Dan Wallace

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll -free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. Hold off on those phone calls until just a little bit later, I already see somebody calling.

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We're going to have a little contest, actually a little giveaway a little bit later in the program and we will let you get in and get some questions toward the end of the program today because we have as special guest on The Dividing Line today,

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I'm so thankful that he has joined us, Dr. Dan Wallace of Dallas Seminary. What has

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Dan not done of late? So many things that people that listen to this program are very interested in and in particular, probably the two biggest things, we have often discussed his work in Greek Grammar, Greek Grammar Beyond the

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Basics, just a book that almost everybody who teaches Greek has used or has at least threatened his students with at one point or another in time.

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And of course, in the area of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts and the preservation of that great heritage of the

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Czars, Dan, thank you very much for joining me on the program today. James, it's a pleasure to be with you. Now you probably remember the first time we met, walked into the studios, where was that?

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Was that in Asheville? That was Chattanooga. Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee. That's right. John Ankerberg.

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And I don't know, how did you get the short end of the straw? Because you ended up having to sit over with all the King James Only guys.

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I think it's because I got there late. I took a flight, four flights, from British Columbia the night before at 6 p .m.,

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never slept and got in at Chattanooga Airport at 10 and the whole thing was supposed to start at 10, so. Ah, that's what it was.

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Okay, well, we stuck you over on the far side for some reason, but actually that ended up working well because you and I sort of tag teamed

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Dr. Strauss in between the two of us and I think it was good, though, that Dr. Strauss was between you and Sam Gip, personally.

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I think that there could have been problems if you all agree with that. Yeah, yeah, Sam struck me that way, yeah.

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Yeah, it was interesting. Anyway, that's when we first met and since then, believe it or not, that was 1995.

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And I look back on the videos and chuckle at my large glasses and thinning hair and how skinny

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I was and things like that. You haven't changed a bit, of course, in that time period.

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But so many things to get to and I know there's going to be a lot of folks that are going to want to call in. Let's start with what you're doing right now,

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I guess. I sent an email, maybe did that last, but I want to make sure to get to that right now. Obviously, if you are, how much time are you spending away right now, basically chasing down manuscripts from all over Europe and just the entire

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Mediterranean area? How much time is that, how big has that become in your life? It's a huge project.

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This last year was my sabbatical from Dallas Seminary and the administration gave me the freedom to work exclusively on the work of photographing these manuscripts and writing up my discoveries and things.

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And I was overseas for about 40 weeks in 10 different countries, including

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Australia and New Zealand and Greece, Germany, the UK, England, Scotland, Albania, all sorts of places.

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Now I'm about to head down to Australia next week. What in the world were you doing down there? There are some manuscripts in Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland, and we were allowed to come down there and photograph them.

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They have the most important biblical manuscript in the Southern Hemisphere is at Macquarie University in Sydney, it's

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P91, third century papyrus, it's just a strip of papyrus from Acts, a very important manuscript.

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Well since I'm going to be there next week, I now have something to go see. So now for folks that don't understand why this is so important, look, don't we already know what all these manuscripts say?

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I wish we did. There's been probably of the approximately 5 ,700 manuscripts,

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Greek New Testament manuscripts that we know of and about 2 .6 million pages of text, we have examined in detail less than 20 percent of them.

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So the others, they've been spot checked, many of them have been spot checked, but not all of them, and even those that have been spot checked, sometimes it's three or four places, oh this is this kind of text, so we'll just put it on the shelf and it's never looked at again.

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So there's still a lot of work that needs to be done, but trying to, and there are people who would like to do that work, but having access to the manuscripts, weren't they all microfilmed at some point?

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About 90 percent of the known manuscripts were put on microfilm, and there's one institute in the world, the

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Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany, that has those microfilms.

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The quality of them is fairly bad, and they're deteriorating.

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Again, as I said, it was 90 percent of the manuscripts that were known to exist back in the 60s or so, and we have discovered quite a bit of manuscripts since that time.

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My guess is it's probably closer to 80 percent now. Now, how did you,

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I mean, you were, I would assume, busy enough teaching Greek and all the things that come with having one of the most popular

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Greek grammars around. How did this opportunity to be involved in this kind of work come up?

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I think the stimulus for it came from St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai.

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I was allowed to come and see the new finds manuscripts that had been discovered in 1975 and spent a week looking at those manuscripts in 2002.

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These manuscripts were found when one of the kitchens at St. Catherine's Monastery had a fire, and when they put the fire out, they noticed between the floorboards that there was a geniza or a storage room beneath the floorboards, and when they finally dug out a hole in the wall to get into it, they discovered that there were hundreds of manuscripts in there.

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Twenty -four years later, they produced a catalog in modern Greek that described 1 ,200 manuscripts, and there were 50 ,000 fragments of manuscripts.

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These have not been examined in detail, and so it was a great privilege for me to go to St. Catherine's in 2002 and examine them.

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I guess that rekindled my interest and my desires to get into textual criticism far more than I had before, and so it was that year that I started the

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Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. So you started this. How many people are working with you now?

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Well, we have volunteers, and we also have volunteers that help us.

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And so the numbers change from almost month to month, but we also have full -time people when we go on these expeditions, and Dr.

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Jeff Hargis, our field director, is full -time, and these expeditions require at least four people, and on one expedition, we actually brought eight people, and we photographed the manuscripts, two people to photograph each manuscript at a time.

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So the cost to pay for just those trips is enormous. It's up to about $10 ,000 a week for four people, and that includes the travel and the minimal wages, all the equipment.

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We bring quite a bit of equipment with us, state -of -the -art kind of digital equipment, cameras, computers.

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We have to have battery backups for everything because we don't know if the electricity in any given place is going to be adequate for us.

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Yeah, in fact, I've seen a picture, and I'm fairly impressed. You have what looks like a MacBook Pro there, right?

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Yeah, that's what we use. That shows a tremendous insight into what's good.

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But anyway— Either that or I'm the son of the devil, one of the two, right? No, I likewise made that switch last year right about this time, so I could not be happier to have done so, but anyway, so you're in—you must have to be able to set up in some pretty unusual situations.

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Some of them are pretty strange, that's true. We've had to put our cameras on top of centuries -old cases that were—it wasn't suitcases, but it was almost like a treasure case that had the big buckles on it, you know, that you'd have on a warship or something like that, and other places the electricity would mandatorily shut off—the government would shut off the electricity in the entire country in the middle of the day, and they would not tell when they would do it, but it would be shut off for anywhere between two and four hours, and when we were in the library at that place, it was during the summer, it was already 100 degrees outside, and the air conditioning had just finally gotten us to the point where it was below sweating, and then the air conditioning shut off.

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But we had our batteries for the cameras and computers, and we just kept on working, but it got frightfully hot, especially because the windows were not the kind that could open.

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Oh, yeah, well, I live in Phoenix. Yeah, I live in Phoenix. I can't imagine what that would be like.

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But are there going to be any textual variants introduced in the future due to sweat, however?

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There may be not from our sweat, but from somebody else's. That's true. That must be what happened at First Timothy 316.

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Is that Thaos or Haas? Well, it's a sweat variant. Yeah, something along those lines.

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So, obviously, you're not finished. I mean, now that your sabbatical is over, then what does the future hold?

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Well, we're trying to raise funds so that we can continue doing this work, and if we were fully funded, we could get all of the

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Greek New Testament manuscripts in the world photographed in about 12 years. To be fully funded, it would take two teams working at about 10 months a year in the field, so eight people full time.

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And we've done, I guess, about 5 or 6 percent of the New Testament manuscripts so far, which isn't too bad on a real shoestring budget.

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And we've got, I believe, over 100 ,000 images posted on our website at csntm .org.

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And, you know, we're a nonprofit organization, just like you are, and so we depend on donations to be able to get the funding.

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Once we get all that funding, or as the funding increases, we can continue to go on expeditions. And we've got places lined up already for this next year that want us to return.

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We'll be in Romania, we'll be in Athens and Munich, for example, Patmos and Munster.

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Well, obviously, it would seem to me that one of the biggest hills you have to climb is getting the word out that this needs to be done.

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Because I just get the feeling that a lot of people assume, because you can pick up the

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Nessie Olin text, that this was all taken care of a long time ago. When I give presentations on New Testament materials and start talking about how, you could with Revelation, well, now we've discovered more manuscripts of Revelation.

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So even Revelation hasn't been completely examined as far as the manuscripts that are available to us. People look at me like, you're kidding me.

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I thought that had all been taken care of. It's interesting that we have to continually tell people that there's so much work left to be done in this field.

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And part of the reason for it is because we have an embarrassment of riches. There's no other ancient text in the world that comes close to the richness of the

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New Testament in terms of the number of witnesses, nor the proximity of those witnesses to the autographs, the original text.

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Now, talk a little bit about what has happened, because certainly those of us who monitor the textual criticism email lists and news sources and stuff like that keep seeing your name and CSNTM's name coming up of late and the term discovery of manuscripts.

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How does that work? It's not like you're running around, you know, digging stuff up in the deserts of Egypt or something like that.

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Correct. So how would you be discovering a manuscript? One of our workers,

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Jeff Hargis, the field director, wrote a blog post on our site called What It Means to Discover a

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Manuscript. And people can read that, but I'll summarize it here for you. To discover a manuscript means, technically, to find a manuscript that is not yet cataloged by the

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Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Munster. That is the official clearinghouse of Greek New Testament manuscripts, and they're the ones who assign a universal shelf number to these manuscripts that all

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New Testament scholars know them by. And until they know about it, the manuscript has technically not been discovered because it is not known to New Testament scholars.

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Now, it may well be known to the library, and most of these manuscripts that we photograph, that we discover, are known to those libraries.

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But Munster doesn't know about them, so we are the ones who are informing Munster about these discoveries.

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At the same time, there are other manuscripts that we discover that neither Munster nor that library knows about, and these typically are one of three kinds.

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It's either a palimpsest, that's a manuscript that's been scraped again by a later scribe, typically several centuries later.

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And it's the undertext that is barely visible, sometimes not visible at all.

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All we can tell is that the leaf is rougher, the parchment is rougher, and that it's been scraped over.

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So we look at it with UV lights or black lights, and we can detect that there's an undertext there.

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So when we find that, and we find that it's a biblical text, it's still very hard to read even with the ultraviolet lights.

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But when we discover that, then we say, okay, this is a discovered manuscript, and we've found quite a few manuscripts that way, including our most important one.

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And we've also found manuscripts that are at the ends of books. For example, it might be the last few leaves of a book that were just used to help with the binding that nobody had ever paid attention to.

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Or it may be something that's towards the end of the book that nobody has really examined in any detail.

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And we've discovered a few manuscripts that way, that we've got some text where the scribe starts out writing a gospels text, and then later on it switches into another gospels text by a different hand for the last 50 leaves of the manuscript that nobody ever paid attention to.

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So that's a discovery. Right. In fact, I thought, did I not read once about finding some leaves that were stuck inside a manuscript that were actually from a different manuscript?

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Yes. That kind of thing can also need to be documented, and those can be extremely important.

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I mean, look at manuscripts like 1739. I mean, they may be later manuscripts, but they go way, way back and are very important witnesses.

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It's always, every one of these manuscripts has a story to tell, and we do the best we can to find out as much of that story as we possibly can.

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And one of the things that most people don't realize when we photograph these is we don't just jump in and start shooting the manuscripts.

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We spend maybe a couple of hours to prepare a manuscript for photography, and usually it's only those who have the most experience working with manuscripts that prepare them.

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And what we'll do is we'll go through, count every leaf. We'll try to count the leaves in the choir.

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That's the folds in the manuscript where, just like in a modern book, you'll have maybe eight leaves that are folded over and then they are sewn into the binding.

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That was the typical standard, the medieval standard of eight leaves that were folded, and that's called a choir,

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Q -U -I -R -E. And we'll look at those and count how many choirs there are, and we'll notice if maybe a choir has been shorted.

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For example, it might only have six leaves in it, and if so, that tells us in a very quick way that there's some missing material from that manuscript.

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We see if the hand has changed, if it's a different handwriting, perhaps even a different century.

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There's all sorts of fascinating information that we look at when we examine these manuscripts before we photograph them.

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And I would imagine that given the quality of the images, some of that examination, there might be things that are discovered, especially about scribes and things like that, that comes after your work.

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Oh, absolutely, yeah. But without that high -quality image, that just can't be discovered anyway.

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Right. So in essence, if the work could be properly funded and completed, then you would be moving toward being able to have a, well, really have full access to the entire range of New Testament manuscripts in a digital format.

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Exactly. And what's exciting about that is we've got so many volunteers throughout the world who are beginning to examine the images that we've already taken.

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They're doing scripture indexes on each image so that we will have all of the tens of thousands of images that we've shot indexed so that we know what the beginning verse and the end verse is on each page.

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And that's going to help us to find where we are in these texts. We've also got a man who's developing software to find the manuscripts.

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Let's say he's looking at 1 Timothy 3 .16, and he keys that, and he says, pull up all the images at CSNTM that have 1

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Timothy 3 .16 on that page. Right. And this will automatically do it. And that should be done, I think, by the end of this year.

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Wow. So those kinds of things are extremely helpful for scholars to be able to examine individual manuscripts and individual verses, all sorts of things.

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Well, I can't think of very many things that could be a better thing for churches, for example, to support than this kind of thing.

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I mean, this is the focus of the attacks on the

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New Testament today. And so you are right there in the forefront of doing that, which sort of brings me to this.

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I wanted to play something for you. I know you've heard it before, and my audience has heard it before, too.

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But as you know, back in January, I had the opportunity of engaging one Dr. Bart Ehrman in a debate in Florida.

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And in his closing statements, he said something. And unfortunately, when you have closing statements, you only have so much time.

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And I had already pre -written about 60 percent of mine. So I didn't get much of an opportunity to respond to this.

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But since it's directly relevant, I want to I want to play this and get your commentary afterwards.

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I understand the arguments of people like James and Dan Wallace, but sometimes, you know, they don't make sense to me, even though I intellectually understand them.

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Dan Wallace, whom he keeps quoting, insists that, in fact, differences don't matter in the manuscript.

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Well, if the differences don't matter, why is it that he is undertaking a major project dealing with Greek manuscripts, a project that is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars?

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If the differences don't matter, what does he tell these people he's trying to raise money from?

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Well, we'd like you to donate $50 ,000 to our cause because the differences don't matter. Of course they matter.

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And if they don't matter, it is shameful to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this in a world where people are starving to death.

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If the differences don't matter. Well, the differences do matter, in my opinion.

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So there's there's Bart Ehrman. And I was left sort of sitting there just sort of staring at him, wondering where in the world did that come from on on two levels.

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A, the I don't know, the the fervor that he has in sort of preaching almost at that point in time.

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Well, he used to be an evangelical, so he knows how to preach. There you go. I'm not sure how that works when you're a happy agnostic. But anyway, but the the fact that and of course, feel free to comment on what he's specifically said about you and CSNTM.

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Oh, I will. I don't know how many times you have corrected

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Bart Ehrman in your debate with him. And I believe it was April. Was it March or April of 2000?

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April of 2008 in New Orleans. I had corrected him already at this point.

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How can Bart Ehrman keep saying that you and I and people like us don't think the textual variants are important?

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I think it's perhaps because that has rhetorical power, and it's a very disingenuous note, and he knows this.

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I've had both private conversations with him to the effect that I've never said that, and he even acknowledged that I had never said that.

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He said, yes, but that's what people think you said. And I said, but that's not what you said when you debated James White.

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Right, right. And so I called him on that one, and he continues to do that because I think that makes it look like he's got the upper hand, that if he can prove that differences just matter, that they're significant to some degree, people think that he's won the debate when that's not what the debate's about at all.

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Exactly. Right, right. Well, but even after, because I sent you that clip,

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I think, back in February, something like that. It's been a while back. But there was an exchange on the

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Textual Criticism email list long after that where, again, he said the same thing, and you wrote some excellent responses before the topic, unfortunately, was prematurely shut down, in my opinion.

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But it just seems that for Dr. Ehrman, for a textual variant to be important, it must follow that there can be absolutely no level of reliability for the

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New Testament at all. It is a huge chasm that you have to drop into for him to accept the idea that, well, okay, yes, now you see that these variants are important because they lead to a complete unreliability of the manuscript tradition in the

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New Testament. One of the things he says in misquoting Jesus is that we can't tell what an author means until we can tell what he says, and we can't tell what he says as long as there are any variants in his writings that are unclear as to what the original wording is.

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And sometimes when he says stuff like that, I'm just dumbfounded, because I'm thinking, Bart, this would not be true of you or any other author ever, because the first printing of your book of it has one mistake in it, therefore

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I can't understand anything you've said in that book. And, I mean, he knows that that's just rhetoric.

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It really has no substance to it, but it sure sounds good to the layperson who wants to buy into his arguments.

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Well, I was completely taken aback, because I just, aside from the radical skepticism that is his in this area, it just struck me as a pretty low blow, to be very honest with you, to take a shot like that in the context of a public debate, especially there are starving people in the world,

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Dan. I mean, come on, what are you doing? Yeah, that was a very low blow. I can't even begin to understand that, especially when

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I would imagine with New York Times bestsellers, right and left, which are really, to be honest, and he says this, they're nothing new in his books.

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He's just, he's resurrecting the same old, same old stuff, but he does it in a very understandable way.

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I think you've got to be careful which rocks you throw while living in glass houses, as far as that goes. But it just struck me as an amazing example of where folks are going these days.

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But it also brings up one other issue, and I've heard you speak on this. In fact, if you want to mention where people can get the lectures you did at ETS and also,

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I believe, at a church somewhere. I don't remember what the location of the church was. But there has been a fundamental change of direction in a large portion of what is called

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New Testament textual critical studies over the past 20 years or so. And you mentioned this,

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I had an interesting experience. I was giving my New Testament reliability presentation at a church on Long Island about a month ago or a little bit more than a month ago.

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And this older fellow came up to me, and he showed me the Byzantine textual platform book.

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And I was extremely exhausted at that time. I was really, really tired. I'd been speaking once or twice a day for quite some time.

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And I said, yeah, I've just got some historical problems with that. And he goes, why don't? I believe 100%, because I wrote it.

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It was Maurice Robinson. I've been sitting in the back listening to the entire presentation.

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And we ended up having a really nice discussion. But you may recall that at one point, I got into trouble on the textual criticism list, because I raised this issue.

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And I pointed to the fact that Ehrman and others are very much pushing away from a concern about the original and abandoning a discussion of really reconstructing the original

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New Testament text. And, of course, Maurice agrees very strongly. He may come from a different perspective as far as how you deal with that.

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But Ehrman, in his closing statement, was basically saying, look, Dan Wallace, these people, they've been left in the dust.

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Scholarship doesn't really think it's relevant anymore. How do you respond to that kind of a claim? Well, I think there are three scholars in particular who are moving in the direction of trying to make

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New Testament textual criticism go completely postmodern. And therefore, everything should be relative.

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And we should be skeptical about getting back to the origins. And Ehrman gave a lecture some years ago about our inordinate concern for the origins, the historical origins of early

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Christianity. And he said, that's just ridiculous. What we need to be thinking about is how Christianity evolved over the centuries and look at the variants that change in various locations and at various times to promote various doctrines.

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I think the issue is that they are basically erasing the distinction between canon and church history.

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And David Parker in England has been doing this, where he says, all of the textual variants are equally inspired.

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Why should we limit just the original wording to be the inspired word of God? All of it is equally inspired.

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And the Spirit of God is still working today to give us these inspired textual variants. Well, when you start making those kinds of statements, your understanding of inspiration is dramatically opposed to what the church's historic understanding of inspiration has been.

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Now, Ehrman himself doesn't believe in inspiration. He doesn't believe in the biblical God. He calls himself an agnostic.

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But he says, if there is a God, it's certainly not the God of the Bible. So whatever his views of the

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Bible are, it has nothing to do with any true deity. And so his take on things is just to be completely postmodern and to say, we can't get back to that original text, that autographic text in any capacity at all.

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And what I'm seeing here is a shift that these scholars, Parker, Ehrman, and Eldon Epp is the other one who have really been promoting this, but the vast bulk of New Testament textual critics are not buying it.

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And they're recognizing that this is still a historic discipline, and it still has a great deal of importance for the church.

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And we're concerned to figure out what that autographic text is as much as we possibly can.

29:36

But those three names, if you do a search for the current published works in those fields, those three names are extremely prominent.

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Oh, they come up a lot. That's right. Yeah. And so, I mean, isn't there a danger that a lot of the minimal funding there is already is going into now exegeting variants?

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And, you know, what does this variant tell us about the Christian scribe who made it and et cetera, et cetera?

30:05

It seems a matter of concern that there would be such a divergence of the goal that these individuals would have in doing the studies that they're doing.

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Yes, and so other scholars have to respond to that and address the issues differently, although there are plenty of other scholars who are.

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Peter Head, P .J. Williams at Cambridge University, Dirk Jankin also at Cambridge University, all three of them at Tyndall House, Mike Holmes at Bethel Seminary, Maurice Robinson, the

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Majority Text Fellow at Southeastern Baptist, myself, there's all the folks at the

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Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Moonster are against this particular view and that's the epicenter for text critical studies in the world and they've published extensively on these issues.

30:55

You know, unfortunately, whenever the media touches on things like this, they're going to go for the news story rather than the solid balanced perspective.

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Oh, absolutely. And this is one of the things about the media that's fascinating and Bart has, he's brilliant to have captured on this.

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He recognizes that for somebody who has been an evangelical to come out of that, to become a theological liberal, and to tell that story in the public square is a stroke of genius.

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It's something that the media have capitalized on and so much so that, well, you may be aware of this,

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James, that about 99 % of all theological liberals used to be evangelical or fundamentalists and most of them have been fundamentalists.

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And you say, well, good grief, what's happened? And I think that's an interesting discussion we could get into sometime on your show, but the point is that the media think that Bart Ehrman is unique because he has told his spiritual autobiography in the public square rather than just keeping it to himself and so they trumpet him as a darling for themselves and for their views.

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And consequently, he's getting so much airtime that others simply have not gotten before.

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Yeah, it is, well, it's something we have to deal with and I know that a lot of people are working on that.

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It's just obviously the media likes to promote that type of thing. Two things, but first I'm going to go ahead and open the phone lines and here's what we're going to do.

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For the first two folks who have questions at 877 -753 -3341, we have the last two of the original edition of the

32:42

King James Only Controversy. I don't know if you know, Dan, there's a new edition of that out, 32 more pages were added to that.

32:50

But we have the original, two of the originals left, signed copies, and we want to give them to someone.

32:56

So 877 -753 -3341, if you have questions for Dan Wallace, that's a toll -free number.

33:02

877 -753 -3341 is the number and you can fill those phone lines up.

33:09

Now, I want to do two more things, stay in sort of the sublime area first. When someone like Bart Ehrman says, we don't believe that textual variants are important and yet we spend so much time discussing them and going over them and talking about them and things like that, one that I had mentioned to you that a lot of people are not aware of and there's not a whole lot of discussion of, but that I think illustrates this concept of we need to know about these things and they can have importance, is in 2

33:43

Peter 1, verse 21. And in the

33:48

Nessie Olin text, the UBS text, the Westcott and Hort text, which, of course, underlies what most,

33:55

I mean, let's face it, most people today are using translations based upon those now, especially with the, have you ever seen an explosion of popularity like the

34:03

ESV has experienced? Well, the RSV experienced that in 1952. It came out on September 1st, and the first day it sold a million copies.

34:11

Wow, okay. But the ESV has, in the modern day,

34:17

I mean, I think it's eclipsed the NIV now. It's just, they've really known how to promote this thing.

34:22

Yeah, they've done a great job on it. They really have. But most of those translations that are following after the

34:28

Nessie Olin United Bible Society text, at the end of that verse, they have the phrase, men being carried along by the

34:35

Holy Spirit spoke from God. And yet, the majority of manuscripts, and especially the

34:45

Byzantine manuscripts, have a different reading, which is reflected in the King James, where it says, holy men of God spoke as they were carried along by the

34:56

Holy Spirit. Now, those are, you know, obviously very closely related, but there's a major difference, as I can see, between speaking about men being carried along by the

35:10

Holy Spirit, speaking apotheu from God, and the other reading, that being that holy men of God spoke as they were being carried along by the

35:23

Holy Spirit. So, you have been, obviously, we haven't even gotten into this, very much involved with the

35:30

New English translation, and we have found, for example,

35:36

I've turned many people on to the NA27NET Diglot, because, in fact,

35:43

I don't know if you've seen this, but that's what I carry in my debates now, when I debated

35:48

Imam Shamsi Ali in New York, that was a text I had with me, because it is a gold mine of information.

35:56

I mean, if you want to be ready for what someone's going to throw at you in regards to especially textual, critical, and historical issues, and you want to have one volume in your hand, that's the one to have.

36:07

I mean, it just is. So, that has become a tremendously useful tool, and we thank you for that.

36:14

But when you encounter a variant like this, and especially you as an

36:19

NET translator, I'm sure you're involved in the editorial decisions. In fact, I know you are, because you've talked about the possibility, even, of removing the

36:27

Pricapay adultery from John 753 -811 in the next edition of the NET, and things like that.

36:33

How do you handle the discussion of this, for example, in the notes?

36:38

I would assume the NET discusses that variant. Amazingly, I apologize, I forgot to look. Actually, we don't discuss it.

36:44

I didn't think it was important enough to discuss, but we probably will for the second edition. Yeah, well, there you go. And by important enough,

36:51

I don't mean that it's not significant in terms of the meaning, but rather that the evidence wasn't as compelling for both readings to bring it in.

36:58

But still, it's something that we should probably discuss, second edition. Yeah, and you know, one of the reasons

37:04

I would suggest it is because there is still so much use of the

37:10

KJV, but even more so the NKJV, that when a translation is used in a church, it's really when there is this meaning difference that the variant introduces, a lot of pastors are caught up short because they sort of fell asleep during the textual criticism lecture is what they shouldn't, because there is a difference between the two.

37:34

And people want to know, well, which one is it? Why is there a difference there?

37:40

How do you handle that in the NET? And how do you handle criticism that when you have, how many thousands of text notes in the

37:48

NET? In the Net Bible, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of only about 800 notes, where we discuss it in some detail.

37:56

Right. But there are approximately 300 ,000 to 400 ,000 textual variants among the witnesses, the

38:03

Greek versional and patristic witnesses to the New Testament. So we've had to be highly selective as to what we put in.

38:09

And we've picked about half of the ones that are listed in the apparatus of the United Bible Society's Greek text to discuss.

38:17

So how do you handle the objection then from people who say by discussing these things, you're actually diminishing people's trust in the

38:27

Bible and its authority? Well, the King James Bible, when it came out, had 8 ,000 marginal notes that discussed both variants and different translations on words.

38:38

And that didn't seem to diminish anyone's trust in the scriptures. In later editions, they deleted that.

38:45

And of course, that's to the glee of the King James only crowd, because they say, therefore, the King James is set in stone. But the reality is that it's only been since the printing press that we can have this artificial sense of we know exactly what the

38:59

Word of God is, because until the printing press came along, all the manuscripts were handwritten, and they differed from each other.

39:06

Consequently, every edition or every manuscript that somebody had would be different from somebody else's, and usually in hundreds of places, at least for the

39:15

New Testament. So we have to wrestle with these kinds of issues as textual critics to try to get back to the original wording.

39:21

And at the same time, the way we do this is we look at both external and internal evidence.

39:27

And external evidence has to do with the manuscripts and how old they are, how reliable they are, given the length of text they have, and how reliable they should prove themselves to be in other places.

39:40

And internal evidence has to do with what is the author likely to have written, what is the scribe likely to have done.

39:46

And in this instance, in 2 Peter 121, we see that although the majority of manuscripts have the reading, holy men of God spoke, that holy men of God is found in manuscripts that for the most part are 2nd millennium manuscripts.

40:04

And just because the majority of manuscripts have it doesn't tell us anything about what the original wording is, because the majority of manuscripts were produced in and around Byzantium or Constantinople beginning in the 4th century.

40:17

They did not become the majority until the 9th century, but then in the 11th century and beyond, then they really went into full swing.

40:25

But it was a fairly localized text. But up until the 4th century, the Greek manuscripts were spread throughout the entire

40:32

Mediterranean region, and those in other areas tended to be more reliable, especially manuscripts that are called the

40:40

Alexandrian text. And yet there are two manuscripts that have that other reading that are pretty famous, pretty well known, with Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus.

40:53

So it's at least a somewhat early reading. Yes, especially

40:58

Sinaiticus is from the 4th century that has this, and that's a very early manuscript.

41:05

However, on the other side for the reading just from God instead of holy men of God, we have the earliest manuscript for the

41:16

Petrine Epistles, which is P782, a 34th century manuscript that has all of 1st and 2nd

41:22

Peter and Jude, and Codex B, which is a 4th century manuscript like Olive or Sinaiticus is, but it tends to be a far more accurate manuscript than Sinaiticus does.

41:35

And we have 1739, which although it's a later manuscript from the 10th century, has readings that go back, almost all of its readings go back to the late 4th century.

41:45

So you've got some very significant witnesses that have just the wording from God, and that's called looking at the external evidence.

41:54

We're comparing these manuscripts to say, okay, which has this, which has the other? And then when we think about it internally, we have to ask, which is more likely?

42:02

And we look at the scribal tendencies in particular at that point. It is interesting that Metzger noted the possibility of some paleographical confusion between Apotheou, Theou being a nomenosacra, so it's an abbreviation, and Hagioi Theou as a possibility too, which is interesting.

42:23

I don't know, those are some of the things that we can look at as possibilities for reconstructing why a particular variant would have come along.

42:31

But I think the important part is we don't hide these things. We don't try to sweep these things under a rug.

42:39

We discuss these things openly. And for me, especially dealing with Islam a lot these days, there is a fundamentally different approach that we have in dealing with New Testament manuscripts than Islam has in dealing with the text of the

42:53

Qur 'an. And I think that's an important thing to bring out. I think there's a fundamental difference in how these two texts were created and transmitted as well, because in Islam you have that control that you've got very early on of what the copies were supposed to look like for apologetic purposes, while as within Christianity the text of the

43:12

New Testament virtually never had much in the way of control. It was due to the life of the

43:19

Church that these manuscripts were copied as frequently as they were, and the very fact that they don't agree with each other as much as we'd like to see them tells us that the

43:28

Church was a living, vibrant, uncontrolled organism that is spreading throughout the

43:35

Mediterranean world. And that's actually very exciting to think about. Well, and I think that's vitally important, because there wasn't any single organization that could introduce any kind of overarching editing for apologetic purposes, which is the primary argumentation we normally hear from the

43:51

Da Vinci codes and things like that of this kind of external corruption of the text. Well, Ehrman even argues that the manuscripts are wild, and then he also tries to argue that there is a conspiracy.

44:02

You simply can't have both at the same time in the same place. If it's wild, it's chaos, and if it's a conspiracy, it's control.

44:10

Well, speaking of wild and conspiracy, to descend from the high plains before we take some calls,

44:18

I did want to get at least a brief comment from you, because believe it or not, some of us are still carrying the water in dealing with the

44:27

King James Only folks. And do you ever get contacted from some of these folks because of being on the

44:36

Anchor Bird show? Do you ever? Oh, I do. Every once in a while, they tend to condemn me to hell pretty quickly.

44:43

Well, Sam Gipp is still around, and you remember Sam. He's the one who looked right into the camera and said,

44:50

God has promised us one inspired and inerrant translation in one language at one time, and right now it's the

44:55

King James version of the Bible. And that was right before you talked about how control towers around the world use

45:02

English, and this is relevant to how we should know what the New Testament originally said.

45:08

Well, as you are undoubtedly aware, there was an incident that took place at the beginning of the fourth program while we were both sitting there in the studio, and John Ankerberg, after lunch, said, look,

45:21

Don Wilkins of the New American Standard Bible Lockman Foundation, we're going to come to you, and I'm going to ask you about New Age Bible versions by Gail Ripplinger.

45:30

And hopefully you'll be able to hear this. This is what took place as soon as John Ankerberg said.

45:37

What did you all find out about Gail Ripplinger's book? Well, first of all, that book...

45:43

Oh, I'm losing my voice. I'll just get a little water here first here. All right, hold on.

45:49

We'll pick it up there when he gets his voice. All right, you all ready?

46:01

Try it out. Hi, yeah, I think I'm all right now. All right, so we'll pick it up right there.

46:08

All right, you ready? So there was Don Wilkins. I'm not sure if he explained to you, he did to me, that he had flown in from Greece, and he takes prescription medications for migraines that frequently dry him up a good bit.

46:23

And so he had a little frog in his throat and took a drink and then moved on with that situation.

46:30

Well, shortly after that, Tex Meyers comes out and says,

46:36

Bible translators struck dumb while trying to criticize the

46:41

King James Version of the Bible. And I had leaned over to Art Farstad. You were across the way, so I couldn't have mentioned this to you.

46:46

Art Farstad was right to my right, and I leaned over to him. During that break, you could hear a bunch of people talking.

46:51

And I said, the King James Only guys are going to make something of this. And he looked at me like I was an alien from another planet. No, no one would ever do that.

46:59

Well, unfortunately, Art hadn't spent enough. The guys on my side, the King James Only folks, were joking about somebody doing it, but it was purely a joke.

47:09

It didn't stay that way. No, no. And when I saw that note by Tex Meyers, I go, oh my gosh, these guys are just conspiracy theory riddled.

47:18

Well, it is amazing. Now, what has happened is, that was taken out of the VHS version and the part that aired, because as you remember,

47:27

Ankerberg had distribution problems right after we did that series, and not all of it actually ended up airing, which also became evidence of God's judgment by somebody else's opinion.

47:37

But anyway, what has happened is, since they have digitized that, they have now reinserted that.

47:42

That's why I have it. They've reinserted that section so people can see what actually happened. And what has been the result of that is

47:49

Sam Gip now says, oh, that wasn't it. That's not what happened. Something else happened where Don Wilkin lost his voice.

47:57

Now, I have told the same story for a long, long, long, long time. That was the only incident in the entire eight programs where there was anything about somebody we had to start over again or somebody had to take a drink or anything like that for anybody, but especially for Don Wilkin.

48:14

That was the only time. Is that your recollection as well? Absolutely. What is

48:20

Sam thinking? Is he thinking some other time separated by 30 minutes or a different program or something?

48:25

A different program. He says that there's no way we can ever show it because Ankerberg erased it.

48:33

And I'm like, that's interesting. Well, there is such a thing known as memory in community.

48:41

And when you and I are part of that community and Ken Barker and Don Wilkins, have you talked to Don about this?

48:47

Yes, yes. And I'm going to get a recording from him. And I'm also going to contact Dr. Ankerberg. Yeah. Well, you've got people who remember the incident.

48:55

You've got it on video. And that's the same kind of thing. Well, you don't have the video, but you have people in community memory, remembering things in the

49:03

Gospels. And that's why we can have a very sure trust that the Gospels are reliable, because those memories about what was said were not done in a corner and hidden away for 30 years.

49:16

They were talked about publicly and there was memory in community for decades before they were ever pinned. Right. Yeah. Well, I just wanted to bring that up because you were sitting there and I certainly remember it, but the idea that it actually happened twice and that there was worse some other time or anything else,

49:31

I had never thought that anyone could come up with something like this. But here's a man who was in the room who's now saying,

49:37

I'm a liar, because I've said, no, this one that we just listened to, that's the only time anything happened.

49:43

That's the incident we've been talking about all along. And I'm a liar for saying that. So I wanted to get another testimony from someone who was in the room that day.

49:53

And we just did so. With that... Well, James, before we get into the callers, could I mention the website where we've got those...

50:00

You bet. ...DVDs. I've done a couple of DVDs that are available.

50:06

One is Challenges in New Testament Textual Criticism for the 21st Century. And this is a critique of Ehrman and Parker and some others.

50:14

The other is what we have now, what they wrote then. These are both available at nttextualcriticism .com.

50:23

NTTextualcriticism. So there's... It's NTT then. There's two T's in a row. NTTextualcriticism .com

50:30

is where you can go. I've listened to both of those. See, what I do is I get those videos and I rip the

50:36

MP3s, put them on iPod, and listen while I'm writing. That's how I did all the preparation for the Ehrman debate, listened to all of his classes and stuff like that, was ripping from video and going straight to MP3.

50:47

So it's weird how my memory works because I remember you talking about D .C.

50:53

Parker as I was climbing Thunderbird Hill. So my heart rate was max and you were talking about D .C.

50:59

Parker all at the same time. It's weird how my memory connects things together. But that's what's going on here.

51:05

Let's take some callers here. Let's talk with Matt in Indianapolis. Hi, Matt. Hi, how are you?

51:11

Doing good. Hi, Dr. Wallace. Quick question. P52 is the oldest manuscript.

51:18

That's about 125 A .D. I was wondering what is the probability of finding even an earlier manuscript than that or even a more complete papyri manuscript really early, say, for the 2nd century?

51:30

I know that a lot of the really good manuscripts are from the 4th or 5th and they're on Bellum and papyri disintegrates.

51:38

But I'm just wondering, since you're not digging up things in the deserts of Egypt, what is the possibility that there may be that manuscript that could be really early and an even greater witness than we already have?

51:50

That's a great question, Matt. Let me mention a little bit more about P52 for the other listeners.

51:56

This is a manuscript that actually is dated somewhere between A .D. 100 and 150.

52:03

Most people don't date it at 125. We can't be that precise about it. But it was discovered in 1934 by C .H.

52:11

Roberts at the University of Manchester in the John Rylands Library. And it's just a fragment. It's got

52:16

John 18, 31 through 33 on one side and verses 37 and 38 on the back. And Roberts sent it to the three leading papyrologists in Europe at the time.

52:25

The next year he published a book on this unknown Gospels fragment. And all three papyrologists said it is dated somewhere between A .D.

52:34

100 and A .D. 150 and probably closer to A .D. 100. A fourth one, Adolf Deissmann, weighed in and he said,

52:39

I think you guys are all wrong. I think it's dated in the 90s of the 1st century. Now, most scholars today would, textual critics would say

52:48

A .D. 100 to A .D. 150 is about as close as we can get on this one. There are other manuscripts from the 2nd century as well.

52:54

And this is not always known because P .52 is so well celebrated. But some of substantial length are found.

53:03

For example, P .66, which has most of John's Gospel, is typically dated about 175.

53:10

And yet, one of the earliest papyrologists who looked at it said, I think this should be dated before 150.

53:17

There is also P .46, which is normally dated about 200, so right at the end of the 2nd century.

53:23

And it's got most of Paul's letters in it. It's our earliest manuscript of Paul. So we do have some manuscripts from the 2nd century.

53:32

As a matter of fact, those that are typically dated either 2nd century or either 2nd or 3rd, where we're just not sure which of the two centuries it belongs to, we have more than 43 % of all

53:44

New Testament verses found in those manuscripts. So we're dealing with a substantial amount of material, and most of the books of the

53:51

New Testament, I think 16 of the books of the New Testament, have portions of them in these manuscripts.

53:57

So in the 2nd century, we've already got quite a bit of data. Now the question you're raising is, is it possible for us to ever find some others?

54:04

And my response is, absolutely. Just 10 years ago at Oxford University, the scholars there went through papyri that had been excavated a century earlier.

54:18

And the fact is that we have probably tens of thousands of papyrus fragments sitting in European libraries that have never really been examined, simply because there's a lack of papyrologists today.

54:30

It's not a real sexy field, so you don't have a lot of folks working in it. But these scholars, 10 years ago at Oxford, at the

54:38

Ashmolean Museum, went through the papyri and said, let's at least determine if they're Christian. And the way they do that is to see if they use what's called nomina sacra that James mentioned earlier in the program.

54:49

That's a word, it's a sacred name that has a horizontal bar over the letters, and it's an abbreviated name.

54:56

And when you see those horizontal bars, immediately you set it aside and call it perhaps a Christian document. Well, 10 years ago, they discovered 17

55:04

New Testament papyri that were unknown to exist before then, even though they had been excavated a century before.

55:11

And some of these were from the second and third century. So yes, I'd say there's quite a bit of possibility that we'll find some more manuscripts from the second century.

55:22

And as the digs continue in Egypt, in Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere, we're getting down to lower layers.

55:29

There's possibilities we'll continue to find more material. Thank you, Matt, for your phone call. Appreciate that. Rich, did you get an address from Matt?

55:36

Okay, good. Thank you. And before I go to Roy, real quickly, what you just said,

55:42

Dan, was the exact thing that Bart rejected. He didn't challenge you on it in your debate, but he challenged me on it in ours.

55:50

How do you respond to his rather scoffing response to the idea that we have that much second century material?

55:59

Well, he has actually said on more than one occasion, even in our debate at the Greer Heard Forum at New Orleans Baptist Seminary, that we have to wait hundreds of years before we see any

56:08

New Testament manuscripts. And I have called him on this in print and in speaking at the

56:14

Greer Heard. I said, Bart, that is factually incorrect. You know we don't have to wait hundreds of years before we see any

56:21

New Testament manuscripts. We have to wait decades before we see any. And maybe it's only one decade.

56:26

If P. 52 is written in the first decade of the second century and John's Gospel is written in the 90s. So he's giving some factually incorrect information.

56:36

And I've called him on that. Well, then he says, yes, but most of the manuscripts are late. I said, yeah, but the vast majority of the manuscripts are second millennium.

56:44

That's really late. But still, we have hundreds of manuscripts in the first millennium. And I've gone through and I charted out how many we have from the second century, how many from the third, fourth, fifth, etc.

56:55

And we have more manuscripts for the New Testament by the third century than the average classical author has in the entire transmissional history of his copies.

57:06

This is an astounding figure. And Ehrman will say things like, well, we can't really tell what

57:14

Plato or Xenophon or some of these other authors actually ever wrote because we have to be skeptical about their writings too.

57:21

And yet in his own books, he says, Plato says this, Xenophon says this, Herodotus says this.

57:27

And he never gives any kind of a critical disclaimer at those points, but he does for the New Testament. That's disingenuous.

57:33

Yeah, I asked him about all that in the cross -examination, which I think is why on the video he did not look happy during cross -ex.

57:39

Really quickly, let's get to Roy, our last caller, Roy in Washington. Hi, Roy.

57:44

Hi. Hey, Dr. Wallace. Hey. I was just curious to get your opinion on how we are, especially

57:50

I'm a pastor, to deal with these texts like the story of the adulterous woman and the long -running of Mark with a populace that's pretty well ignorant of a lot of these subjects, and especially with translations that keep putting them in.

58:06

Boy, that is a great question to end this show with. I'd have to say that we have done a disservice to the

58:13

Church, and there has been a tradition of timidity among translations and pastors and professors to not wrestle with these issues and bring it up before laypeople.

58:24

As you know, most New Testament scholars, including most evangelical scholars, would say that the longer ending of Mark's Gospel and the story of the woman caught in adultery are almost surely not authentic parts of the

58:37

Gospels of Mark and John. And yet, we don't say this in the pulpit, and we don't relegate those passages just to the footnotes in our translations.

58:47

Bart Ehrman, I think, has done the Church a great service by exposing that and doing it in the public square.

58:54

The problem is that he's a source that Christians can't trust, and we have been silent about it.

59:00

It is time for us to speak up and to say these things, but to do it gently with people, give them enough instruction and enough background so they don't become chicken littles and think the sky is falling when we say, here's two passages that are 12 verses long that are not authentic.

59:14

These are the only two passages of more than two verses that are of any dispute in the

59:19

New Testament. So you look at these two, and at one point in Ehrman's book, he says, well, the long ending of Mark's Gospel is a typical example of a kind of a variant we're dealing with.

59:28

It's anything but typical. There's only one other passage like it that has more than two verses, and that's John 753 through 811.

59:34

So we need to be honest, we need to be gentle, we need to be pastoral with our people, but we also have to tell them the truth.

59:43

I appreciate that. Thank you, Roy, for your call, and Dan, I so thank you for the amount of time you gave us this evening.

59:51

Especially, I really appreciate how we ended there, because anybody who's listened to this program for any time at all knows that what you just said is what

01:00:00

I have said over and over and over again, and it's always nice to have somebody else saying the same things, especially when it comes to the fact that we are facing a day where because of the internet, because of the culture we live in, the

01:00:15

Bart Ehrmans of the world are not going to be going away. Harper One is going to crank out everything that they write on anything, and if our people are not being prepared in our churches, if they don't know where their

01:00:25

Bible came from, if they don't know why there are those teeny tiny four point font notes down at the bottom of their page, we're setting them up.

01:00:33

It's our fault. It's not Bart Ehrman's fault. It's our fault. And I can't think of anybody who has been more instrumental in equipping us for answering those questions than you have.

01:00:44

I very much appreciate that. I've said many times on the program, I don't always agree with everything Dan Wallace says, but when he says it,

01:00:50

I have to figure out why he said it. And that, I think, I hope you take as the compliment that it is meant to be.

01:00:58

Your Greek grammatical materials, your New Testament materials, your textual critical materials, vitally important stuff.

01:01:04

I pray God will give you a long and healthy life as you continue to serve the church in what you're doing.

01:01:11

James, thanks so much. I appreciate being on your show. You've got some good people listening. Those were two great questions.

01:01:17

Oh, we do. We do. We've got good folks listening, and if there's ever anything in the future where you would like to get a message out about important stuff coming up for CSNTM, maybe some big thing comes down the pike and you need some help,

01:01:32

I hope you'll feel free to call and let us help you get that word out. Oh, I will. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much.

01:01:38

Yeah, thank you. All right. God bless. Bye -bye. All right, folks. Thank you so much for... Thanks to Dan Wallace.

01:01:45

Thanks to everyone who listened. I think it's important to get that information out there and to hear more than one voice saying it.

01:01:52

I think that's really, really important. So do pray for CSNTM. Support them. What they're doing is extremely important.

01:02:00

How many times do you find non -profit ministries talking about other non -profit ministries?

01:02:05

But hey, that's what we're all about. We want the body of Christ to be edified. That's why we're here. That's why they're there.

01:02:11

Pray for their work. Pray for ours as well. We will see you next week. Back on The Dividing Line. God bless. us on the world wide web at aomin .org.

01:03:27

That's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G. Where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.