most liberal estimate, we have about 400 ,000 variants in the manuscript tradition of the
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New Testament. That sounds like a huge number, until you start thinking about it. About 99 % of those variations cannot be translated out of Greek.
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That is, they do not impact the meaning of the text. For example, there is, if you've ever taught Greek or learned
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Greek, there's something called a movable noob. And I remember a fellow that took Greek with me, and he just could not get the concept of the movable noob.
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It was like saying an apple versus a apple. You're supposed to say an apple, some of us skip over that, but Greek had the same kind of concept in it.
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And many of the scribes didn't understand it either. Now, you can't, it has no meaning, it has no impact upon the meaning of the text whatsoever, but a lot of scribes made an error, and as long as one scribe made an error, that's one of those 400 ,000 variants that we talk about in the manuscript tradition.
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Of the remaining variants, the vast majority are simple errors of sight or hearing, depending on how the manuscript was produced.
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That is, was it a person copying another manuscript, or a person in a scriptorium who is listening as a manuscript is being read to them, and taking it down via dictation.
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Now, one of the very particularly common errors that we find in the manuscript tradition is homoi teluton, which means similar endings.
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How many times, you students, you have been working on a, you've been diligently working, because your professors are here, diligently working on a term paper, and trying to get it done early, and you're checking your sources, and you're copying from a source, and you're typing it into your computer, and you type the word education, and it ends with T -I -O -N.
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Now, T -I -O -N is a common ending in our language. And so you type T -I -O -N, and your eyes go back to the book that you're copying, and you see
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T -I -O -N, and you continue. The problem is the T -I -O -N you saw was the word location on the next line.
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And so you've continued on from there. Now, the problem is you have now inadvertently deleted an entire line of text, and you didn't even realize it because of similar endings,
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I -N -G -E -S -T -I -O -N. Those types of endings are the ones that catch us. And the same thing happened to the scribes of the
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New Testament. On the screen in front of you, you need to realize that for the first 800, 900 years of the history of the text in the
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New Testament, it was written in what's called majuscule text. All capitals, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.
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It's simply a long line of capital letters. And so you're copying that long line of capital letters, and you come across this line right here, and it actually says,
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Hinatechnotheou kleithoumen kai esmen diatouta. But you get to the end of the word kleithoumen, and I've used, that's interesting it's using that font, but I've used the red right here, you can barely see it here, but there's kleithoumen, and then here's kai esmen right here.
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And your eye, you write kleithoumen, your eye goes back, sees the new M -E -N, and you continue on from there.
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You've now accidentally deleted the phrase kai esmen. This is the exact textual variance you'll find in 1
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John 3 .1. In 1 John 3 .1, in the ESV, NASB, NIV, etc.,
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etc., it will say that we might be called the children of God, and such we are. But the
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King James doesn't have the phrase, and such we are. Is it because the King James translators didn't like adoption as sons of God?
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No. It's because the manuscripts they were dealing with, which is a very small number of manuscripts in comparison to the number that we have today, did not contain this reading, and it's a simple error of homoeoteluton.
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Thankfully, we don't have just one manuscript of 1 John. We have many manuscripts of 1
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John, and they come from different times and different places. And because we have these many manuscripts, and because we understand the nature of the type of errors that scribes would make, we can identify this kind of error very, very clearly.
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This is the vast majority of the errors that we see in the New Testament. These kinds of scribal errors are common and expected in any widely transmitted document.
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As long as anyone has a robust manuscript tradition representing various geographical areas and containing early witnesses, these kinds of variations are rather easily detected.
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But all of these considerations— here, folks, if you're starting to drift, tune in. All of these considerations relate primarily to a freely transmitted text, not to a controlled, edited, or redacted text.
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This is the key issue this evening. We need to understand the difference between those two kinds of texts.
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And let me make sure that you see this. A freely transmitted text is one whose transmission is not controlled by an external authority such as a government.
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It is widely copied without constraint. A controlled text is one that is copied under the guidance of an external authority.
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Everything I've said to you about comparing manuscripts, everything like that, that only applies to a freely transmitted text, where copies were able to be made by different people in different places and there was no one standing over them going, no, you need to change this to that, or no one who had the ability to alter the transmission of that text over time in a purposeful direction.
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The New Testament is a freely transmitted text, and as we'll see later on, that is the contrast this evening.
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A freely transmitted text will have more textual variance, but will have greater confidence as to originality.
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A controlled text will have more uniformity, but much less confidence as to originality.
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Now this is the thesis of the debate. If Mr. Ismail is going to interact with my position this evening, this is the point that he is going to have to deal with.
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And that is, my assertion is, a freely transmitted text will have more textual variance.
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You know, if the government isn't in control, if the government isn't saying, well, we're going to produce one version, and we're going to distribute it, and if you don't have our version, we're going to take your version and destroy it.
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The result over time is that that one government -approved version is going to have a pretty clean transmission over time.
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But the problem is, it has a much less level of confidence as to originality. Why? Because once you have an external authority that comes in and says, this is going to be the text, what do you have to believe?
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That they got it right the first time. And especially if they destroy the materials that existed before it, you can only take your confidence back to that point of the redaction, of the editing.
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And you have to trust they got it right at that point, because you can't go any earlier than that. And that is the fundamental difference in the transmission of the text of the
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New Testament versus that of the Quran this evening, as we will illustrate over and over again in various ways.
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A freely transmitted text can promise to present the original readings in its manuscript tradition.
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A controlled text cannot promise the original text past the last redaction or revision, especially if previous versions are destroyed.
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So in other words, even amongst all of those textual variants in the New Testament, I have absolute confidence that one of the readings found in the manuscripts is the original.
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We still have all the original readings. We may have to study them to find out which one's which, but we have the original readings.
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But if you have a controlled text, you can't make that claim. All you can say is, well, we know what it read at this point in history anyways, but before that, we don't know.
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We can't tell because there is redaction, there is an editing, there is a controlling of the text. That is the fundamental difference that we're looking at.
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So how did we get the New Testament? Well, by the way, I made this graphic, so any oohs and aahs would be appreciated.
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Man, everyone's so nice, thank you. We need to recognize the
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New Testament is written by multiple authors at multiple times in multiple places to multiple audiences.
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And that means you might have Paul writing in Thessalonica, he might be in Rome, you might have John in Ephesus, you have the same author writing from different places and writing to different churches at different times.
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And so these manuscripts go all over the world. And let's say
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Paul writes to the church at Colossae and someone comes through and they say, you know, we haven't seen that letter, could we copy it for our church?
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And so a copy is made and that letter then goes to another church and to another church. And this is how the letters are copied over time and present and move all around the known world.
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Eventually what happens is that you have these copies coming together and collections start being made.
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So, for example, I recently, just a couple of years ago, had the wonderful opportunity of seeing a manuscript
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P46 at the Chester Beattie Library in Dublin and that is one of the earliest manuscripts that we have from the
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New Testament. There's manuscripts of Paul, there's manuscripts of the Gospels, you have manuscripts like P75 of the
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Gospels and things like that. These are collections that take place over time. And then eventually you have entire
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New Testaments coming together. But my point is this, there was never ever a time when there was ever a controlling authority that could control the entire text of the
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New Testament. And so when people come along and say, well, you know, all these doctrines were inserted and so on and so forth, there was never a time when that could happen.
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It is vitally important to realize the transmission of the text of the New Testament did not follow a single line of transmission.
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The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors with books being sent to multiple locations.
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You would somehow have to be able to control all those multiple lines to be able to make purposeful changes in the text of the
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New Testament and there was never a time when that could happen. This means the text was never under the control of a single individual or group.
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At no time in its history, at the time of authorship or at any point during its time of transmission were the
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New Testament documents under the control of an individual or under the control of a group.
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As a result, we can look forward, in fact, to finding even earlier manuscripts of the
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New Testament documents as the free transmission of the text has provided us with a solid basis for asserting that we continue to possess the original readings of the authors themselves.
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I want to reiterate that point so you hear what I'm saying. Because of the nature of how the
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New Testament was transmitted, it demonstrates something called tenacity. Tenacity.
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The transmission of the New Testament textual tradition is characterized by an extremely impressive degree of tenacity.
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Once a reading occurs, it will persist with obstinacy. What does that mean? Well, that means even silly readings are still found in the textual tradition.
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For example, there is one rather humorous manuscript. Evidently, some of you recognize what it's like.
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Your alarm didn't go off at the right time. You go rushing into class early in the morning. You're not an early morning person anyways. Your coffee tastes bad.
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It's just very difficult for you to do a really good job that morning. Well, there were scribes who had days like that. And there was this one scribe.
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He must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed one morning. And so he is copying a manuscript that has two columns of text.
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And you're supposed to read down this column and then read down this column. But he wasn't really paying attention that morning.
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And so he just copied straight across. And unfortunately, this was in the genealogies of Jesus.
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And so in that manuscript, God has a daddy named Ferris. How did you not catch that?
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I mean, you really got to not be paying attention to what you're doing. But you know what? We still have that manuscript, and it's a good thing we do.
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And you go, why is it a good thing that we would have a manuscript that has a silly error like that? Because the
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New Testament manuscript tradition is tenacious. Once a reading appears, it stays there.
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You say, well, how is that a good thing? Think about it, my friends. That means the originals stay there, too.
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The originals stay there, too. And that's my confidence in practicing New Testament textual criticism is that I can be looking at an extremely complex variant.
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And Mr. Ismail, I'm sure, is going to talk about a number of extremely complex variants. But I can look at it, and today we have more information than any generation has ever had before us.
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On this iPad, I have more textual information than any generation before me had in one place in any library in the world.
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It's amazing, absolutely amazing. But I can look at that information, and I can have absolute confidence that one of those readings is the original.
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I'm not just tilting at windmills. I'm not just engaging in some kind of academic exercise here.
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The original reading is still there, and I need to determine which one it is. And that is an artifact of the way that God has preserved the
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New Testament text by having it explode across the known world. Now, remember, during the first 300 years of its existence, up until 313, and the peace of the church, what was going on?
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Christians were being persecuted. A papyrus found recently that documents the
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Romans going into a church in Egypt and destroying 300 manuscripts in that single church, in that single church.
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And there were many Christians who lost their lives for even possessing the Christian scriptures. And so the
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Christians realized we need to be proliferating this text because there are people who are destroying it.
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And so there was a lot of copying going on, but not everybody had their copyist card. Not everyone, you know, if you say you really can't have a proper transmission of the text until you can do it perfectly, you know when
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God would have had to have waited to give us a revelation of himself? 1949, that's when they invented the photocopier.
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Well, obviously God didn't want to wait that long, and God felt it was quite appropriate to give us his word in a way that would have to be transmitted over time in this fashion.
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And that he has done, and he has done so in such a way that we can have confidence. In fact, someone, a friend of mine used a very good illustration.
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He said, what we have in the New Testament is like having a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle. Now, what would be worse?
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To have 10 ,100 pieces or 9 ,999? Have you ever done a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle and then discovered the cat ate the last piece?
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It's a bad thing. It really makes you mad. It's a whole lot better to have to figure out what the 100 extra are than it is to be missing 100 or 1 ,000 or something else like that.
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And the reality is, in the New Testament, what we have is like a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle. We got 10 ,100 pieces.
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And what textual critical scholars do is they find out what those 100 extra pieces are. But the originals are all still there.
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That's vitally important to understand. Let me quote. There we go.
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It is precisely the, oh, this is a quote. It is precisely the overwhelming mass of the New Testament textual tradition, assuming the
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Huguenos Nusa Desaskalia of New Testament textual criticism, which provides an assurance of certainty in establishing the original text.
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We can be certain that among the New Testament manuscripts, there is still a group of witnesses which preserves the original form of the text, despite the pervasive authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the prestige of the later text.
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That, of course, is from the rather well -known work by Kurt and Barbara Alon, The Text of the
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New Testament, pages 291 through 292. The Alons, of course, have run the New Testament Institute in Munster.
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Kurt, of course, has died, but for many, many, many years. So, here is someone who knows all of the textual variants and says we can have great certainty that the original is still there.
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He believes in that integrity of the text. Now, what we hear very often from people, we hear words like, there are more variant readings in the
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New Testament than there are words, because there's 400 ,000 variants, there's only 138 ,162 words in the
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Nessie -Alan 27th edition of the Greek New Testament. So, that means there's three variants per word. No, that's not what it means at all, but you will hear statements like that.
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We do not have two similar manuscripts of the New Testament in their contents. If what you mean by that is a photocopy of each other, that's obviously the case of every work of antiquity.
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That's nothing new. It is impossible to know today what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Paul might have written.
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These kinds of statements are very, very common in our day in what I will very honestly identify as radical skepticism.
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These statements represent skepticism beyond that even of unbelieving scholars like Bart Ehrman, who recognized that such statements go far beyond what the actual data could possibly substantiate.
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The picture in the New Testament presented here is never presented by anyone who has done first -hand study of the New Testament documents.
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Never. Let me give you an example. A number of years ago, I asked my computer to compare the two most dissimilar printed texts of the
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New Testament. In other words, for those of you who know the field, to compare the Westcott and Hort text with the majority text, the
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Robinson Pierpont majority text. In other words, the Byzantine versus Alexandrian manuscripts. Here in Hebrews chapter 6, verses 8 through 20, you'll see on the screen that I have marked in green, if you can see it, right there, there's one right there, one right there.
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Don't worry, doctor, I'm not going to hit you with a laser. And there's, I think, one, no, there's only three, only three places where these printed editions, which represent the widest variations in the manuscript tradition, vary from one another, and they are not major issues.
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There is no question on the part of any scholar that we know what these verses said originally. This is what was written.
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There can be no question about that. It would require absolute radical skepticism to come to any other conclusion than that.
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So what you have from radical skepticism is they'll give you graphics like this, where the blue line represents the number of words in the
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New Testament, and the red line represents the number of variants. But then if you know something about the
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New Testament, then you know some of the facts about that. You know, for example, what they don't tell you, is that 99 % of all those variants do not impact the meaning of the text.
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You also discover that 1 % of 400 ,000 equals about 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants out of 138 ,162 words, is 2 .9%,
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or one meaningful variant every three pages. But only half of these are viable. In other words, if you run across a manuscript written, oh,
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I don't know, 1 ,400 years after the original, and it has one mistake in it that no one else has ever made, that's not found anywhere else in the world, that doesn't have a chance of being the original.
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And so it's not a viable reading. So only about half of these are viable. So it's about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable meaning
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New Testament textual variants. That's a very, very different picture. And I forgot to...
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I'm sorry? Yes. That's a different picture, and let me show you what that picture would look like.
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Now the blue line is the number of words, and the red line is the number of variants. Very different picture than what is normally presented when people attack the text of the
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New Testament today. So, 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful and viable variants, over 2 million pages of hand -copied text spanning approximately 1 ,500 years prior to the invention of printing, is an amazingly small percentage of the text reflecting an amazingly accurate history of transmission.
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One might say it is downright miraculous. Now, the real issue again, free transmission versus controlled transmission.
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One is superior to the other. Having a controlled transmission of the
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New Testament text or any work of antiquity diminishes the confidence that you can have that you possess the original.
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Because once someone has control of the text and can manipulate the text, then you have to have utter confidence that one particular person or group got it right.
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You see, with a free transmission of the text, I don't have to trust in any one particular person because the source, the streams, come from so many different places, and we can compare them with one another.
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So, free transmission of the text versus controlled transmission, key issue this evening.
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I honestly think if you want to evaluate how this evening goes, ask yourself the question, did both sides address that issue?
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Multifocality, the fact that the New Testament writers, you have multiple writers writing at multiple times to multiple audiences, vitally important issue.
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And then the tenacity of the text, the fact that the writings, the original readings, they still exist, they are still there, and so when
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Mr. Ismail raises various textual variants, please realize those of us who work in this field know all about them.
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Some of us, believe it or not, we don't have a lot in the way of life. Some of you saw how excited
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I got when the moderator mentioned my granddaughter Clementine. She's the joy of my life, she really is, and she is the cutest baby that's ever been born, and that is without question, okay?
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So, and you're supposed to say that, but she actually happens to be. I wish I had a picture I could put up so I could prove it, but some of us don't have a life, though, because to be honest with you, you know one of the things that I read regularly?
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I have a rather thick book. It's nothing but all the textual variants of the New Testament, and every once in a while I just sit down,
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I just read through a few pages, expose myself to some more, look at these types of things, and some of us actually find that to be very interesting.
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Some of us do that so you don't have to. But the reality is, any variation that Mr.
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Ismail is going to present, we've seen before, and you know why? Because Christians are wide open with their text.
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You can go to the bookstore right now, I bet you can buy a Nessie Olin text, you can buy a United Bible Society's text, all this information is going to be right there, it's on the internet, it's all over the place.
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But you cannot today buy a critical edition of the Quran, because one doesn't exist.
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Now they're working on it, but one doesn't exist. That's the difference. You see, we can look at this information, we put it all out there and we say, this is how
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God has preserved his text. Yes, we have textual variants, but those textual variants are the result of the very means that God used to preserve his text.
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He had it go out all over everywhere, every Christian said, we want everybody to know the gospel, you want to copy this?
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Great, make a copy. And as a result, there are textual variants. But as a result,
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I can stand before you this evening and say because of the tenacity of the text, we have all the original readings.
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God has preserved his word, even during those periods of persecution and into this time of unbelief,
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God has preserved his word for us. Thank you very much. And now, also half an hour to Mr.
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Yusuf Ismail. I seek protection in God from Satan, the accursed one.
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In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful.
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Good evening and welcome to all of you. The discussion for tonight, as James has correctly articulated, is the
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New Testament a reliable record of the teachings of Jesus? When you look at the
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New Testament in general, it's a well -known fact that in Christianity, depending upon the church,
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Bibles can be divided into either the Protestant church, the Roman Catholic church, they have got their own canon.
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Amongst Roman Catholics, you've got 73 books which they believe to be the inspired word of God. The Protestants, you've got 66.
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The Anglican church has its own canon. The Greek Orthodox church has its own canon. Coptic church, the
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Ethiopic church, the Syriac church. So if you look at their books, their New Testament that they would have would not be similar to what those in the
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Protestant world has. If you look at the interpreters' dictionary of the Bible, they basically say that it is safe to say that there's not one sentence in the
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New Testament in which the manuscript tradition is wholly uniform. And we're going to unpack that shortly because James has alluded to a few issues on that particular point.
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Look at a conservative scholar like Bruce Metzger. He says that from early Jewish writings, the
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Bible consisted of Old Testament and some Jewish apocryphal literature. Furthermore, there was as yet no conception of the duty of the exact quotation from the books that were not yet fully in the full sense canonical.
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Therefore, it is exceedingly difficult to ascertain which New Testament books were known to early
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Christian writers. Our evidence does not become clear until the end of the 2nd century. Meaning, prior to the 2nd century, people never had a uniform idea in terms of what constitutes a
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New Testament, what are the books in terms of the New Testament. So the books in the New Testament as we have it today has its origins as inspired scripture from the end of the 2nd century.
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If you basically look at the Gospels in general, who wrote the Gospels? There is a general consensus among scholars that the
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Gospels have been written anonymously and none of the writers claim to be eyewitnesses. If you open the
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Gospels in general, you start with the Gospel according to Matthew or the Gospel according to Mark, the
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Gospel according to Luke, the Gospel according to John. If James White has to author a book, I will not write there the forgotten
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Trinity according to James White because it is in fact the book that's written to him. Yet the word according to is incorporated at the beginning of the particular
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Gospel because of the fact that there is a suggestion that no one knew the authors of this. Matthew's Gospel, for example, written in the third person.
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Why would he want to do that? Why would some writings be anonymous, pseudonymous?
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Matthew 9, 9. Acts chapter 4, verse 13 tells us that the disciples were unlettered.
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They spoke Aramaic. Yet you find that the Gospels as they exist today in certain instances are written in sophisticated
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Greek like the Gospel of Luke. If you look at the origins of the
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Gospel, according to many scholars, some would tell us that Matthew and liberal scholars would tell you it was written about 100,
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John about 110, Luke in the year 75, Mark between 60 to 65.
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The problem is that it is possible that the writers of the Gospels who have the name attributed to them were possibly dead at the time of the compilation.
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And those dates are only in theory because the manuscripts date far later. Now, I'll give you an example here.
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We've got two people. One is Richard Borkham. The other is the late F .F.
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Bruce. They're both conservative scholars. They believe the Bible is the Word of God. They believe in the divinity of Christ.
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Borkham particularly wrote a book called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. And they went on to discuss the relationship between the synoptic
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Gospels, coming to the idea that when we compare the Gospels, we can see how the stories of Jesus would change to reflect a higher view of Jesus.
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You have parallels. Matthew has a story. Mark repeats the same story.
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Luke has the same story. And John has the same story. And when you do a reading and when you cross -reference these particular
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Gospels, you find certain significant changes. For example, on the occasion when
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Jesus was transfigured, the transfiguration, in Mark, Peter calls Jesus Rabbi, Mark 9, 5.
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But in Matthew, same incident, Peter calls him Lord. So can you see Matthew, which was written far later to a different audience, as James has conceded, changes the wording to reflect a higher
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Christology of Christ. If you look at further, Matthew made Jesus describe himself as Lord.
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In Mark 13, 35, Jesus tells the disciples to wait and watch for the imminent return, and he calls himself the master of the house.
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But in Matthew 24, 42, same incident, he describes himself as your Lord. So can you see the change?
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But more particularly, can you see what's happening? There's an evolution. At a place called
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Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asks Peter, who do you say I am? In Mark, Peter says, you are the
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Messiah. But in Matthew, he says, you are the Messiah, the Son of the living
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God. So Matthew improves the account by making Jesus or developing a higher
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Christology of Jesus. Matthew reduces Jesus' emphasis on one God.
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In Mark 12, 29, the commandment is, Shema Yisraelu Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.
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Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. But in Matthew, same occasion, the individual comes and asks
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Jesus, what is the first commandment? He says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might.
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Can you see there is a reduction in the emphasis of the divinity of Christ? Or an increase in the, an increasing in the focus of the divinity of Christ.
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Matthew made people pray to Jesus. You remember the incident? When Jesus was asleep in the boat, a storm rocked the boat.
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In Mark, what did the disciples tell him? They said, teacher, can't you see? We are drowning.
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Don't you care that we are drowning? But in Matthew, same God, same story, same incident, same account.
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They say, Lord, save us. We are perishing. So can you see Matthew improves the account in contrast to what you have in Mark.
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It's not just a contradiction. It's an improvement, a stylistic improvement in terms of how the author wanted
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Jesus to be reflected to the particular community that he was writing. Matthew reduced the distinction between Jesus and God.
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Mark 10, 18, someone says, good master, what good thing shall I do to enter eternal life?
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Jesus says, why do you call me good? There is only one good, and that is God. But in Matthew, he says, why do you ask about what is good?
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There is only one who is good. So can you see he reduces the distinction between Jesus and God?
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And you could basically go on. I'm not going to belabor on this point. There are hundreds of examples When we read a book, you read it from beginning to end.
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We need to start reading the same account in a parallel fashion as they occur in different gospels.
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And you'd see there are striking changes. I mean, Mark shows that the night before the crucifixion,
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Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemane saying that his soul is troubled. And he says, let this cup pass away from me.
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But in John's gospel, the last, Jesus does not pray. He says it is for this very reason that I'm going to be sent.
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And he declares at the outset that he's not going to basically pray. What about the incident covering the limitations of Jesus?
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The story of the fig tree. Mark 11 verse 12 to 14, Jesus was hungry. He sees it in the distance, a fig tree having leaves.
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When he comes to it, he finds no figs because the season was not there. So Jesus says, may no one ever eat fruit from you ever again.
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Matthew, same incident, same story. Jesus was hungry. He goes, he finds nothing but leaves.
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And then Jesus says, may no fruit ever come again from you. And the tree withered. But Matthew does not mention that it was a season for figs.
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Now James in response to this will say, well look, Matthew's depiction of the event uses the narrative as a parable to show how those who refuse to bear fruit will be dealt with.
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But the point is that in Mark's gospel, the first gospel, according to Mark in priority, the indication is given that Jesus was ignorant of the figs.
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He had human limitations. Matthew changes it and the ignorance of the season is basically eliminated.
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So can you see basically that when you move from one gospel to the next, we can see how
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Matthew reworks the particular tradition. The difference is further pronounced if you go into the gospel of John.
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I am the light of the world. I am this. Before Abraham was, I am. In the beginning was the
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Word, and the Word was of God, and the Word was God. All those are basically only in the gospel of John. Why is it that they're not in Matthew, Mark, or Luke?
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I'll be quite fascinating also, and just to be naughty, maybe a little later on in the debate we can emphasize or deal with the issue of John 1 .1,
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whether even that, as a Greek scholar, and him knowing Greek, is in fact an indication of the divinity of Christ, but we'll see how far we can go in the particular debate.
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So, as it stands now, that's the evolution in the particular gospel accounts.
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Many scholars have basically pointed out in the particular book I have here that without a knowledge of the history of the text, the original reading of the text cannot be established, particularly when you have an ignorance of the history, the date, the composition, the circulation.
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What apologists generally ignore, and James dealt with, you know,
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I don't want to focus on some of the issues he raised, but maybe later on in the rebuttal we'll deal with that, but what apologists generally ignore is that there are no traces of the most important church doctrines, such as the original sin and the trinity.
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We have the papyri dating back to the second century. Many of the divergences about Jesus evolved at a particular point in time at the time of the emergence of the particular gospels, and that becomes a problem, particularly when you look at the failure of textual criticism.
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According to Eberhard Nestle, whom he quoted in the introduction to textual criticism of the New Testament, he says that the problem of finding the autographs is possible when we understand that the greater portion of the
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New Testament, via Isaiah the Epistles, are occasional writings never intended for publication or meant to have a limited circulation.
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I'll be quite fascinated to find out, for example, 2 Thessalonians, chapter 3, verse 17.
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Here the biblical scholar Daniel Wallace alludes to the fact that in this particular verse,
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Paul alludes to every letter that he had written to churches. Now, if you take into account, if you assume that he had only written to Galatians, and only
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Galatians and one Thessalonians are prior to two Thessalonians, so if Paul speaks about writing every letter to the churches, and if you assume the
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South Galatian theory, then where are all these letters? Why is it that in 1 Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 9, concerning,
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I think, the... I can't recall the actual issue, but he says that concerning the fornicators, if I'm not mistaken,
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I write this, but in a previous letter, he makes mention of a previous letter that he wrote to the
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Corinthians. And where is that letter, if this is, in fact, the first letter to the
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Corinthians? So that becomes a major, major problem. So, in conclusion, on that point, we can say that we have no version in the world that claims that it is copied from the original autograph.
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We have no version that is identical to any modern critical text of the New Testament. The versions of the
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New Testament are witnesses to all four divergent text types. It's like all of you doing a summary of what happened here today, and then your friends copy what you write, and then their friends copy what they write, and then their friends copy what they write, and then for hundreds of years later, you find a whole series of articles about what happened here.
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Can you verify the authenticity? And that's basically what you need to do with the New Testament, is that scholars have to pick and choose to see what possibly could be the original.
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The versions of the New Testament are not identical. James agrees with this. There are different readings, even in the versions.
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None of the original manuscripts of the version is extant, therefore, existing scholars have to engage in what they would call textual criticism.
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No language has the exact feature of Koine Greek. The Titessaron of Teton, which is a gospel harmony, where you take all the gospels together, is considered the earliest translation, but again, the version is not helpful because no copy has survived.
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The original language is unknown, and the gospel harmony, it's a gospel harmony. It's like a combination of all of them, and it eliminates contradiction.
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So what do you do in those circumstances? Well, you're left with this. One has thousands of manuscripts, and one needs to, therefore, reconstruct what possibly could be the ancestor of these ancient texts.
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So we do not have any originals. We have thousands of texts, but they are many years later, and that becomes a particular problem.
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Kurt and Barbara Allen, and he quoted them, they are authoritative. This is what they say. They say, until the beginning of the fourth century, the texts of the
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New Testament developed freely. Even for later scribes, parallel passages of the gospels were so familiar that they would adapt the text of one gospel to that of another.
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They also found themselves free to make corrections in the text, improving it by their own standard of correctness, whether grammatically, stylistically, as I showed, or more substantively.
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Why would you want to make stylistic improvements to the Word of God? Do you know more than God himself? So you want to now choose that you can edit, and change, and adapt, and amend, and make the improvements accordingly.
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And what they importantly say further is that in contrast to the Hebrew Old Testament and other oriental traditions, such as the
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Quran, where an almost letter -perfect transcription was the rule, almost letter -perfect transcription was a particular rule.
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And so you've got basically developments in terms of how they proceed and how they develop the particular text.
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Sometimes you find that the selection amounts to no more than an eclectic guess.
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So what does James White and myself agree to tonight? And we need to know whether the rest of you agree.
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Number one, he agrees too that we don't have any originals of the books of the New Testament. We don't possess the original sayings of Jesus, nor in his language.
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You see, even if we had the original manuscripts today, and in an email discussion I said, I'm prepared to concede that you've got the original.
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Let's deal with the original. Let's assume that this is the original. And he didn't want to debate on that particular issue. But I'm saying, let's even assume we've got the original.
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You wouldn't have the original sayings of Jesus. Why not? Because Jesus spoke Aramaic. He never spoke
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Greek. Majority of these copies date to the 8th century. And of course, there are many mistakes, but those particular mistakes, some of them are significant, some of them obviously are not too significant.
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This is a language Jesus spoke. He spoke Aramaic. There are more mistakes in the
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New Testament than words, as James correctly pointed out. Some mistakes matter, some don't.
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And the task of the author is to basically show what the original. And this is what they do. If you look at this here, if you look at the
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Gospels, this is basically the different manuscript text types. Can you see that? The total number of manuscripts.
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And what happens is that on the top you've got the
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Greek New Testament, the different editions. Can you see that there? And then you've got the different sorts of papyri.
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And then you've got the percentage used out of the 5 ,000 somewhat manuscripts.
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Now the question is, why so little? Why so little? Why do the scholars use such a little percentage to come up with these
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Greek editions which you can buy from a bookstore? Why is that the case? It's because the vast majority do not agree with each other.
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This is a committee of Bible scholars. And what they're basically doing is that they're constructing the New Testament.
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You've got Bruce Metzger, the late Bruce Metzger, Kurt, Erlen, and so on. And what they're doing is at the back you see certain annotations.
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And the annotations are an indication the letter A indicates that the text is certain.
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The letter B indicates the text is almost certain. Letter C indicates that the committee had difficulty in deciding which variant to place in the text.
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And the letter D indicates that the committee had a difficulty in arriving at the decision. So these are categorizations that they place to particular texts.
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And they then say, well, look, this is probably authentic, this is not, this is not authentic, this we have a difficulty, so they vote.
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And that's how they basically construct the New Testament. And unfortunately, for the vast majority of people, most people don't seem to understand how these particular writings work.
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Of the 5 ,847 Greek manuscripts, no two are identical. The earliest we have is the
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Ouspensky Gospels dating to the 8th century. That's Theodos Beza.
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And basically he constructed the first New Testament. What he did was, he used corrupted text to compile the
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New Testament. Several readings have been found which have never been found in the particular manuscripts.
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James White, in his article examining Muslim apologetics, says that scribes were extremely conservative in the handling of the text and were fearful of losing anything in the copy or copies that they were working for.
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Scribes were hesitant to change or correct what was found in the text. I don't know, James, whether you still accept that.
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You do believe in that? Well, that's basically something that he accepts. He's basically indicating that there's no indication to suggest that the scribes made any deliberate changes or deliberate alterations.
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Okay. Here's one example here. If you look, for example, at Matthew 8 .15,
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He touched her hand and the fever left her and she arose and ministered unto them. Now, after noticing parallel passages,
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Mark 1 .31 and Luke 4 .39, the scribes changed him to Otwa, them.
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Matthew changed Mark's version. Why did he do that? Because he thought that the woman was supposed to serve only the one who had cured her miraculously, but later scribes considered
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Matthew's choice incompatible with the claim that the canonical Gospels are, in fact, the non -contradictory word of God.
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If you can go on further, beloved or chosen, in Luke 9 .35, there came a voice out of the clouds saying, this is my beloved son, hear him.
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Now, the earlier manuscripts, P .45, P .75, have the word, is that, ek leglegmenos, chosen one, and what the later scribes did is that they changed it to agapetos, beloved, to harmonize it with Mark 9 .7.
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Now, James said, well, there were no deliberate alterations, but here you can see, ek leglegmenos has been changed to agapetos.
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And Philip Comfort, a biblical scholar, says, as often happens, divine proclamations of Jesus were harmonized.
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Mark 6 .22. Mark 6 .22. What happened in Mark 6 .22?
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Here, the daughter of the said Herodias came in and danced and pleased Herod with them and then said, and the king said unto the damsel, ask of me whatever thou wilt and I will give it unto thee.
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Earliest manuscripts, Mark 6 .22, Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus, tell us that the girl who danced and pleased
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Herod is Herodias, who is Herod's daughter, orto Herodiados.
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But in Matthew 14 .6, we are informed that the girl who danced was Herodias' daughter. So the scribes did change
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Mark 6 .22 to ortos tes Herodiados, the daughter herself of Herodias, to fit the parallel passage that you find in Matthew 14 .6.
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Yet, basically, Josephus tells us that Herod's daughter from her first marriage was
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Salome, the wife of Philip the Tetrarch. This would mean that the daughter's name had become confused with the name of the mother.
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Galileo Judea, Luke 4 .44, and he preached in the synagogues of Galilee. What then subsequently happened, scribes changed the earliest manuscripts which read the synagogues of Judea to the synagogues of Galilee, because the context of verse 44 informs us that Jesus was in Galilee before and stayed there.
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So the UBS follows the earlier manuscripts. But the King James Version, the Afrikaans Bible, which
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I've got here in my hotel this evening, what does it have? It has Galilee. So why is it that millions and millions of people like the
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Afrikaners, the Zulus, the Songas, the Kozas, the Suanas, are not being told about what is happening?
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It's only in the critical editions that you basically become aware of this. Look at these corruptions here.
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A defiled God, when the days of her purification were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem.
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The oldest and majority of the manuscripts have Orton there. Later manuscripts change it to Ortez, her.
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Because if you say, and when the days of their purification were accomplished, it would mean that Jesus himself was impure.
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So the scribes saw this problem, and they say, well, we can't say Jesus is impure, so they had to change it to Orton there.
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And many of the critical Greek editions follow the improved account in terms of what they have.
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Matthew 5 .22, But I say unto you, that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.
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Without a cause is not to be found in the original manuscripts. The scribes added without a cause, because they knew that whoever is angry shall be in danger of judgment, but Jesus himself becomes angry.
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So can you see what they do? They basically had to add without a cause. So that was a deliberate change.
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James says there was no deliberate change on the part of scribes. Nervous Jesus. Jesus moved with compassion.
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The word is augustius. Actually should be anger, not with compassion. Submitting yourself to the fear of God.
01:00:00
It is the scribes who changed the fear of Christ to the fear of Theo, and so on. And one could go on and on and on and on.
01:00:06
I've got a library of collections on terms of this. We just simply don't have time. James, in his discussion, made discussions and mentions of all these minor issues that are affecting us.
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About, I think, something about Phares being the father of God or something. These are minor issues. How many of us here believe in the ascension of Jesus?
01:00:29
Pick up your hands. Everybody. Well, everybody believes in the ascension. Yet there are only two gospels, two accounts in the gospel, which make reference to the ascension.
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Mark 16, verse 9 to 20. Luke 24, verse 51. Of course, you find that mentioned in Acts, but in the gospels, only these two places.
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Why did James not tell you that these two passages are a fabrication?
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Why didn't he tell you that? How many of you believe that's a fabrication? James believed that's a fabrication.
01:01:03
What about Jesus and the adulteress? How many of you believe in the story of Jesus and the adulteress?
01:01:10
Everybody. It's in Mafrakan's Bible. It's in the Zulu Bible.
01:01:16
It's in the Arabic Bible. Everybody believes in it. You see it in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. You see it in Jesus of Nazareth.
01:01:22
But do you know that James and I both are aware of the vast majority of biblical scholars would tell you that that's a fabrication.
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There was never such an incident. The earliest manuscripts never had that. So why is it that people now are believing something that has never been there?
01:01:38
And it's not the fault of you. It's the fault of the scholars and the apologists who failed to inform their congregation.
01:01:45
I mean in the discussion he had, he could have mentioned you all these particular points. He didn't decide to mention that.
01:01:50
I mean the Trinity. The first epistle of John chapter 5 verse 7. For there are three that bear record in heaven.
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The Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. And these three are one. How many of you believe in that? Everybody believes in it.
01:02:05
Yet that is also a fabrication. It's not in the original ancient. And James agrees with me as well.
01:02:11
So why didn't he tell you this? Obviously now, the fact that the found, and that's a point, it's the doctrine that's a problem here.
01:02:18
That's a foundation. We don't have such problems in the Quran. You might have in the ancient manuscripts, grammatical mistakes, rearrangement of suras and so on.
01:02:27
No problem on doctrine. Here is a foundation. You can easily quote, go baptizing them in the name of the
01:02:33
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As you find at the end of Matthew's gospel. But the problem there too, is that baptism in the early church was never done in the name of the
01:02:42
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It was done in the name of Jesus. So can you see the difficulty?
01:02:48
Can you see the problem? And we've got hundreds and hundreds of such critical issues. If you open a cursory and you revise standard version, it will tell you at the footnote, other ancient versions add, other ancient versions omit, and other ancient versions insert.
01:03:02
Meaning that it is a guess. And when it affects issues such as dogma, then it becomes increasingly problematic.
01:03:11
Very much so. Even on issues like, for example, the death of Jesus. If someone has to die for our sins, the most important person in the world, we should know when he died.
01:03:23
If you look at Mark's dating of the crucifixion, for example, you would tell us, and I know time is coming to a close.
01:03:30
Mark tells us in Mark 15, 25, that Jesus is crucified that same day at nine o 'clock in the morning, on the day of Passover, the morning after the
01:03:40
Passover meal was eaten. But in John's Gospel, on the other hand, Jesus doesn't have the meal with the disciples.
01:03:47
He goes somewhere else. They do eat a final supper. He's betrayed. And then in John 19, 14, it was a day of preparation for the
01:03:55
Passover, and it was about noon. Noon, on the day of the preparation for the Passover, the day the lambs were slaughtered.
01:04:02
In Mark's Gospel, Jesus lived through that day. So why is it that John makes a stylistic change?
01:04:09
John makes it, is that in John's Gospel, Jesus is a sacrificial lamb. And John has to change a historical datum in order to make a theological point.
01:04:19
Jesus is a sacrificial lamb. To convey that theological point, John has to create a discrepancy between his account and the accounts of the others.
01:04:28
So can you see the problems that we have in New Testament textual criticism? It's not too simple to say, yes, there are obviously insignificant variations, as James has highlighted a few, but there are certain significant variations.
01:04:41
The Ascension is intrinsic to Christianity. The Trinity is intrinsic to Christianity. When did
01:04:48
Jesus die is intrinsic to Christianity. What the problem in Christianity today is that to get to what scholars think is perhaps the original text, they have to engage in a process of reconstruction.
01:05:03
And what they do, they look at the divergent manuscripts, most date from the 8th or 9th century, a few from before that time, and based on the different manuscripts, they then construct what they call a critical edition.
01:05:15
And these editions go on to its continuous evolution. And that is a problem that we have.
01:05:22
And I'll leave you at that. Thank you very much. Dr. White will now have 10 minutes for rebuttal.
01:05:36
If I had the time, there is not a single reference that Yusuf Ismail just presented that I could not demonstrate to you the original reading of the
01:05:42
New Testament. Not a one. Not a one. It is amazing that Yusuf said, why didn't he tell you about that?
01:05:48
When I sent Yusuf books that were written 19 years ago that I authored that discusses every single reference in depth.
01:05:56
Every single reference. The Longer Ending of Mark, the Percuvia Adultery, John 73 through 811, 1 John 5, 7, etc.,
01:06:02
etc. We have discussed these things. We've presented these things. You can go on my YouTube page. You can see entire videos about each one of these things.
01:06:09
They are not unknown to us in any way, shape, or form. And folks, what you need to understand is the only reason Yusuf Ismail could talk about any of these is because we know what the original is.
01:06:17
Did you catch that? He says, see, scribes change this. How does he know that? First of all, because we publish all of our information.
01:06:24
He can't do it with the Quran because he doesn't have, for example, all the palimpsest readings from Sa 'ana or the
01:06:29
Fawqs palimpsest. He can't do that with the Quran even though it has the same type of history. So you can only do it with the
01:06:34
New Testament because we're very open in providing this information. But the only way you could say scribes did this is because we know what the original reading was.
01:06:41
We know what the earlier manuscripts actually said. And so to say, well, you know, why not talk about these things?
01:06:47
We have. In fact, I predicted the exact approach. There was nothing that was just said that even begins to address the thesis that I gave you that the free transmission of the text is superior to any kind of controlled transmission of the text.
01:07:02
Nothing whatsoever. Hopefully in the rebuttal, we'll have some address of that. For example,
01:07:07
I mean, honestly, there are so many examples here I would love to get into. He said there are no traces of the Trinity in the papyri.
01:07:13
I have examined papyri P72. I have read the Granville -Sharp construction, 2 Peter 1 .1, which refers to Jesus Christ, our
01:07:19
God and Savior, long before the manuscripts he was talking about. He talked about 2 Thessalonians 3 .17, and Paul identifies his own handwriting.
01:07:26
He says, we don't have the other letters of Paul. Why are we supposed to? God knew exactly what to include in the canon, exactly what to preserve.
01:07:32
Just because Paul may have written other letters to people doesn't mean those were inspired scripture, do they? Examine the assumptions of what is being said.
01:07:38
He said we don't have any manuscript identical to the original. Of course. No two manuscripts of the Quran are identical either.
01:07:44
In any work of antiquity that is handwritten and passed down over time, the only way you can get an identical manuscript is if you carve it in stone.
01:07:52
They're not very portable. But they would be the same anyways. Okay? That's the case of any work of antiquity.
01:07:58
It's a given. It's a non -argument. It's a non -starter to anyone who actually knows the New Testament. He presented the single -line idea of transmission, error after error after error, which has already been refuted.
01:08:10
That's not how the New Testament came about. There is no evidence of this. Did you notice that in almost all of the… very few, in very few of the presentations, did
01:08:18
Yusuf actually give us the textual information so we could examine it for ourselves? He's using sources that give him that information.
01:08:24
He mentioned Philip Comfort, for example. That gives you all the manuscripts. But he didn't give it to us. So, for example, he raised
01:08:31
Luke 2 .22. If you actually look at Luke 2 .22, which I discuss extensively in my book on the King James Only controversy, you'll discover that it's only very late manuscripts.
01:08:41
In fact, some critical editions don't even address it because there's no possibility that the change that was made there, which was because of the later rise of the
01:08:48
Marian dogmas, that that had anything whatsoever to do with the original reading whatsoever.
01:08:54
We can see all of those things. Now, we also had, for example, the date of Jesus' death.
01:09:02
What date did He die? Now, I realize there are lots of scholars today that want to say that John gives a different date than Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
01:09:10
He doesn't. The very word for Friday in the Greek language is preparation day.
01:09:17
And if you just realize, and this is something I've addressed many, many times, this is not something we're hiding. It was just said that apologists don't talk about these things.
01:09:25
I've been doing it for almost 30 years. We do talk about these things. The very word for Friday, the name is preparation day.
01:09:35
John tells us, as long as you remember, that the Passover was not one day. It was a week -long celebration.
01:09:41
John is in perfect harmony with Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Why is it so many scholars don't go that direction? Because, basically, to get published today, you can't go that direction.
01:09:49
You have to come up with something new. The idea that, well, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are going the same direction doesn't really get you anywhere in publication.
01:09:58
So John actually does give the exact same time. We heard, for example, the quote from the
01:10:05
Alans in regards to the free transmission of the text. Funny, we were talking with scholars this morning about this very, very issue.
01:10:11
Unfortunately, he hasn't read the later material from Barbara Alon that very clearly identifies the fact that amongst the papyri, the largest portion of the early papyri are strict texts, not free texts.
01:10:25
That means they're strict in providing exact copy of their exemplar. Unfortunately, that free statement is frequently taken out of context and misused by those who don't actually work in the field itself.
01:10:36
Again, even the table that was put up in front of you and said they're only using 10 % and things like that. I'm sorry,
01:10:42
Mr. Esmail just doesn't understand what that table's about. That table is either about the main text reading representing a certain percentage of the original manuscripts over against the later manuscripts, or the number of manuscripts that are cited in a particular critical text.
01:10:57
But it's not what he said. It's because there's so much difference between the manuscripts. That just isn't the reason why those percentages are the way they are in that particular text at all.
01:11:07
Now, there are all sorts of other issues that were raised. He raised all sorts of issues about the canon. We could talk about the canon of the
01:11:13
New Testament. By the way, the differences exist in the Old Testament canon. There's no difference between Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants on the
01:11:22
New Testament canon in any way. There really isn't any question about that. One of the books would even be suggested. And the interesting thing is, from an
01:11:28
Islamic perspective, the Koran talks about the Torah and the Injil. We know what the Injil was in the days of Muhammad, and it's exactly what we have today.
01:11:36
And according to the Koran, it contains light and guidance. So we may want to discuss that in the second half to see if there has been a consistency relating to that.
01:11:45
I don't know why Yusuf keeps doing this, but he keeps going to Mark 13, 35. And in all the discussion of the
01:11:52
Synoptic Gospels, did you notice that somehow Yusuf Ismail knows what Matthew, Mark, and Luke were thinking?
01:11:58
He also seems to know what every scribe was thinking. This scribe was afraid of this, and so he made this change.
01:12:04
And Mark wanted to make this change, and he was—how do you know that? Isn't it much more simple to say that they're following the sources that they had rather than trying to climb into their minds 2 ,000 years later and say, oh, they were just slavishly copying
01:12:21
Mark and didn't like what Mark had to say? As N .T. Wright has said, we don't know what order the Gospels were written in.
01:12:27
You can theorize that Mark's the first. You can theorize one source, two source, three source, four source. You can throw
01:12:33
Q in. You can throw Proto Mark in. You can throw all sorts of stuff. It's all theories, nothing more than theories.
01:12:39
You never found any manuscripts to substantiate these things. It's all theoretical, and on the basis of that, you can mind -read somebody and say that's why they made the change?
01:12:48
I want to handle my sources a little bit more carefully than that kind of presentation. So, for example,
01:12:55
Shabir Ali, Yusuf Ismail, they all go to Mark 13, 35, and they say, see, in Mark 13,
01:13:02
Jesus is called the master of the house, but in Matthew, He's called Lord. The problem is they're basing that on an
01:13:08
English translation. The actual Greek of Mark 13, 35 is how kurios tastes oikios.
01:13:14
It's the word kurios. So Mark uses a longer title than Matthew does, but he uses the exact same
01:13:21
Greek term. So how is this somehow an improvement? You see, in all of the synoptic
01:13:27
Gospel issues that were raised, there was an assumption made of a certain theoretical formulation that somehow allows us to look into the minds of people rather than allowing those people to be accurate recorders.
01:13:38
And, of course, most of the differences between the synoptic Gospels are due to the fact that Mark has one audience,
01:13:44
Matthew has a different audience, Luke has a different audience. Every time, for example, that Mark and Matthew tell the same story,
01:13:50
Mark tells a fuller version of what Matthew does. Matthew telescopes things a great deal at that particular point in time.
01:13:57
And so when we keep that in mind, we can see what the differences between the synoptic Gospels are.
01:14:02
I've got a minute and a half right now, according to my clock here. So when you've only got ten minutes, you get everything you can.
01:14:10
Let me put it that way. So the fig tree. I can't believe that people keep bringing the fig tree argument up.
01:14:18
Because, again, just the difference between Matthew and Mark is, again, due to telescoping. But the idea that Jesus didn't know when figs were, it's just so obvious that what's going on here is that the fig tree represents
01:14:31
Israel, it has all this showy religiosity, and yet it doesn't have any reality.
01:14:36
Jesus is going into the temple. He's about to give the Olivet Discourse in regards to the destruction of the temple. And by the way,
01:14:42
I never said that there was no harmonization. I've lectured on harmonization over and over again. I was actually paraphrasing
01:14:48
Bart Ehrman, who recognizes that the general tendency of scribes was to be very careful in the scribal activity that they engaged in.
01:14:57
Even Bart Ehrman says that. So I was giving a general statement, and Yusuf has misrepresented my statement, as if all the discussion that I've published on things such as the
01:15:08
Pricope Adultery and things like that just simply don't exist. So I think there needs to be a much more careful reading of the sources.
01:15:14
So once again, let's go back to the issue. What is the better way? To have this free transmission, which allows us to have this discussion, or to have a controlled transmission, where you have one group in charge, and you can't go back and check what they did.
01:15:27
That truly is the issue this evening, and we need to see in the next section whether Yusuf addresses that. Thank you very much.
01:15:34
Thank you for that, James, and thank you for that level of engagement. Now let me review the positive case that I had basically made, which
01:15:43
James unfortunately, and to date, hasn't addressed. You see, he said, and he ended his particular rebuttal by saying, what is it better, to have a controlled text, or to have an uncontrolled transmission of the text?
01:15:56
Am I correct? And that's a point. It's because of this uncontrolled, wild transmission process that you have, that you have all these particular variations that basically occur.
01:16:09
Now let's look at the point that I made, and what James' response to that. Number one, I said we don't have any of the original books of the
01:16:16
New Testament. Again, James, in his rebuttal, had nothing to say about that, because obviously he agrees.
01:16:22
I further said that scholars in general have to reconstruct what they believe to be the original.
01:16:28
And again, James, in his rebuttal, never rebutted this particular point, because that indeed is the case.
01:16:35
I further went on to say that the majority of the copies that we have date from the 8th. You see, most of the copies are in a minuscule type of writing, and most of them come after the 8th century.
01:16:45
The minority, for example, date from prior to the 8th century, and so scholars are left with the idea that they've got a minority of the manuscripts prior to the 8th century, majority after the 8th century, and the vast majority are in fact problematic.
01:16:59
James had nothing to say about that. I said that they contain mistakes. James agrees. He says they're insignificant. Then I pointed out certain key passages, 1
01:17:07
John 5, verse 7, Mark 16, 9, 20, Luke 24, verse 51, and I said that these particular writings deal with the issue that are foundational to Christian dogma.
01:17:20
Now, we don't care what James may have written in his book 20 years ago. I'm saying to engage an important subject like that tonight, why is it that as a
01:17:30
Greek scholar, as an apologist, you chose not to tell the audience, bearing in mind that the vast majority of them believe in the story of Jesus, and how many of you still believe in Jesus and the woman caught in the act of adultery?
01:17:43
He that is without sin amongst you, let him cast the first stone. You see,
01:17:49
James, they still believe in that, and that's a problem because regardless of what scholars may or may not say, the millions and billions, what are they believing?
01:17:58
Are they believing false? Is it false belief? 1 John 5, verse 7, 3 that bear record in heaven, the
01:18:05
Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. How many of you still believe in it? You see, James, they still believe in that, and that's the point here, that even though you and I agree that these particular passages are fabrications, what are we saying?
01:18:17
Are we saying that they are wrong? That they are going to go to hell because they believe in that? What's the point?
01:18:22
The point is, can you see the implications? That's the issue that we basically have, and again, James will not deal with that because he deals with this in his writings, but it's critical.
01:18:31
We don't have, it's like having something in the Quran which says that Muhammad is not the last and final messenger of God.
01:18:38
That will be a problem for us Muslims. We don't have such a problem. Can you see the difficulty that you have?
01:18:44
I dealt with the issue of the evolution of the Gospels and the fact that scholars in general agree that there is a development in terms of the
01:18:50
Christology. Here James went on to basically say, I think he made mention about Mark, Mark's usage of the term
01:18:58
Kyrios, but what scholars now tell us is that when they refer to Mark, they actually refer to a previous document called
01:19:05
Ormakas, which is a source for Matthew and Luke. So Ormakas, for example, had the original writings, had basically an idea of Jesus where he had human limitations, where he was limited in his concept, and the later
01:19:19
Gospels and the later writers obviously decided to increase it and change it according to what they basically believed.
01:19:27
You mentioned about the fact that the New Testament universally is the same. Well, let me tell you this. In the oldest
01:19:33
Bible in the world, what's called the Codex Sinaiticus, and you can go to www .codexsinaiticus
01:19:39
.org or .com, not .co .za, you'd find that there are books such as the
01:19:47
Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas, which is found to be part of that particular document.
01:19:54
Now if that is the case in the oldest Bible, why is it not in the particular New Testament that we have today?
01:20:02
Thank you, Professor. It's like an examination. What else?
01:20:09
Look, I just want to be, you know, James mentioned the issue of Mark, but I just want to kind of show that even, even, even, let's assume that John gives an accurate account, for example, on the so -called divinity of Christ.
01:20:21
Look at John 1 .1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was of God, and the Word was God. And I'd like to engage him on this maybe during the little later session.
01:20:29
Most people believe that this is an indication reflecting the divinity of Christ. But yet, if you look at the
01:20:37
Greek, it is something like this from memory. I'm not a Greek scholar. En arche en hologos, kai hologos, en prostontion kai theos, en hologos.
01:20:50
Now quite fascinatingly enough, I've got an article here, published in the
01:20:55
Journal of Biblical Literature, volume 92, page 85. Philip B.
01:21:01
Harner says, that such clauses as the one in John 1 .1 with an unauthorized predicate preceding the verb, are primarily qualitative in meaning.
01:21:09
They indicate that the logos has a nature of the theos. There is no basis for regarding the predicate theos as definite.
01:21:17
In John 1 .1, I think that the qualitative force of the predicate is so prominent that the noun cannot be regarded as definite.
01:21:24
In other words, the theos, if I were to say James is godly, god -like, he's a man of God.
01:21:30
It doesn't make him almighty God. You get the point. And what I find problematic here is that even on the assumption that we have the actual text, you've got an apologist, as many apologists do, and a
01:21:43
Greek scholar that would have to turn the very basis of Greek grammar upside down in order to justify their particular theological viewpoint.
01:21:52
Even though John 1 .1, the theos, does not indicate that the logos is almighty God. And it's basically, according to Philip Garner, there is no basis for regarding the theos as definite.
01:22:04
You'd find that people in the world will have to manipulate, change, misinterpret, in certain instances, even change their understanding of Greek grammar in order to prove and substantiate a particular theological point.
01:22:15
So can you see the problem we have? Most of the examples that I gave you up there, which James says that he was aware of, and he obviously probably is aware of, indeed, those were deliberate alterations.
01:22:27
Can you see, whoever is angry without a just cause, the word without a just cause is not there.
01:22:33
But when you remove without a just cause, what does it mean? Whoever is angry is in danger of the judgment.
01:22:40
Jesus himself became angry. So the scribes thought that, look, if they were to include the word without a cause, it would, in a sense, vindicate
01:22:47
Jesus. Or, for example, where it speaks about the purification, their purification,
01:22:52
Mary's, Joseph's, and Jesus', the scribes change it to her purification.
01:22:58
Why? Because if it was their purification, how can Almighty God be defiled? How does he need to be purified?
01:23:06
So can you see that these are deliberate changes that are being made? And it's not honest scholarship, no honest apologetics to say that these are not significant.
01:23:14
Yes, we know them now. But despite the fact that we know that, James, it hasn't changed the mindset of millions and millions of Christians today.
01:23:25
They still believe in the story of Jesus and the woman caught in the act of adultery. They still subscribe to the doctrine of Trinity.
01:23:31
Most of them still believe, even in my hotel room, it has 1 John 5, verse 7. It has the ascension of Jesus.
01:23:37
And these are critical to Christianity. What do you do in those particular circumstances and instances?
01:23:43
I don't believe I misquoted or took out of context what Curt and Barbara Allen said. They inform us about the various problems in the committee, and they quite clearly say that a committee text of this kind is occasionally regarded as problematical, and at times it may be so.
01:23:59
In a number of instances, it represents a compromise, for none of the editors can claim a perfect acceptance record of all recommendations offered.
01:24:08
Meaning, if there are recommendations that the text should be this, someone would disagree. No, that the text should say this.
01:24:13
Can you see, or there are certain passages that are not there. The text is agreed by a committee.
01:24:19
Where they disagreed on the best reading to print, they voted. What we have are working editions.
01:24:26
What's a working edition? A working edition is like a draft. It's not your final product.
01:24:32
It's a working edition. And the working edition in the present scenario with the Nestle -Alland
01:24:37
New Testament is in the 27th edition. So there's going to be a 28th, maybe a 29th, maybe a 30th, the more and the more manuscripts are studied.
01:24:45
Can you see the problem? Can you see the difficulty we have with that? We don't have problems like that with the
01:24:51
Quran. If every single Quranic text was burnt in the world today, every one of them, burn them all, put them on a bonfire, will we be able to reconstruct the
01:24:59
Quran? Yes, because it's in the minds and the hearts of the people. And that is the difference between the