The Reliability of the New Testament Scriptures

Is 122 degrees. That week it went 115, 118, 120, 122, 120, 118, 115. That was fun. That was enjoyable. But anyway, so the record was 33 days up until 2020. You know what the record is now? 52 days. We added three weeks of 110 and above.

August of last year averaged the average temperature between high and low was over 90 degrees. So it just never cooled off. It just never, ever cooled off. It was incredible. So if you're thinking about moving to Arizona, just keep that in mind.

Now, you all know what it's like to have the palm trees swaying and it's 72 degrees for Christmas, and that's pretty much what we do as well. But you got to have those days that keep everybody from moving to your state, and we have them all over.

Summer in Phoenix is from April to October. Last year, October 23rd was 103 degrees. So the week before Halloween. That kept a lot of the kids out there putting masks on because then they just died of the heat.

The New Testament Compared with the Old Testament

So anyways, that's not why we're here. We are here because for some odd, strange reason. I don't know why it is. You happen to live in the middle of a pocket in the United States of America with some very, very, very interesting theories that exist concerning the transmission of the text of the Bible.

Now, tomorrow night, obviously we're going to be dealing with King James Only-ism and the claims of King James Only churches and things like that. But tonight I want to do something positive and primarily focus upon why we can trust.

Primarily, I'm looking at the New Testament tonight. Now, it's not that the Old Testament is not a relevant issue. It's just that it's a completely different issue. I mean, just think about the time frames.

The youngest book of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures is 400 years, let's say 500 years, older than the youngest book of the New Testament. So, there's a huge time frame difference and there's also a completely different way in which the Old Testament was transmitted over time versus the New Testament.

When you think about it, the Old Testament Scriptures were the covenant documents of a particular people. There was no united Hebrew Old Testament society where they're distributing copies of Moses in Greece and Rome and sending missionaries out and things like that.

They just didn't do that. The scrolls were kept in the community and so it was a transmission within the community. Whereas, with the New Testament, as soon as the New Testament is written, people are making copies and giving them out all over the place and they go all over the known world and they're very quickly being translated into other languages.

So, it's a very, very different situation and hence a very different, and of course, much less material to work with. If the early date for Moses is correct, and I think that it is, there's either a 1250 or 1400 date on Moses, BC.

We're talking nearly 3 ,500 years. There's almost no written documents that go back that far outside of something scratched in the wall someplace. So, it's a very, very different situation than what we face.

Well, let's be honest. The vast majority of controversies exist over New Testament documents, not over Old Testament documents. The Hebrew text that they use to translate the King James Version of the Bible between 1604 and 1611 is called the 1525 Blomberg text.

The Hebrew text I use to study in seminary and is still the common is called the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. There are only eight places where those two texts really differ in any substantial way.

Eight places. I mean, considering how long the Old Testament is, that means they're substantially the exact same text. And so, that's not the big issue. The big issue has to do with variations in the New Testament manuscripts, and that's where the focus will be upon here.

And so, what I want to do is, in the time that we have available, I want to introduce you to the issue, some of the background, some of the problems, and why we can have tremendous confidence in the mechanism that God has used to transmit the text of the New Testament to us.

But He didn't do it the way that a lot of people wish He had done it. He did it in the way that was best for the proclamation of the Gospel and the establishment of the Church, and especially to respond to the attacks that exist today.

And there are many, many of those attacks today. So, why don't you take your Bible. Thank you, sir. We're going to put you in the mood now. We're going to put on some little reggae music in the background.

I'm going to lower my voice and sound like Barry White. I wish I did sound like Barry White, but I do when I have a cold or a sinus infection, which you can't have today without being fired or put in a gulag.

So, I don't have colds and sinus infections any longer. Now, let me do a quick scan, and some of you are going to go, I'm not going to answer this question. So, how many King James Bibles do we have out there?

Okay, new King James? Oh, okay. NASB? Hey, old NASB guys. ESV? Yeah, there's all the newbies. No, he ain't no newbie. NIV? One? You can go sit next to the King James lady. You guys can fight it out, finger fight or something like that.

All right, so that gives me a little bit of an idea. Now, what you need to understand, oh, hey, just saw the skillet shirt. I could take a picture and send it to John right now if you'd like, but he's like, yeah, do it, and he'd respond to it.

They're going to be in Phoenix in a couple weeks, so I won't tell you what we're going to be doing during the day, but anyways. What am I talking about now? Moses was in the bulrushes, and yes, okay. So, what you need to recognize is your King James and your New King James.

The New Testament is a translation of the same Greek text called the Textus Receptus, or called the TR. We're going to be getting into the TR tomorrow night primarily, but just so you know, the King James and New King James are pretty much going to read the same when it comes to the underlying Greek text, not necessarily how they translate that underlying Greek text.

There are a couple places where the New King James actually improves upon the rendering of the King James. We may end up looking at a few of those. Obviously, the NASV, ESV, NIV are translations of the modern Greek text, and that modern Greek text would be the Nessialan.

Now, yeah, they're all up to this one. This is the 28th edition. This is the current edition. If any of you know Jeffrey Rice and his Bible revines, this was the edition that got him started. This is where his business started because he did such an awesome job binding this particular text.

Anyway, if you're familiar with this text, it's been around for a few years now. 29th edition, I would predict, will be within the next two years probably. This is the text that most people in seminary or Bible colleges are going to be studying when they're taking Greek or whatever else it might be.

That's where the major difference is as far as the textual differences go between the modern translations and the King James and New King James, is the TR is from the 16th century. It's 400 years old.

The Nessialan is from a few years ago. TR is based on between 6 and 12 manuscripts. The Nessialan is based on about 5 ,700 Greek manuscripts plus about 20 ,000 Latin manuscripts and numerous others. There's where your difference is as far as the underlying Greek texts go.

Then the other differences are simply due to the translational philosophy of the translation committees. The NIV obviously is more periphrastic. It paraphrases more. The NESV is more literal. They don't always follow those rules, but that's where you'll get other differences between the various Bible translations is dependent upon that.

Since we have one King James, where are my New King James people again? Okay, all right. Someone with the New King James, because I don't want to pick on the poor King James because she's going to feel really unhappy by the end of the night, so I don't want to do that.

Someone with New King James, read for me John chapter 5, Gospel of John chapter 5 verse 4. Then someone with an ESV. Okay, I've got two ESV people here. Look up John chapter 5 verse 4, Gospel of John.

Be ready to read that for me. What does the King James and New King James say? Anybody? Yes. Okay, and now our ESV folks want to read John chapter 5 verse 4. Yeah, there is no John 5 verse 4. ESV will go straight from 5 .3 to 5 .5.

Now, if you can read the teeny, tiny little footnote at the bottom of the page, it is down there. They did translate it. It's down at the bottom of the page, but it is not any longer in the text. I think, if I recall correctly, the NESV has brackets, probably double brackets if I recall.

I don't remember what the NIV did with it. But, now, here is a major textual variant. It's an entire verse that is... Now, and immediately, this is a good time to introduce this, is the verse deleted or added?

Is the verse deleted or added? We have to get our thinking clear on this from the start because this really determines what we're going to be talking about tomorrow night. And that is, what is the standard?

And if you think about it without engaging your emotions, the standard should be pretty obvious. I want to know what John wrote. I don't want to know what a scribe 500 years after John wrote thought he should have written, or a thousand years after John.

I want to know what the Apostle John wrote because that's the locus of inspiration. And so that's your standard. And so the question is, was John 5 -4 added at a later point in time? Or was, for some reason, some scribe someplace decided to try to take it out because they were embarrassed by the story or something along those lines?

Now, this gives you all the information you could ever want to know. Are we all clear on that now? Literally, that does give you the information. And I just realized I forgot to get out my, I bought at Target today, my little, a new little doodad for, there we go, for clicking through my slides and stuff like that.

I forgot to plug it in. I don't know how many of these things I've purchased and how many of them I've lost over the years. They're sitting in a bag somewhere that my poor children will find after I die and wonder what in the world I was doing in there anyways.

But this is the information from, this happens to be from Logos specifically, but this is literally what you can gain today. You need to understand, that may look like a bunch of gibberish to you, but, oh, if I start wandering around this is going to drive you crazy.

But you can just put it on the screen because I'm still going to wander around. I love being peripatetic. Keeps you all awake too. Because I start walking down here like, I'm an old time professor. And I start looking down here, okay, who's playing Minesweeper?

That causes everyone to stop playing Minesweeper very, very quickly. Anyways, this actually does give you all the information you need. Because here is the text with the various variations from manuscripts.

For example, what you really need to see is it is included by these manuscripts. That's a fair number of them. And it is excluded, it is not found in these manuscripts right here. Now, if we just simply counted manuscripts, then it would look like you need to have this because it is in what is called the majority text.

You see this little booger right there? That means the majority text or the Byzantine text. So, let's say we have, like I said, there are about 5 ,700 to 5 ,800, the number of various pieces of the New Testament.

Sometimes it's a whole New Testament, sometimes it's just a fragment of the New Testament, but about that many. Let's say we had 1 ,500 of those or the Gospels, you know, the Gospels are pretty popular.

The majority text would represent, you know, probably 1 ,200 of those. And so if you just counted noses, and there is one text that does that, it's called the majority text. And you just count noses, and whoever has the most manuscripts wins, and that's the reading you put into it.

I'll explain later why I don't think that's a wise way of doing things. But you'll also notice there's a lot of variations amongst some of the manuscripts. Some of them have this, some of them have that.

What's important to see is what these manuscripts are. Right there, P, that's a Fraktur P66 and P75. Those are the two earliest manuscripts we have of the Gospels. They are from around 175 to 200. We don't have anything.

We have a fragment like P52, but that only contains a few verses. It's earlier than that, but it's pretty much the whole Gospel of John. These are our two earliest ones. They don't have it. Codex Sinaiticus from around 325, 350.

Codex Vaticanus. You can see the other manuscripts here. This one's important because that's the beginning of what's called the Byzantine text. And so translations into other languages also do not have it.

And these are all the earliest sources. So the earliest representation we have of New Testament text does not have John 5 -4. Now, I'll explain the significance of that. I just wanted to show that to you so that you can keep that in mind so when we go back to it, hopefully you'll now have a little more basis upon which to go, oh, okay.

Now, leaving aside, and this is the most important part. I've done this presentation for decades, and the reason I want to do it is because this has become so much more important now. I'm a grandpa, and becoming a grandpa has changed me.

It's changed me a lot. Any grandfathers in here? Okay. Any of you testify to me that when your babies had babies, all of a sudden you realized, I'm a part of something bigger than I ever thought I was before.

I've got to invest in these kids. I want to leave something for them. I'm not talking about just money or something. I'm talking about worldview and everything else. And they made me think so much more about the future.

And when I think about our kids, they go off to university, and what percentage of them? You always bring enough candy for everyone in the class. Because when the teacher sees you passing it out, I'm not going to do it right now because then I'll spit all over my computer, but I will get to it when I'm done.

I told you I'm watching. I don't mind. This isn't just a dry lecture. I just love teaching. It's just sort of fun to do. Anyways, I think about those kids. Right now, we send our kids off to university.

What's the percentage now of them that lose their faith when they go off to university? Eighty percent? Why? Because we're not talking about this stuff in Sunday school. We're entertaining them with pizza parties.

Thank you. This is the kind of stuff we need to be communicating to them. And that needs to be done in the church, but it also needs to be done at home. It needs to be done at home with parents. I wasn't homeschooled.

I'm old enough that I got—I'm glad that I had to fight the battles I had to fight for all of my academic career as a Christian because it helped me make me who I am. But now, it's just necessary. And my daughter's homeschooling, and I think it's awesome that she's doing that, but I realize the importance of understanding this stuff.

And this is where the attack is at. The attack, foundationally, is that you cannot know that what you're reading is what was given by those apostles. And this is where it is. And the vast majority of us are not prepared to deal with those attacks.

And that's why I love giving this presentation. And hopefully, you'll understand as we get through it. So naturalistic materialism, the idea that all literature is just simply humans' thoughts, it rules the day in academia.

And sadly, sadly, sadly, in much Christian academia as well. We have been deeply influenced by it. If I could make every single professor in a seminary, a Bible college, read 1 Corinthians chapters 1 and 2, every three months I would.

The foolishness of God is wiser than man. And God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. We miss that, and we miss it way too much. Anything that is not presupposed in an uncreated universe that can be explained solely on the basis of naturalism is rejected a priori.

You can't even allow for a supernatural explanation to anything. That's just simply the way that it is. Because Christian claims are relegated to the arena of myth. Now, in 2009, I had the opportunity to debate Dr. Bart Ehrman.

Bart Ehrman is probably the best-known critic of New Testament Christianity in the United States today. He was the last doctoral student for Dr. Metzger at Princeton years ago, sadly. He is an apostate by his own profession.

That is, he once claimed to be a Christian. He has no longer claimed to be a Christian. It's a technical thing. So I want you to listen to this little clip. It gives you an idea of the mindset that we're dealing with.

I'd like to show my guest tonight, a religious scholar and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. His best-selling book is Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why.

Please welcome Bart Ehrman. You were someone that went through sort of a period of discovery. You were a literalist, I guess, or born again, you would say. Then as you studied and learned more about it, you began to question that.

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

Because that was the original language. That was the original language that was written. And so the more I studied, though, the more I saw there was an enormous problem. We don't have the original Greek copies of any of these books.

All we have are these thousands of manuscripts from centuries later that have all these changes in them. And so realizing that we didn't have the original and that some places we don't know what the original said, that had quite a profound effect on my faith that these words had been given by God.

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

It suddenly becomes a living document. It is changed by whoever it passes through, which suddenly makes it seem more, almost more godly in some respects.

Well, yeah, it's an interesting point. Because for me, the Bible takes on new life when you see that the Bible is a living thing. That it isn't a dead document that was written 2 ,000 years ago. But as scribes copied the text, in a sense they were interpreting the text and putting their interpretations into the text while they did that.

For me, I found it to be a liberating experience to realize this. In part because I realized that the Bible was not only copied by human scribes, it was written by human authors. And these authors all had different points of view, different perspectives, different ideas.

And they put all those different views and points of view in the text itself.

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

Right, so the authors of the New Testament were writing mainly in the first century, but then their books were copied by these scribes over those centuries. And those are the Gospels. Those are the Gospels of the New Testament.

Okay. I'm sorry? Schumacher. Well, that's one commentary. So, there's the idea. Copies of copies of copies of copies. We don't know what he originally said, etc. Now, the funny thing is, Bart Ehrman's scholarly stuff, he is significantly more toward the center than in his popular stuff.

So, when I asked him a question during our debate, where he felt we do not have any idea what the original was, he came up with one reading. And it's completely irrelevant to all of Christian theology.

It's all you can come up with. And that's just simply where he is. By the way, before I continue on, I wanted to pass something around for you all. I'm going to be talking a little bit about this, and I want to be able to pass it around and get it all the way through the room.

Anyone seen running out the back door will be shot. But, this is called the ECM. Editio Critica Mayor. This is a massive project going on right now, primarily in Munster, Germany, at the INTF. I bored one person right out of the door right there.

And this is supposed to be done by 2030. I think COVID is probably going to delay that by a few years. But it is the largest scholarly collation of New Testament manuscripts ever undertaken. It's an amazing project.

This just came out. This is the Gospel of Mark. That's just Mark. And there's two other volumes that go with Mark. What you have up here, in total, is just Mark, Acts, and the little epistles of, like, Jude and 1st, 2nd Peter.

1st, 2nd, 3rd John. That's it. That's all that's been published so far. And that's how big it is. Can you imagine what the whole New Testament is going to look like? It's going to be massive. This is great stuff.

You may say, why is it great stuff? We've never had this much information. There isn't anything. The Muslims don't have one one-thousandth of this kind of information about the text of the Quran that we have in the New Testament.

That's a good thing. That's a very good thing. So, I'm going to pass it around. If you want to take a look at it. It may not mean much to you, but just take a look at the extensiveness of it. And you might find it to be interesting.

The Bart Ehrman Debate and the Problem of Skeptical Claims

Speaking of Muslims. I guess I have to hit play again. And play. Is there any way that you can give to us to see, to explain to us, how we can determine what is still inspired in the New Testament and what is not?

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

What is contradictory is obviously not from God. And that which is neutral, neither in agreement nor in disagreement, may be treated with some bit of silence. Usually, the classical scholars have recommended silence.

But I believe that Muslims who are quite familiar with the Gospels, and familiar with the development of the text over time, can make some judgments, though these judgments will be tentative. So, everything about the cross, resurrection, atonement, deity of Christ, Jesus the son of God, the Holy Spirit as a divine person, not an angel Gabriel.

All of that stuff is uninspired and a corruption of the original intention of the New Testament, in light of the Quran. A Muslim would say that the Quranic revelation is here now, is the pristine word of God.

That teaches us that there is only one God, that Jesus is his Messiah, but nevertheless the servant and messenger of the one true God. And so, anything that is contrary to that, something that teaches, for example, that human responsibility as described in the Quran is to be somehow evaded, that would be contrary and would be thought to be a later development.

Now, of course, that could be studied from another angle. One can look at the history and development of Christian teaching over time. One can look at the Gospels even without Islamic presuppositions.

And it seems to me that many biblical scholars are coming to conclusions which are very close to the main conclusions which Muslims insist on. That Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, like the prophets of the Old Testament.

He preached the belief in God, similar to the belief that was known from the Jewish prophets since he himself was Jewish. He lived in a Jewish milieu. He made people like the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Cross and Marcus Bohr.

It doesn't have to be them. The scholars are so numerous, it would be hard for us to list them and to name them now. So, is there any New Testament book that Mark, for example, which you've referred to many times, clearly identifies Jesus as the son of God, puts words in his mouth that he would never be able to accept as a Muslim.

Isn't that correct? Well, it is clear that even Mark must have suffered from a similar sort of phenomenon that we described in the case of Matthew. And John Bowdoin has made specifically that point in his book, Jesus Beyond Answered Questions.

If we look at Mark chapter 1, verse 1, which in many Bibles begins the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God, it is noted in NIV, for example, that the title, the son of God, in this particular verse is not found in some of the most ancient and reliable manuscripts.

So, I'm not saying that the Gospel according to Mark does not present Jesus as the son of God, but we have to be aware of spiral changes that have affected the Gospel according to Mark in places as well.

And, in fact, we are working with the Gospel according to Mark only as it has come down to us. Knowing the history of spiral changes, we would not be out of our grounds to wonder if, in fact, we do really have the original Markan Gospel.

Would you admit that you do not have any hard manuscript evidence from the first or second centuries that gives to us a New Testament that looks like a Muslim would expect it to look like? We do not have such a document.

No, you don't. That is Shabir Ali. That was actually my first Islamic debate, full Islamic debate. I debated a Muslim before, but it was not an Islamic topic. That was at Biola in 2006. And what's interesting is you notice what he brought up.

He brought up Mark 1 -1. And what's interesting is I'm passing around to you the brand new, just came out last month, ECM volume on Mark. And so you might want to go, hmm, okay, what did they do with Mark 1 -1?

Well, Mark 1 -1 says in the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And so the CBGM analysis, which I'll talk about a little later on, has strengthened the argument for that particular text.

But the point is the Muslims know about this, and the atheists know about this. But we don't. That's not a good thing. Because just think how easy it is for someone with that kind of information to shut down the conversation by just simply throwing something like that out to you.

That shouldn't be that way. I think there's no reason why all Christians shouldn't have sufficient knowledge in this field to be able to recognize sound arguments and non-sound arguments as they are presented.

So, we know that scholars spin the evidence, particularly in media appearances, and the media just loves it. The media doesn't call me for any commentary on New Testament issues, that's for sure. They emphasize that all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies from hundreds of years after the originals.

So, those of you who have seen this before are not allowed to answer this question or call out the number, because if you do, I will ask you to leave in shame. And you should be in shame, because I've had people do this.

But, we're talking about variants in the New Testament. And how many variants are we talking about? Well, when I asked this question around the world, when I used to travel around the world, I got a lot of different answers.

Everywhere from six to numbers much, much higher. How many variants would there be? Well, I've already told you about how many manuscripts there are. If you have 5 ,700 handwritten manuscripts, think about how many variants you would have.

If we just all copied the same, let's say we passed out a piece of paper to everybody, and asked you to copy just a page of text on the screen. How many variations would we have, just amongst the people in this room?

We'd have a lot. So, how many do you think there are in the entire New Testament? Well, a conservative guess would be around 400 ,000. 400 ,000 variants. It may be 500 ,000, it may be 300 ,000. Now, in the Messianic 28th edition of the Greek New Testament, there are 138 ,213 words.

We all have our Bible programs today. There are great Bible programs today. We are so blessed. I'm a big Accordance guy. You've got Logos. You've got PC Study Bible, I think, is still out there. Ollo Tree on your phone, your iPad, and stuff like that.

There's a lot of stuff you can do. If you just ask Accordance to do a word count of the New Testament, it'll come up and say 138 ,213 words. In the Greek New Testament, there'll be a whole lot more words than that.

In the English New Testament, because we use more words than the Greek did. And so, you'll be told, that's nearly three variants per word. And so, the idea that many people have. And my daughter, for example, ran into a nasty anti-Christian professor in a community college when she went to Glendale Community College a number of years ago.

And I can guarantee you that what he wanted to communicate to his students and what is being communicated to students all over our land today is exactly this. That for every one of the words of the New Testament, there are three options out there.

That is why we can be confidently told, no one can have any confidence that the text they read today accurately reflects what was originally written. And so, they believe that they can just simply dismiss whatever you quote from the Bible because, well, we don't know that it originally said that.

And so, if you were to look at it graphically, this is the number of words, this is the number of variants, and that looks really, really bad. But, we need to learn tonight what they don't tell you so that you can share it with other folks.

First of all, 99%, Ann Barnerman would agree with this. 99 of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text. Variations in spelling and word order make up the vast bulk of variations. The vast number of them, you could not explain to someone in English what the Greek variation meant.

It just simply doesn't translate into English. It doesn't impact the meaning. So, 1 of 400 ,000 is about 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants. Out of 138 ,213 words, it's about 2 .9%, about 3%. Or, one meaningful variant every three pages.

That's a completely different story, isn't it? How different is that from three options for every word to one variant per three pages? That's a different issue. But, only half of these are viable. And what do I mean by viable?

Well, if you have a manuscript from the 14th century that has a reading that's never been seen before, no one's ever seen this before. There's nothing in the 1st century, 2nd century, 3rd century. There's no translation.

Because translations are important, because they had to translate from something. And so, you can sometimes tell by translations whether a reading was prevalent in the Greek text or wasn't prevalent in the Greek text.

So, if you have something from the 14th century in a manuscript, nobody before had ever read that way. That's not a viable reading. That cannot be the original. Because it has left no history, no evidence of its existence prior to the 14th century.

So, only about half of these are viable, have any possibility of being the original. Hence, there are about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable, meaningful New Testament technical variants. Alright? That's quite a different picture.

Or, to look at it in graphic form, now the graph has changed. Here's your number of words, and here's your number of meaningful variants. Very different than what you were looking at before. But remember, this isn't what's being taught in the university classroom.

They don't tell you this part. You have to drag it out of folks, if they even know it. And sadly, most of those religion professors don't know it. They just read Bart Ehrman. They don't read his scholarly works, they read his popular works.

So, here's a simple fact. Think about it. The more manuscripts you have for a particular work, the more textual variants you will have. Right? If you only have one manuscript, let's say there was an ancient historian, and today, one manuscript exists from 900 years after he lived.

Alright? Now, if you only have one manuscript, how many textual variants will you have? None. Because you can't have any. You only got one manuscript. But if you only have one manuscript, that was copied 900 years after the guy lived, how much confidence do you have that you actually have what he wrote?

Not a whole lot. But once you get two manuscripts, you start getting variants. Three, ten, hundred. And the more manuscripts increases the number of variants exponentially. But, what would you rather have?

A hundred manuscripts of what a guy wrote, or one manuscript of what the guy wrote? It's pretty obvious, but people just don't like to think along those particular lines. So, if we have more than 5 ,800 catalog manuscripts of New Testament books, the average of which is 350 pages long, that's over two million pages of text, two million pages of handwritten text.

That's a lot of handwriting to be looking at. So, 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful and viable variants, over two 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.

One might say it is miraculous. Even Bart Ehrman will admit, the scribes that copied New Testament manuscripts in general really tried to do a very good job. And they did. They did. There's no question about it.

So, let me give you some examples. A number of years ago, I asked my computer, and I need to ask my computer to do it again and make it even prettier. But I asked my computer to put together some examples.

I'll stop. Put together some examples of where variations exist between the most different printed editions of the Greek New Testament. Now, we've got a number of printed editions of the Greek New Testament.

The ECM is being passed around here. We've got the Nessiolam, which is based on that anyways. You've got the UBS. Historically, you've got Tregella, Simitischendorf, and all these printed editions of the Greek New Testament.

And so I took the most dissimilar ones and asked the computer to mark the differences between them. And so here's Ephesians chapter 1. And so, oh wow, you cannot see it on the screen at all. Well, if you squint really hard, it's really clear on mine, but the green has just disappeared.

But you can see here and here, here, here, here, here. And then the one you can't see at all is right there. That's an important one. This is the beginning of verse 14. This one says, who is the Erebon, the down payment of our inheritance.

We're speaking of the Holy Spirit, which is right here, the Holy Spirit of promise. And so the manuscripts either have ha, which is neuter, or has, which is masculine. And so that's actually a significant difference because if it's has, then it would be emphasized in the personality spirit.

But ha matches the gender of Numa. Numa is neuter. So scribes struggled with what they were going to do with that. But you can see the vast majority of the text is identically the same between the most different printed editions of the Greek New Testament that you have.