The Reliability of the New Testament Scriptures

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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October 3, 2021

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00:00: is 122 degrees. That week it went 115, 118, 120, 122, 120, 118, 115.
00:07: That was fun. That was enjoyable. But anyway, so the record was 33 days up until 2020.
00:14: You know what the record is now? 52 days. We added 3 weeks of 110 and above.
00:26: August of last year averaged the average temperature between high and low was over 90 degrees.
00:33: 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.
00:41: Now you all know what it's like to have the palm trees swaying and it's 72 degrees for Christmas.
00:47: 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.
00:54: We have them all. Summer in Phoenix is from April to October.
01:00: 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 the heat.
01:11: 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.
01:18: 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
01:32: 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.
01:40: But tonight I want to do something positive and primarily focus upon why we can trust.
01:47: Primarily, I'm looking at the Old Testament tonight. Now it's not that the Old Testament is not a relevant issue.
01:54: It's just that it's a completely different issue. I mean, just think about the time frames.
01:59: The youngest book of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures is 400 years.
02:07: Let's say 500 years older than the youngest book of the
02:12: New Testament. So there's a huge time frame difference. And there's also a completely different way in which the
02:19: 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.
02:28: 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.
02:39: They just didn't do that. The scrolls were kept in the community. And so it was a transmission within the community.
02:46: Whereas with the New Testament, as soon as the New Testament was written, people are making copies and giving them out all over the place.
02:53: 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.
03:01: And hence, very different. And of course, much less material to work with. They're talking, 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.
03:17: We're talking nearly 3 ,500 years. There's almost no written documents that go back that far outside of something scratched in a wall someplace.
03:25: And so it's a very, very different situation than what we face. But let's be honest, the vast majority of controversies exist over New Testament documents, not over Old Testament documents.
03:37: The Hebrew text that they used to translate the King James Version Bible between 1604 and 1611 is called the 1525
03:45: Blomberg text. The Hebrew text I used to study in seminary and is still the common is called the
03:51: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. There are only eight places where those two texts really differ in any substantial way.
03:58: Eight places. I mean, considering how long the Old Testament is, that means they're substantially the exact same text.
04:05: And so that's not the big issue. The big issue has to do with variations in the
04:12: New Testament manuscripts, and that's where the focus will be upon here. And so what
04:17: 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
04:33: New Testament to us. But he didn't do it the way that a lot of people wish he had done it.
04:39: 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.
04:49: And there are many, many of those attacks today. So why don't you take your
04:55: 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, and I'm going to lower my voice and sound like Barry White.
05:10: 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.
05:20: So I don't have colds and sinus infections any longer. Let me do a quick scan, and some of you are going to be, oh no,
05:30: I'm not going to answer this question. So how many King James Bibles do we have out there? Okay, new
05:39: King James? Oh, okay. NASV? Hey, old
05:45: NASV guys. ESV? Yeah, there's all the newbies. No, he ain't no newbie.
05:54: NIV? One? You can go sit next to the King James lady. You guys can fight it out, finger fight or something like that.
06:02: All right, so that gives me a little bit of an idea. Now, what you need to understand, oh hey, you saw the skillet shirt.
06:08: Good job. I could take a picture and send it to John right now if you'd like, but he's like, yeah, do it.
06:16: And he'd respond to the question. 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.
06:26: What am I talking about now? Moses was in the bulrushes, and yes, okay. So what you need to recognize is your
06:32: King James and your new King James. The New Testament is a translation of the same
06:39: 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
06:48: King James and the 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
06:57: Greek text. There are a couple places where the New King James actually improves upon the rendering of the
07:03: King James. We may end up looking at a few of those. Obviously, the NASV, ESV, NIV are translations of the modern
07:10: Greek text, and that modern Greek text would be the Nessiolan.
07:16: Now, yeah, they're all up to this one. This is the 28th edition. This is the current edition.
07:23: If any of you know Jeffrey Rice and his Bible Revines, this was the edition that got him started.
07:29: This one right here. His business started because he did such an awesome job binding this particular text.
07:35: Anyway, if you're familiar with this text, it's been around for a few years now.
07:41: 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
07:55: 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
08:08: King James and New King James, is the TR is from the 16th century.
08:15: It's 400 years old. The Nessiolan is from a few years ago.
08:22: TR is based on between 6 and 12 manuscripts. The Nessiolan is based on about 5 ,700
08:28: Greek manuscripts plus about 20 ,000 Latin manuscripts and numerous others. There's where your difference is as far as the underlying
08:36: Greek texts go. The other differences are simply due to the translational philosophy of the translation committees.
08:45: The NIV obviously is more paraphrastic. It paraphrases more. The NESV is more literal.
08:51: They don't always follow those rules, but that's where you'll get other differences between the various Bible translations is dependent on that.
09:05: Where are my New King James people again? Okay, all right, so someone with the New King James, because I don't want to pick on the poor
09:11: King James lady, because she's going to feel really unhappy by the end of the night, so I don't want to do that.
09:16: So someone with New King James, read for me John chapter 5, Gospel of John chapter 5 verse 4, and then someone with an
09:24: ESV. Okay, I've got two ESV people here. Look up John chapter 5 verse 4,
09:32: Gospel of John. Be ready to read that for me. So what does the King James, the New King James say? Anybody?
09:38: Yes. For an angel went down at a certain time to a pool and stirred up the water when whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well of whatever disease he had.
09:53: Okay, and now our ESV folks want to read John chapter 5 verse 4. Yeah, there is no
10:03: John 5. ESV will go straight from 5 .3
10:09: to 5 .5. Now, if you can read the teeny tiny little footnote at the bottom of the page, it is down there.
10:16: 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
10:21: NASV has brackets, probably double brackets if I recall. I don't remember what the
10:27: NIV did with it. But now, here is a major textual variant.
10:34: It's an entire verse that is... Now, and immediately, this is a good time to introduce this.
10:41: Is the verse deleted or added? Is the verse deleted or added?
10:47: We have to get our thinking clear on this from the start because this really determines what we'll be talking about tomorrow night.
10:55: And that is, what is the standard? And if you think about it without engaging your emotions, the standard should be pretty obvious.
11:06: 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.
11:17: I want to know what the Apostle John wrote because that's the locus of inspiration.
11:26: And so, that's your standard. And so, the question is, was John 5 -4 added at a later point in time?
11:34: 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?
11:42: Now, this gives you all the information you could ever want to know. We all clear on it now?
11:50: Literally, that does give you the information. And I just realized I forgot to get out my...
11:56: I bought at Target today my little, a new little doodad for, there we go, for clicking through my slides and stuff like that.
12:09: I forgot to plug it in. I don't know how many of these things I've purchased and how many of them
12:14: 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
12:23: 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.
12:36: You need to understand that that may look like a bunch of gibberish to you. But, oh, if I start wandering around this could drive you crazy, but you can just put it on the screen because I'm still going to wander around.
12:47: I love being peripatetic. It keeps you all awake too. Because I start walking down here, I'm an old time professor.
12:54: And I start looking down here, okay, who's playing Minesweeper? That causes everyone to stop playing
13:00: Minesweeper very, very quickly. It's great. Anyways, this actually does give you all the information you need, because here is the text with the various variations from manuscripts, for example.
13:15: 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.
13:28: Now, if we just simply counted manuscripts, then it would look like you need to have this, because it is in what is what is called the majority text.
13:38: 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 varies, pieces of the
13:54: New Testament. Sometimes it's a whole New Testament, sometimes it's just a fragment of the New Testament, but about that many.
14:00: 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.
14:23: 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.
14:32: Some of them have this, some of them have that. What's important to see is what these manuscripts are.
14:38: Right there, P, that's a Fraktur P66 and P75, those are the two earliest manuscripts we have in the
14:46: Gospel of John. 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.
14:56: It's earlier than that, but it's pretty much the whole Gospel of John. These are our two earliest ones.
15:02: They don't have it. Codex Sinaiticus from around 325 -350, Codex Vaticanus.
15:08: 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 in New Testament text does not have
15:26: John 5 -4. Now, I'll explain the significance of that.
15:32: 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.
15:43: Now, leaving aside, and this is the most important part. I've done this presentation for decades, and the reason
15:52: 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.
16:01: 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
16:11: I'm a part of something bigger than I ever thought I was before? I've got to invest in these kids.
16:18: I want to leave something for them, and 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
16:29: I think about our kids, they go off to university, and what percentage of them?
16:38: You always bring enough candy for everyone in the class, because when the teacher sees you passing it out,
16:46: I'm not going to do it right now, because then I'll spin all over my computer, but I will get to them. I told you
16:54: I'm watching. I don't mind. This isn't just a dry lecture. I just love teaching.
17:00: It's just sort of fun to do. Anyways, I think about those kids. Right now, we send our kids off to university.
17:05: What's the percentage now of them that lose their faith when they go off to university? 80 %? Why? Because we're not talking about this stuff in Sunday school.
17:14: 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 in the home.
17:25: It needs to be done in the home. Parents. I wasn't homeschooled. I'm old enough that I got.
17:32: I'm glad that I had to fight the battles I had to fight for all of my academic career as a
17:39: Christian, because it helped 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.
17:55: 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
18:10: I love giving this presentation, and hopefully you'll help. You'll understand as we get through it.
18:15: So naturalistic materialism, the idea that all literature is just simply humans' thoughts.
18:21: It rules the day in academia, and sadly, sadly, sadly, in much
18:26: Christian academia as well. We have been deeply influenced by it. If I could make every single professor in a seminary at a
18:35: 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 in the world to shame the wise.
18:49: 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.
18:59: You can't even allow for a supernatural explanation to anything. That's just simply the way that it is.
19:06: Christian claims are relegated to the arena of myth. Now, in 2009, I had the opportunity to debate
19:12: Dr. Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman is probably the best -known critic of New Testament Christianity in the
19:19: United States today. He was the last doctoral student for Dr.
19:26: Metzger at Princeton years ago, sadly. He is an apostate by his own profession.
19:32: That is, he once claimed to be a Christian. He does no longer claim to be a Christian. It's a technical thing. So I want you to listen to this little clip.
19:39: It gives you an idea of the mindset that we're dealing with. Now, what does that do?
20:49: 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
21:01: 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 almost more godly in some respects.
21:13: Well, yeah, it's an interesting point because for me, the Bible takes on new life when you see that the
21:19: Bible is a living thing, that it isn't a dead document that was written 2 ,000 years ago.
21:24: 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.
21:32: For me, I found it to be a liberating experience to realize this, in part because I realized that the
21:37: 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.
21:50: And mostly shaped it during that 300 years between Christ's death and when,
21:56: I guess, Constantine converted and Rome converted and Christianity became sort of the law of the land.
22:01: 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.
22:08: And those are the Gospels. Those are the Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Okay, I'm sorry?
22:15: Schumacher. Well, that's one commentary. So, there's the idea.
22:21: Copies of copies of copies of copies. We don't know what originally said Now, the funny thing is, Bart Ehrman's scholarly stuff, he is significantly more toward the center than in his popular stuff.
22:33: 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.
22:45: It's all you can come up with. And that's just simply where he is.
22:50: 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.
23:03: Anyone seen running out the back door will be shot. But this is called the
23:11: ECM, Edicio Critica Mayor. This is a massive project going on right now, primarily in Münster, Germany, at the
23:20: INTF. I bored one person right out of the door right there. And this is supposed to be done by 2030.
23:28: I think COVID's probably going to delay that by a few years. But it is the largest scholarly collation of New Testament manuscripts ever undertaken.
23:38: It's an amazing project. This just came out. This is the
23:44: 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 Jude and 1st, 2nd
23:56: 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
24:01: New Testament's going to look like? It's going to be massive. This is great stuff.
24:07: 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
24:19: Qur 'an 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. You want to take a look at it.
24:26: 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.
24:32: Speaking of Muslims. Hmm. Okay.
24:47: I guess I have to hit play again. Any way that you can give us to explain to us how we can determine what is still inspired in the
25:02: New Testament and what is not? Well, I believe that Muslims have a simple answer to this in saying that whatever is in the
25:09: Qur 'an, that would be a judge of whatever is there in the Bible. So whatever the
25:15: Bible agrees with the Qur 'an, that obviously is inspired. What is contradictory is obviously not from God.
25:22: And that which is neutral, neither in agreement nor in disagreement, may be treated with some bit of silence.
25:29: Usually the classical scholars have recommended silence. But I believe that Muslims who are quite familiar with the
25:35: Gospels and familiar with the development of the text over time can make some judgments, though these judgments will be tentative.
25:44: So everything about the cross, resurrection, atonement, deity of Christ is the son of God.
25:51: The Holy Spirit is a divine person, not an angel of Gabriel. All of that stuff is uninspired and a corruption of the original intention of the
25:59: New Testament in light of the Qur 'an. A Muslim would say that the Qur 'anic revelation is here now is the pristine word of God that teaches us that there is only one
26:07: God, that Jesus is his Messiah, but nevertheless the servant and messenger of the one true
26:13: God. And so anything that is contrary to that, something that teaches, for example, that human responsibility as described in the
26:19: Qur 'an is to be somehow evaded. That would be contrary and would be thought to be a later development.
26:27: Now, of course, that could be studied from another angle. One can look at the history and development of Christian teaching over time.
26:33: 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
26:44: Muslims insist on, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet like the prophets of the
26:50: Old Testament. He preached the belief in God, similar to the belief that was known from the
26:58: Jewish prophet since he himself was Jewish. He lived in a Jewish milieu. He made people like the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Cross and Marcus Borg.
27:05: 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.
27:10: So is there any New Testament book that Mark, for example, which you've referred to many times, clearly identifies
27:20: 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
27:25: Mark must have suffered from a similar sort of phenomenon that we describe with in the case of Matthew.
27:32: And John Bowdoin has made specifically that point in his book, Jesus Beyond Answered Questions. If we look at Mark 1, verse 1, which in many
27:39: Bibles begins at the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, it is noted in NIV, for example, that the title of the
27:46: Son of God in this particular verse is not found in some of the most ancient and reliable manuscripts.
27:52: 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 scribal changes that have affected the
28:00: 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.
28:07: Knowing the history of scribal changes, we would not be out of our grounds to wonder if in fact we do really have the original
28:14: 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
28:23: New Testament that looks like a Muslim would expect it to look like? We do not have such a document. No, you don't.
28:30: That is Shabir Ali. That was actually my first Islamic debate, full Islamic debate. I debated a
28:36: Muslim before, but it was not an Islamic topic. That was a Biola in 2006. And what's interesting is you notice what he brought up.
28:43: 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,
28:50: ECM volume on Mark. And so you might want to go, hmm, okay, what did they do with Mark 1 -1?
28:57: Well, Mark 1 -1 says in the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And so the CBGM analysis, which
29:03: I'll talk about a little later on, has strengthened the argument for that particular text.
29:11: But the point is the Muslims know about this and the atheists know about this, but we don't.
29:17: 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.
29:28: That shouldn't be that way. I think there's no reason why all
29:33: Christians shouldn't have sufficient knowledge in this field to be able to recognize sound arguments and non -sound arguments as they are presented.
29:43: So we know that scholars spin the evidence, particularly in media appearances, and the media just loves it.
29:50: 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.
30:01: So those who have seen this before are not allowed to answer this question or call out the number, because if you do,
30:07: I will ask you to leave in shame. And you should be shamed, because I've had people do this.
30:13: But we're talking about variants in the New Testament. And how many variants are we talking about?
30:21: Well, when I ask this question around the world, when I used to travel around the world, I got a lot of different answers.
30:30: Everywhere from six to numbers much, much higher. How many variants would there be?
30:38: 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.
30:50: 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.
31:03: How many variations would we have just amongst the people in this room? We'd have a lot.
31:10: So how many do you think there are in the entire New Testament? Well, a conservative guess would be around 400 ,000 variants.
31:22: It may be 500 ,000, it may be 300 ,000. Now, in the
31:27: Messianic 28th edition of the Greek New Testament, there are 138 ,213 words.
31:35: So if you just, we all have our Bible programs today. There's great Bible programs today. We are so blessed. I'm a big accordance guy.
31:43: You've got Logos. You've got PC Study Bible, I think, is still out there. Olive Tree on your phone and your iPad and stuff like that.
31:50: There's a lot of stuff you can do, and if you just ask accordance to do a word count of the New Testament, it'll come up and say 138 ,213 words.
32:00: 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
32:08: Greek did. And so you'll be told that's nearly three variants per word.
32:14: 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.
32:28: And I can guarantee you that what he wanted to communicate to his students and was being communicated to students all over our land today is exactly this, that for every one of the words of the
32:40: 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.
32:53: 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.
32:59: 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.
33:09: But we need to learn tonight what they don't tell you so that you can share it with other folks.
33:16: First of all, 99 % and Bart Ehrman would agree with this. 99 % of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text.
33:26: 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
33:37: 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%,
33:53: about 3%. Or one meaningful variant every three pages. That's a completely different story, isn't it?
34:00: How different is that from three options for every word to one variant per three pages?
34:07: That's a different issue. But only half of these are viable. And what do
34:13: I mean by viable? Well, if you have a manuscript from the 14th century that has a reading that's never been seen before, just 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.
34:36: And so you can sometimes tell by translations whether a reading was prevalent in the
34:42: 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.
34:51: 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.
35:00: So only about half of these are viable, have any possibility of being the original.
35:05: Hence, there are about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable, meaningful New Testament technical variants.
35:12: All right? That's quite a different picture, or to look at it in graphic form, now the graph has changed.
35:19: Here's your number of words, and here's your number of meaningful variants. Very different than what you were looking at before.
35:25: But remember, this isn't what's being taught in the university classroom.
35:31: 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.
35:39: They just read Bart Ehrman. They don't read his scholarly works. They read his popular works. There you go. So here's a simple fact.
35:47: Think about it. The more manuscripts you have for a particular work, the more textual variants you will have. Right?
35:54: 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.
36:07: All right? Now, if you only have one manuscript, how many textual variants will you have? None, because you can't have any.
36:16: 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?
36:27: Not a whole lot. But once you get two manuscripts, you start getting variants.
36:33: Three, ten, hundred. And the more manuscripts increases the number of variants exponentially.
36:42: But what would you rather have? A hundred manuscripts of what a guy wrote, or one manuscript of what the guy wrote?
36:48: It's pretty obvious, but people 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.
37:05: 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.
37:24: One might say it is miraculous. Even Bart Ehrman will admit, the scribes that copied
37:29: New Testament manuscripts in general really tried to do a very good job. And they did.
37:36: They did. There's no question about it. So let me give you some examples. A number of years ago,
37:42: 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, and I'll stop, put together some examples of where variations exist between the most different printed editions of the
38:07: Greek New Testament. Now, we've got a number of printed editions of the Greek New Testament. The ECM is being passed around here. You've got the
38:12: Nessiolam, which is based on that anyways. You've got the UBS. Historically, you've got
38:18: Trigellus and Tischendorf 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.
38:31: And so here's Ephesians chapter one. And so, oh, wow, you cannot see it on the screen at all. Well, if you squint really hard, you can, it's really clear on mine, but the green is like just disappeared.
38:44: But you can see here and here, here, here, here, here.
38:51: And then the one you can't see at all is right there. Now, that's an important one. This is the beginning of verse 14.
38:58: This one says, ha es in arabon teis kleronimias himon, who is the arabon, the down payment of our inheritance.
39:06: We're speaking of the Holy Spirit, which is right here, the Holy Spirit of promise.
39:13: And so the manuscripts either have ha, which is neuter, or has, which is masculine.
39:20: And so that's actually a significant difference, because if it's has, then it would be emphasized in the personality spirit.
39:28: But ha matches the gender of Numa. Numa is neuter. So scribes struggled with what they were going to do with that.
39:37: But you can see the vast majority of the text is identically the same between the most different printed editions of Greek New Testament that you have.
39:45: Now, which book of the New Testament do you think we have the fewest manuscripts of?
39:53: Anyone want to take a guess? Revelation. You said Revelations.
39:59: I'm sorry. Oh, you did not? He did not. Okay. All right. Okay. All right.
40:06: The only thing worse than saying Revelations is saying Psalms. You never turn to Psalms 103.
40:12: There is no Psalms 103. Do you turn to hymns 103? No. You turn to hymn 103. So I know most of your
40:18: Bible programs even kick it out saying Psalms. Delete that S. It's just heretical.
40:25: So you know why we might have the fewest manuscripts of Revelation?
40:31: Because it struggled so long to be accepted within the canon. There were a lot of Christians who were like, that's a weird book.
40:40: And when you think about it, it's probably best that the church wasn't running around going, you know,
40:46: I don't think we have enough books with seven -headed monsters and ten -headed monsters and people coming out of the sea and stuff like that.
40:54: So it struggled. And so we have the there's a little bit more in the way of variation here looking at Revelation 1.
41:03: You can see here, here, there, there, there, there, and there.
41:10: But again, the vast majority of the text, even in Revelation, reads the same.
41:17: There isn't any difference between them. The Gospels were copied many times. And so here's
41:23: Mark 1 .1. So if you're looking at the ECM, you can sort of check all these out. There are a number of places there.
41:29: Which book do you think has the fewest variance? Well, the book that I think probably gets the least reading, because it's so soaked in the
41:39: Old Testament. Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, look at Hebrews 6, 8 through 20. You got one there, one there, and one there.
41:48: That's it. That's it. Everything else, identical all the way through.
41:55: So when people try to present the idea that, oh, we just, we have no earthly idea. And these are just variations.
42:02: That doesn't mean that they're necessarily difficult variations to actually figure out. It's just asking the computer to show these things to you.
42:09: But even that 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 number needs to be understood. Even when the variant does impact the reading, in the large majority of instances, the careful student of the text can see which reading is original.
42:21: Many of these errors involve common scribal errors, mistakes we continue to make to this very day when copying from one text to another.
42:27: And here's an example from the early history of the New Testament. Now, it's funny. I've been doing this so long that I've recognized that this example, when
42:35: I say mistakes that we continue to make to this very day when copying from one text to another,
42:41: I'm thinking back to the days when I was writing papers in college and high school, where I have a book propped open, and I'm sitting in an
42:49: IBM Selectric. You're laughing at my IBM Selectric? That was an awesome typewriter, man.
42:56: That was the best typewriter ever. Don't you agree? I mean, it was big, it was ugly, but it was wonderful. Anyway, some of you are going,
43:03: IBM Selectric? Oh, find one in the museum someplace. They're great. Whiteout?
43:09: Well, that was fun. Correction tape? Yeah, oh, man, just, you got to respect those older folks. We went through a lot before you young folks came along.
43:16: We really did. But anyway, that's how I would copy stuff, is
43:21: I'm using my eyes to copy things over. That's exactly how the scribes did it. There was no cut and paste in those days.
43:30: And so it is interesting that people who have never had to do that kind of thing struggle a little bit to enter into the world of the scribes to understand what was really going on there.
43:41: So if you look at 1 John 3 .1 in your Bible, King James, New King James, NASB, whatever,
43:46: ESV. King James says, Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.
43:52: Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. But the NASB says,
43:57: See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we will be called the children of God, and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know him.
44:06: And for the colorblind men in the audience, this phrase right here is in red.
44:12: And such we are. And it is not found in the
44:19: King James Version. And yet it's an affirmation of the fact that we are adopted into the family of God.
44:28: And so the modern text contained an important phrase affirming our adoption as children of God through Christ. It is not found in the
44:34: KJV. Why? Well, if I was an anti -KJV -onelist,
44:42: I could come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories, and I could say that, Well, look what those
44:47: Anglicans are doing these days. The Anglican churches have gone into apostasy, and the seeds were all the way back then, and they didn't believe that we were truly adopted into the family of God, and so etc.,
44:58: etc., etc. That's not why. It has nothing to do with it. The reality is, this is a, the
45:08: Greek text that they utilized, and I didn't bring mine with me, but I have a 1550
45:14: Stephanos text. The King James translators used the five editions of Erasmus, the edition of Stephanos, mainly in 1550, and then the editions of Beza, Theodor Beza in 1598.
45:27: They used only printed editions of the Greek New Testament. They did not go back to manuscripts. They used printed editions for their work, and so if you look at those printed editions of the
45:37: Greek New Testament, they don't have the phrase, and such we are. Why? Well, this is a glowing example of what's called homoiteleuton, homoiteleuton, which means similar endings.
45:51: Think how many times you've been copying a word ending with such combinations as ing, t -i -o -n -e -s, common grammatical terminations in the
45:59: English language, and when looking back at what you were copying, have mistakenly started a different word that had the same ending, so you're copying a text, you type the word education, you type t -i -o -n, your eyes go back, you find t -i -o -n, you continue.
46:17: The problem is that t -i -o -n is on the line below where you just finished copying, or it's a few words down, there's another word that ends with t -i -o -n, and so the similar endings cause your eye to hit the wrong place.
46:32: Sometimes that resulted either in you repeating something even when you weren't paying attention, or most often, deleting something, and that's what happened here.
46:41: So, here is the Greek text of 1 John 3 .1,
46:46: Behold what great love the Father has given to us, in order that children of God we might be called, and we are, and there's a little mark that means this is deleted in certain manuscripts, and we are, diatuta hakaso, for this reason the world uginoskayimas does not know us, because it did not know him.
47:04: So, here's the phrase, only two words, kai esmen, and we are, here's the little mark down here, these are the manuscripts that delete it, but notice, there is that fractur m, the majority of Greek manuscripts deleted, which also means the majority of the earlier manuscripts contain it.
47:23: So, that doesn't actually explain to you why it happened, so let me show you why it happened.
47:29: Ancient writers made the same error, here is the relevant portion of the Greek as it would have appeared in the unseal or majuscule text in the early days of the
47:36: New Testament. So, what you need to know is that for the first 900 years of the transmission of the text of the
47:48: Greek New Testament by hand, it was written in all capital letters, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.
47:56: Can you imagine what that looked like? All capital letters, no spaces between words, and no punctuation.
48:06: That's why most people who take Greek in seminary, when they look at their first ancient manuscript, go, what language is this?
48:14: Because it doesn't look anything like what you study in seminary. We have really nice printed
48:20: Greek texts now, but that's what it looked like, it's just a line of capital
48:26: Greek letters, but let me use color to help you see what the issue is.
48:33: All right? So, to us, hapater, the father, in order that tecna, they do, that's called the nomen of sacra, there should actually be technically a line right there, because I'll talk to you about the nomen of sacra a little bit later on.
48:48: Clathomen, we might be called, it's first person plural, is a mu epsilon nu, or m -e -n, if we use
48:56: English. Clathomen, we might be called, chi s -men, and we are, ends with the same three letters as clathomen, and for this reason, the world goes on from there.
49:09: So, a scribe copies clathomen, his eyes go back to what he's copying, and instead of seeing that mu epsilon nu, he sees this mu epsilon nu, there's not that much space between them, he continues copying from there, and inadvertently deletes the phrase, and we are.
49:25: It's a common scribal error that we see, not just in New Testament manuscripts, but in all sorts of other manuscripts, as well as the kind of error we make when we're doing actual copying outside of using the computer, as it is, it's called homo teleuton.
49:41: There's no reason for a conspiracy theory, there's no reason to be going, I wonder if a scribe just didn't like the idea that we're the children of God, or something like that.
49:50: You don't have to do any of that when there is a much simpler answer to be found. So, a few more facts that you need to know, the majority of the 5800 plus Greek manuscripts date from after 1000
50:03: AD, comprising majority text. Well, that would make sense. The earlier texts are called papyri, and they are written in unseal or magiskal text, capital letters
50:14: I was just talking about. Papyri was made by taking the leaves of papyrus plant, putting them at 90 degrees angle to one another, pressing them together, creates a very smooth surface on one side, not so smooth surface on the back side, which would be fine for scrolls, but for some reason, and we do not know why,
50:33: Christians did not like to use scrolls. We've only found six scrolls in the New Testament. Christians used the codex, the same type of folding of paper, binding it together that we use for books today.
50:45: Christians, for some reason, just really, really prefer that for their New Testament manuscripts, which meant that half the time you're writing on something that isn't all that smooth, which is interesting.
50:56: Here's a quick graphic of the age distribution and number distribution of the manuscripts, and so here's your centuries, 2nd century, 3rd, 4th, all the way up through the 16th century.
51:08: You might go, why did it include these? This is after printing. Well, because Gutenberg invented the press, but Kinko's did not appear the next day.
51:18: Okay, so presses, it took time for that to catch on. That was considered a new technology, and so handwritten manuscripts continue to be important all the way through the time of the
51:30: Reformation. You can see the majority are here. You'll notice a difference in color. The blue are the papyri, the green are what are called the unciels.
51:39: They're on a what's called vellum. They're animal skin, but sliced extremely thin. Amazing the technology that they were able to do even back then, and then these are the minuscules.
51:49: Someone finally got the idea in the 9th century. Hey, how about we have big letters and little letters, and let's put space between words and punctuation.
51:57: It's really cool, too, and so they started doing that, and pretty quickly, everybody's like, yeah, it's a whole lot easier.
52:04: That's brilliant. Why didn't we think of this before? I don't know, so they take over very, very quickly in starting the 9th century, the 10th century, and then all the rest of them fade out at that particular point in time.
52:15: Very, very quickly, just something to think about, and I'm not going to take time to expand upon this, but I talked to you about the majority text theory, the idea that you just count the number of manuscripts.
52:25: If you've got a variant in there, you've got a thousand manuscripts, 800 of them have one way, 200 have the other way.
52:30: You just count the noses, and you go with the 800. The problem with that is that would give you a different New Testament depending on what century you're in.
52:38: That's what I think is the major problem. This is standard terminology up until recently.
52:46: You have the Byzantine text. That's still being used. CBGM, which I'm going to explain later on, is making it questionable that this actually is an entire manuscript group, but you can tell the difference between Byzantine manuscripts and the earlier manuscripts we call
53:03: Alexandrian manuscripts. If you look at these centuries, the Byzantine doesn't even appear in the 5th century, so if you did the majority text here, it's going to be
53:13: Alexandrian, but by the time you get to the 9th century, now you've pretty much evened out, and then as it goes on from there, it's become
53:20: Byzantine, so the majority text will change depending on what century you're in. That's not a good methodology for finding out what the original was.
53:29: Pickering has a whole book that gets very in -depth on trying to argue to the point, but I don't have time to talk about that this evening.
53:35: Now, one of the things I love to do, because it's just so much fun, is down at the bottom of your page in your
53:42: Bible, it says some early manuscripts say this, and some early manuscripts say that, and then no one ever knows what in the world these manuscripts are.
53:48: Where are they? What do they look like? Why should I care? Are they all in the same place? Well, they're not.
53:54: They're spread all over museums all over the world, and today, now you've got to realize, there is more information available to us today about the transmission of the text in New Testament than any other generation has ever, ever had.
54:13: It's not even close. I mean, even in my own life, when I first started going over to London, I think
54:20: I went over the first time in 05, love London, what a beautiful city. If I never get to see
54:26: London again, that is going to be one thing that's going to make me sad, but I spent two and a half months in London in 2019, so I guess
54:39: I just have to be happy with that. But anyway, we would go out street witnessing in London, and the guys would just automatically, when the
54:52: Muslims showed up, they'd shuffle them over to me, so they could keep talking to the regular folks, and I was wishing, man,
54:59: I wish I had my textual data to be able to show people stuff, and I was trying to find ways of copying out of my computer and my phone, and I was trying to do all this stuff.
55:08: It's all on my phone now. I mean, it's just as easy to get on my phone now as anything else, and so just in that fairly short number of years, there's just been such an advancement as to what is available to us.
55:20: It's amazing, but I want to show you some of the early manuscripts, talk a little bit about them, so to take some of the mystery away, and I think it's important to have in your mind what some of this stuff looks like.
55:34: So I mentioned earlier, not all scholars agree. You're not going to find almost anything all scholars agree on, but most scholars agree that at least right now, this is probably the earliest fragment of the
55:46: New Testament that we possess. It's called Ryland's 47, better known as P52, and that's all there is to it.
55:54: It's written on both sides, so you can't see the backside there. Recto and Verso is what the sides are called. It's about the size of a credit card.
56:02: You can see this was toward the top of the page, because you've got the margin up here, so here is where the top of the page was, and you can take the text, and in fact, for over a decade now,
56:15: I've had these fonts on my Mac that are based upon the early papyri, so you can you can do fun stuff like this.
56:24: It's okay to go, ooh, it's okay. I mean, I did all the graphics in this by myself, so if you go, ooh,
56:32: I feel much better about myself. But you can wrap the text around it here, and you sort of get an idea of where it would have appeared on a page in essence, but what's fascinating to me is this is from John chapter 18.
56:51: Now, why is that significant? It's significant because if you had gone to school in Germany in the 1870s, you would have been taught the
57:00: Gospel of John. I'm sorry if I'm keeping you awake. I know it's been a long day. I do watch.
57:08: In fact, I don't have it with me, but sometimes I have this super bright green laser.
57:15: I mean, it's the type of thing that pops balloons, you know, that type, you know, blinds people, and what I tell people is, look, if you start falling asleep while I'm talking, what
57:24: I'm going to do is I'm going to shine this in your mouth while you're yawning. Your eyes will glow. I'll take a picture and put it on Facebook. Everybody stays awake.
57:32: It's really great. He's me. Yeah, that's fine. Anyway, I've never done it, but it's sort of fun to watch people go, would he do that?
57:39: Yeah, good question. Anyways, what was I talking about here? I don't even remember what I was talking about. See what happens. Moses is in a bull rush, so we need to go back to,
57:46: I just go back to my default spot. If you were in school in Germany in the 1870s, you would have been taught that the
57:52: Gospel of John was written around the year 200. Why?
57:58: Because it has such an advanced Christology, the theory was that that took time to develop, to evolve.
58:04: It was applying Darwinism to the New Testament, and so the scholarly consensus was that John was written long after the century or more after the days of Jesus, and so on and so forth.
58:18: Well, here's the problem. When this was discovered in a basement in London amongst all the fragments that the
58:25: British had stolen from the Egyptians long earlier during their period of empire, this guy is looking around, and he's looking at it, and he's so good at reading
58:34: Greek that he recognizes where this is from. This is from John chapter 18. So it was sent to the four leading papyrologists of the day, and you might ask the question, how do you date something that small?
58:47: I mean, that's a challenge. How do you date a papyrus? And my suggestion is you walk up and say, hey, honey, how you doing?
58:54: Okay, just trying to keep you awake. I have to use all the skills that I have to try to keep it, because once somebody starts snoring, it's done.
59:08: I've had it happen. Oh, goodness, I had it happen once at a seminar I was doing. It wasn't on sexual criticism either, and a big boy sitting right down here right on the front.
59:20: He went out, and man, that boy was rattling the windows, and it didn't matter what in the world
59:28: I was saying, because no one was listening to me anyways. It was terrible. Anyway, so if you start snoring,
59:35: I will shoot you down with a laser. This laser is a wimpy laser, so it's not going to do anything.
59:41: Anyway, what was I talking about snoring? Oh, yeah, so this particular...
59:48: I did lose him. Dating a papyrus. Yes, how do you date a papyrus?
59:53: Honestly, the only way you can do it, and very rarely a papyrus will say in the year of... and so then that's easy.
01:00:01: Sometimes it's bound with other stuff that will give you an idea of its date or things like that, but generally it's done on the basis of the handwriting itself, because the
01:00:12: Caesar would come, and he would bring his own scribes in, and so they would do official documents, and it would differ from Caesar to Caesar, and the other people would imitate it, and so we now have so many manuscripts that, since we've found the
01:00:27: Nag Hammadi Library and the Oxyrhynchus and stuff like that, that we can compare them, and a lot of them do have dates, because they're business documents and stuff like that, and so you just...
01:00:36: you compare them, but you can't do it to a specific year. Generally, it's a 50 -year period, so 25 years one direction, 25 years the other direction is what you're doing, and so when they sent these off to the various papyrologists, this one, three put it at around 125, so between 100 and 150, and one put it in the first century, so that's very, very, very early.
01:01:02: If you understand how documents are passed down to us, the average ancient document,
01:01:08: I'm going to mention this a little later on, the average document from this time period, secular documents, non -religious documents, or at least non -Christian documents, is between 500 and 900 years after it was written that we have our first manuscript.
01:01:21: This would be within 100 years, so that's huge, massive.
01:01:28: Now I'm a bit of a geek, and so when I debated Bart Ehrman, I had a tie made.
01:01:34: Here is my P52 tie, that's what I was wearing for the debate, and here's me giving Bart Ehrman his own
01:01:40: P52 tie. That was about the only time he smiled during the debate. I don't know if he burned it, or if he wears it once a year to mock fundamentalists,
01:01:49: I don't know, but there you go with the P52. Now I love this one.
01:01:57: When I'm in a church, I say, now I'm going to throw this one out here, but if you have any questions about this, you ask the pastor.
01:02:05: So we're not really in that kind of a situation here, because we have a number of different churches represented, but I love doing it because it's so much fun, because the pastor gets really nervous, and that's always fun to look at.
01:02:16: This is P115. This is one of only two papyri manuscripts we have of the
01:02:21: Book of Revelation, and as you can see, it's not in the best shape, and whenever anybody starts ragging on the papyri for the bad shape they're in,
01:02:30: I just look at them and go, and how are you going to look in 1800 years? So given what the ravages of time they've gone through,
01:02:40: I think they're pretty doing pretty darn good, personally. But you can see what the page would have looked like, so this is all we have left of this particular page.
01:02:49: This is about 250 to 275, but this is from Revelation chapter 13.
01:02:56: Yes. Oh, by the way, I did the zoom thing too, the graphic zoom thing. Eating out of my hand.
01:03:04: I love it. I love it. I'm having fun watching you over there.
01:03:09: You're going, I had to be here, but I'm actually sort of enjoying this. I didn't expect this.
01:03:14: It's sort of good. All right, so what's Revelation chapter 13? Well, that's where you have the number of the beast.
01:03:25: You didn't have to do it all for that. It's okay. Honestly, if a guy rode by on a
01:03:32: Harley out there, and we stopped him, and we asked him, do you know the number of the beast? You go, sure, it's 666.
01:03:39: You know, he's got it tattooed on his shoulder, and everybody knows the number of the beast, and how Lindsay made sure we knew the number of the beast.
01:03:46: I'm so old, I remember when the number of the beast added up to Henry Kissinger. That's how old
01:03:52: I am, okay? Not Obama, Trump, or Hillary, or anything, because I've seen all of them add up to 666 at some point, but it was
01:04:01: Henry Kissinger, who is still alive at 143 years of age. It's amazing, astonishing how preserved he is.
01:04:09: Most of us think he's actually a cyborg from the future, but anyway. But in P115, it doesn't say 666.
01:04:19: It's right there, and in Greek numbers, that's 616. 616.
01:04:30: Now, I think personally, I was giving credit, I think Dan Wallace nailed this one. I think
01:04:35: Dan Wallace dialed somewhere, I think he figured this one out, but you've got to think carefully here, okay? Think carefully with me.
01:04:41: Dan Wallace says 666 is the number of the beast, and 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast.
01:04:51: Get it? Address, 666. A few houses down.
01:04:57: Wow. I'm gonna tell
01:05:03: Dan that that joke is not doing as well as it used to, because either that, or you're just not quite as sharp as the audience
01:05:08: I'm used to addressing here. What is he talking about? Never mind. Actually, if you really want to know, this is really obvious.
01:05:17: 666 is the Greek spelling of Kaiser Nero, and 616 is the
01:05:23: Hebrew spelling of Kaiser Nero. Just so you know, sorry, that's the historical reality, talking about Nero, but anyway.
01:05:30: That may mess with your eschatology, we will do that at another point. P72. I got to see this one in 1993 in Denver, Colorado, when the
01:05:41: Pope came. We went up, I did some debates, period, and I took some papacy, and the papal treasurer's exhibit came, and this was the page that they had.
01:05:48: I'll be very brief, because I've told the story before, but I'll never forget it. Me and Rich go walking into this exhibit.
01:05:54: It's one of the first things they had out. It's on your glass, and I start looking at it, and I stop, and immediately
01:06:00: I start translating it, because it's really, it's not really fancy handwriting, but it's very legible.
01:06:08: So you can see Petru Epistolae Bae, which means 2nd Peter. This is the end of 1st
01:06:14: Peter, this is the beginning of 2nd Peter, and I mentioned to you before the Nomina Sacra.
01:06:20: We do not know why early Christians do this. There's theories, but we just don't know. But for some reason, early
01:06:27: Christians abbreviated key theological terms in the
01:06:33: New Testament. Names, God, Jesus, Lord, Spirit, Christ, and they abbreviated them down to two or three letters, and then put a line over the top.
01:06:42: We don't know why, but it makes it real easy to identify a Christian manuscript, because that's what they do. And so, you have there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there's one over here.
01:06:56: So for example, that's Thaou, that's the genitive singular of God, but it's only two letters, and it's got the
01:07:03: Nomina Sacra on it. And so, I'm looking at this, and I realize this is 2nd
01:07:09: Peter 1 -1, and 2nd Peter 1 .1 has, you're getting good at this, you're getting good at this, 2nd
01:07:22: Peter 1 .1 has something called the Gramble -Sharp Rule, which we'll be talking about more tomorrow night. The reason we'll be talking more about tomorrow night is because you have a local pastor, who actually teaches his congregation, that I changed my book on the
01:07:35: King James only controversy because of his brilliant argumentation about Gramble -Sharp Rules. Problem is,
01:07:41: I've never heard of his argumentation about Gramble -Sharp Rules, and there was no changes made in my book at all on that particular subject, and we'll talk about that more tomorrow evening.
01:07:51: But, the Gramble -Sharp Rule, the Gramble -Sharp Instruction in 2nd Peter 1 .1 is
01:07:56: Our Great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. So here's God, there's Jesus, there's Christ, here's
01:08:01: Soteros, Our Great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. And, we'll talk about what the rule tomorrow night is.
01:08:09: But what's interesting is, this was written 175 to 200, and remember the book that was extremely popular a decade ago,
01:08:19: The Da Vinci Code? It became a movie, the whole nine yards, Dan Brown made millions, telling people that Constantine made up the deity of Christ in 325.
01:08:30: Here you have the deity of Christ, long before Constantine ever took his first breath. I like having documented evidence better than fictional writer stuff.
01:08:40: And, so I'm sitting here looking at this, and people would come up, and I'm engrossed in translating it, and Rich is standing next to me.
01:08:48: These people would come up, and they sort of look at it, and look at the description, and look at me, and they look over at Rich, and they go,
01:08:54: Can this, is this man reading this document? And Rich goes, yeah. Look at this,
01:08:59: Carol, this man's reading this ancient document. And people start gathering around, the security guys are like, what's going on over here?
01:09:05: And so Rich would drag me off to go look at a crown, or a tiara, or something like that for a while, and then back to the manuscript.
01:09:11: But, eventually we had to leave. It was just so exciting to me, to see, because we don't know what the situation was in the context in which this was written.
01:09:23: Was this person risking their life to make this copy of scripture? Because, certainly, especially between 300 and 313, that would have been the case.
01:09:32: But even earlier than that, in many parts of the Roman Empire, you're risking your life to copy Christian scripture. So, I always ask people, how much of the
01:09:41: Bible would you have, if you had to hand copy it? Well, I'd have
01:09:48: Jude, 1st John, 3rd John would be a great one, you know.
01:09:54: If we had to hand copy our own Bibles, would you even make it through the genealogies?
01:10:01: It's a good question. People before us gave a lot, so that we might have what we have. So, there's that manuscript.
01:10:08: Then we have, ah, P75. Now, this is a
01:10:15: Gospels manuscript. In fact, this is the beginning of John, right here. And P75 is fascinating.
01:10:21: It is one of the most accurate Gospel texts we have. And, because, when you analyze it, because of the types of errors that the author made, we know how he copied this.
01:10:35: Think about it. If you're going to make a copy of the Gospel of John, out of the ESV, and you have to do it by hand, how would you do it?
01:10:45: Would you do it word by word? Would you do it phrase by phrase? Sentence by sentence? Depends on how your mind works.
01:10:53: The longer the chunks you copy, the faster you can get it done, but what else is the problem?
01:11:02: Problems of errors. Right. We know exactly how this guy did it. He never made an error that was more than one letter long.
01:11:11: He did it letter by letter. Not even word by word. He did it letter by letter.
01:11:17: That took a while. That was a labor of love. He or that or he was being paid well. I'm not sure which one it was.
01:11:23: But, P75, very, very important Gospel manuscript. One of the earliest ones. Remember I mentioned in John 5 .4,
01:11:29: P66 and P75 don't contain it. It's not there. So, if this guy is copying letter by letter, that means what he was copying did not have
01:11:38: John 5 .4. And since this is around 175 to 200, and we know that this one is related to another manuscript
01:11:48: I'm about to show you called Codex Vaticanus, these go back minimally to 125, 100 to 125.
01:11:55: So, when Vaticanus and P75 agree, you're looking at the state of the text in the year 100.
01:12:02: That's extremely important. That's extremely valuable. And none of that was available to the translators of King James, by the way.
01:12:13: Here's P66. I like this picture because you can see what the book actually looked like. Normally when you see this papyri, you only see a single sheet because they've been separated.
01:12:21: But this is what the book looked like before, so you can see the spine over here. And you can also see what's going to be damaged, the upper corner and even more, the lower corner.
01:12:31: Just like all our books, too. You look at your Bible, you get a nice, shiny Bible, and what ends up getting damaged first?
01:12:37: It's like, eh, draft. Same thing happened to these papyri. You can also see how the papyri breaks off, becomes brittle over the years, stuff like that.
01:12:44: This is also the year of John 1 -1. If it was a little darker, you could actually literally see N -R -K -N -H -L -O -G -S -K -I -L -O -G -S -N -X -T -O -N -P -L -A -Y -O -N up there at the top of John 1 -1.
01:12:56: This scribe—oh, actually, you can see it. See? Oh! Yeah, there you go.
01:13:02: Why is that important? Anyone ever had a debate with a Jehovah's Witness at the front door? I think the
01:13:08: Jehovah's Witnesses quit. I'm not sure about you. COVID, they just said, no more of that. So, I'm not sure what they're doing.
01:13:14: They're just hiding in the Kingdom Hall someplace. They haven't come by my house in a long, long time. Doesn't seem like they're running around much these days.
01:13:20: But everybody's probably had a debate with a Jehovah's Witness. And you know that their New World Translation says the word was a god, and stuff like that.
01:13:29: There is that phrase, chaos. Notice what's— Okay, test, test. What is chaos here?
01:13:36: No one is sacred. Yes! You're doing— Man, I'm telling you, you guys are going to go home, and you're going to impress your family.
01:13:43: Let me tell you about no man is sacred. Where did you go? So, here you have this from around 175 to 200.
01:13:52: P66. This is my baby. P45. I was working on a
01:13:58: PhD down in South Africa. My Dr. Vajra, my doctoral advisor, in the middle of COVID, had a massive heart attack and had to retire.
01:14:05: So, I'm trying to find some way of shifting all that stuff myself. But I've spent a lot of time with this manuscript.
01:14:12: This is P45. 180 to 220, I'd say more close to 220 than 180. P45 is really interesting because it contains portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.
01:14:24: The only manuscript we have that contained those four books. Acts normally did not get attached to the four
01:14:30: Gospels. But this one did. And this is actually in John chapter 10. And there's not much
01:14:37: I can't tell you about this manuscript, but we also have a lot more to get to. I can't have you here all night.
01:14:43: So, P45. That's my baby. P46. Okay, now.
01:14:51: You all get to participate in what is now a 15 to 20 year survey.
01:14:57: On my part. But I am hoping to find out that people in Florida have hearts.
01:15:04: That you're not kind and cruel and heartless like some of my audiences are. Because you see, what has happened is when
01:15:10: I ask people to participate in this poll, what happens is most people just sit there and ignore me.
01:15:18: They will not participate. And it hurts me. It brings little tears in my
01:15:24: Scottish eye. I'm not even convincing you of this. This is really bad. We don't care.
01:15:31: Here's the situation. P46 is our earliest manuscript containing the epistles of Paul.
01:15:37: The major epistles of Paul. Not the pastoral epistles. So, for example.
01:15:48: Prost Philippeius to the Philippians. Alright. So, 175 -200.
01:15:56: Early collection of Paul's epistles. I saw this manuscript in Dublin, Ireland a number of years ago.
01:16:04: I got in trouble with security guards because I was on my knees in front of the manuscript trying to read it.
01:16:10: Now, why was I on my knees? Because the light was up above. It was very dim. And I realized it would be bouncing off at an angle.
01:16:15: So it would be most visible from down here. And they were watching on closed TV. And they thought I was probably worshipping the manuscripts.
01:16:21: So they wanted to find out what in the world I was up to. So. In fact,
01:16:27: I saw this page. To the Philippians. Now, there is a major work in the
01:16:34: New Testament. Where there is some confusion as to who wrote it.
01:16:40: It's called the Book of Hebrews. And so a big question would be. Is Hebrews in P46?
01:16:50: Or is it not? Because this would be an early testament. If it's in it, then the author obviously thought this was
01:16:55: Paul's. If it's not, then the author didn't. And so what I've done for 15 -20 years now.
01:17:02: Is I've asked my dear brothers and sisters in the Lord. To take a poll.
01:17:08: And I'm going to ask you. Put your hand up if you think Hebrews is in P46. Or if Hebrews isn't in P46.
01:17:16: And here's what happens. Most people just sit there and say. I'm not voting.
01:17:23: I'm not. He's. No. I have no idea. I'm not going to vote. I don't want to vote. I think it's mean to make me vote.
01:17:30: This is worse than a vaccine. And you just sit there. And stare at me.
01:17:37: And it hurts. I just want you to know. Okay.
01:17:44: So how many of you think P46 contains Hebrews? How many of you think P46 does not contain
01:17:50: Hebrews? How many of you sat there and did not vote? There you go.
01:17:56: I knew the guy in the mask wasn't going to vote. He was like, I'm asleep anyways. Don't worry about it. So, it does contain
01:18:01: Hebrews right after Romans. All that means is someone around the year 200.
01:18:07: Probably thought Paul wrote Hebrews. I think Paul preached
01:18:12: Hebrews in Hebrew. And Luke wrote it in Greek.
01:18:18: Because the theology is Paul's. The grammar and the vocabulary is
01:18:23: Luke's. Anybody who reads a lot of Paul. And reads Hebrews. Realizes, wow, this is different.
01:18:30: And it is. So I think Paul preached it. It's his theology. And Luke wrote it down.
01:18:35: And that's why it is what it is. But there's P46. Okay. Here I am in Sydney, Australia.
01:18:42: I'm glad I got out of there in time. Years and years ago. Looking at a little fragment of P91 at Macquarie State University.
01:18:49: That's from the book of Acts. You can see the moment of sacred. But it's just a teeny tiny little fragment.
01:18:55: And what's interesting is that's one third of the fragment. The other two thirds is in Italy. And the two museums fight over who's going to give theirs up.
01:19:03: To give it to the other side. So they can put it back together again. But anyway, we won't take any time.
01:19:08: All right. Back to just the facts. Because you all will eventually want to get this all over with.
01:19:15: Now after the peace of the church in AD 313. And man, would I love to talk to you a little bit more about this.
01:19:20: But I just don't have time to. Christians could have professional scribes copy the scriptures. At this time the great vellum or leather manuscripts begin to appear.
01:19:29: Including the three greatest of these. Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Vaticanus. And Codex Alexandrinus.
01:19:35: Vaticanus and Sinaiticus may well be among the Bibles copied with imperial monies. At the time of the council.
01:19:40: And I see it 8325. We have a mention from Eusebius that Constantine gave money to the church to copy manuscripts.
01:19:47: Why? Because between 303 and 313. That ten year period of time.
01:19:53: Rome had destroyed thousands of biblical manuscripts. All across the empire. In an attempt to wipe out
01:19:59: Christianity. And so they may have been copied at that particular time. This is what
01:20:04: Codex Sinaiticus looked like when I saw it. In 2005 at the
01:20:09: British Library in London. And that's pretty much how it was laid out. What's freaked me out is
01:20:16: I walk into this room. There's nobody in there. And I walk up to this case.
01:20:22: And here's Codex Sinaiticus. Right next to it is Codex Alexandrinus. Over here is a
01:20:28: Wycliffe Bible. And here's a Tyndale Bible. And a 1611 King James. And there's nobody in there.
01:20:34: And I'm like wow. One suicide bomber takes everything out in one shot here. This is not good.
01:20:40: But it's pretty amazing to see. And I doubt this is going to look real clear. But let's see.
01:20:46: That's not bad. That's what it looks like. Compare that to the papyri we were looking at before. That's handwritten folks.
01:20:52: That's not printed. That is handwritten. What's that? That's handwritten.
01:20:59: Now the other thing to remember about Codex Sinaiticus is it's not just the New Testament. It is also the earliest manuscript we have of the
01:21:06: Old Testament in Greek. And so when Count von Tischendorf discovered this.
01:21:12: Did you know? Everybody knows Count von Tischendorf, right? Did you know that Count von
01:21:18: Tischendorf who found this at St. Catherine's Monastery. Most people do believe was the model for Indiana Jones.
01:21:33: He was a Christian looking for biblical manuscripts. And he was the model for the character
01:21:39: Indiana Jones. You all know who Indiana Jones is, right? I mean I'm starting to. I'm really starting.
01:21:46: I'm just going to start doing my presentations in the old folks' homes. My illustrations will actually be understood because anymore no one even knows what this is all about.
01:21:57: So Tischendorf was a believing Christian. He knew somewhere he would find ancient manuscripts that would validate his belief in the scriptures.
01:22:08: And when he found Sinaiticus. A lot of people like to try to say that he found it in a trash can.
01:22:14: He did not. When he found Sinaiticus, the actual volume that you saw in the previous picture.
01:22:20: A monk had it wrapped in red cloth in the closet of his room.
01:22:26: You don't put trash in red cloth in the closet of a room. The monk knew it was very special.
01:22:32: And so the whole story of how von Tischendorf eventually got to the
01:22:39: Russian czar and all the rest of that stuff is very complicated, very political. And the monks at St.
01:22:46: Catharines are still ticked off about it hundreds of years later. But you can sort of see, for example, here's a marginal note here.
01:22:53: Here's another one here. One right there. This is obviously produced in a scriptorium.
01:22:59: There's one in between lines right there. You can go to codexsinaiticus .org and examine all of this.
01:23:05: Zoom in on it. It's really, really cool. They really need to update their page. It was really great when it first came out, but it's really dated now, sadly.
01:23:14: So, for example, here's Sinaiticus. And you can see how you can zoom in and you can see.
01:23:21: And notice, you can even tell in this, that's a different ink than what was originally written up here.
01:23:26: It's got more red to it right here. Same thing here. And so you can look at stuff very, very closely and examine them and things like that.
01:23:40: I want you to know, I texted John. And I said, are you guys performing tonight?
01:23:45: And he got back to me and said, yes, going on in three minutes. So, sorry. But I did contact him.
01:23:52: He did get back to me. Some of you are going, what are you talking about? I have some cool friends.
01:24:00: And one of them is John Cooper of Skillet. And we talk. We talk a lot.
01:24:06: I almost talk daily. But anyway, here is Codex Sinaiticus. I'm sorry, Codex Vaticanus.
01:24:13: This is the one that I mentioned to you. Wow, does that get washed out. That's actually supposed to be green.
01:24:19: This is a color one. Vaticanus was known to people like Desiderius Erasmus.
01:24:25: We'll talk more about him tomorrow night in regards to King James. It's in the Vatican Library. And what's important is that Codex Vaticanus and P75 are in the same line of manuscripts.
01:24:44: We know this. We can tell. But it's not a copy of P75. So Vaticanus is a copy of a manuscript whose ancestor was what
01:24:55: P75 was from. So the point is, here you're talking 325 to 350. P75 is around 175 to 200.
01:25:03: And that means when the two of them have the same reading, that goes even farther back in the church history.
01:25:08: That's a fascinating reality and extremely important when you're analyzing readings and things like that.
01:25:14: And I'm going to be very interested in seeing what CBGM does with this once it gets to especially the
01:25:21: Gospel of John, which is being worked on in Birmingham right now. And there's Codex Alexandrinus. I made a really cool tie out of Codex Alexandrinus once.
01:25:29: It looks really cool. But I won't go into all that because we are running out of time. I've been keeping you for as long as it is, and I've still got to tell you a little bit about CBGM.
01:25:37: So aside from the 1 ,500 plus Greek texts, we have early translations in the Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, that are important witnesses to the early text of the
01:25:44: New Testament. I mentioned those earlier. Combining these with the Greek text yields over 24 ,000 handwritten witnesses to the text of the
01:25:53: New Testament. We have more than 124 Greek manuscript witnesses within the first 300 years after the writing of the
01:26:00: New Testament. Far more, far more than any other work of antiquity. There was no other work of antiquity that even comes close.
01:26:07: In fact, we have 12 manuscripts from the second century, that is within 100 years of the writing of the
01:26:12: New Testament. These manuscripts contain portions of all four Gospels, nine books of Paul, Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation, comprising the majority of the books the
01:26:20: New Testament possesses today. Again, no work of antiquity even comes close to this early attestation.
01:26:26: The average length of time between the writing of most works contemporaneous to the New Testament, such as the historical works of Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus, and their first extant copies between 500 and 900 years.
01:26:38: I need to stop there so that it sinks in. I said it before. Everything else being written around the time of the
01:26:45: New Testament, on average, our first copies are between 500 and 900 years later.
01:26:53: I'll take it. Because I don't trust you. Five to 900 years.
01:27:03: And we're talking we have at least 12 within 100 years. You would think that would be the main thing that people would talk about in the university settings.
01:27:12: It's not. No one's going to talk about that. No one's going to tell your Christian student about that, even if they know about it, which most of them don't anyways.
01:27:20: So, note this admission by Bart Ehrman. Now, I never expected this.
01:27:27: This is cross -examination. I'm asking him questions, and I did not. I almost, if you look closely,
01:27:35: I almost cut him off so he didn't end up saying what he ended up saying. But the Lord kept me from doing it.
01:27:41: Listen to what Bart Ehrman says in response to my question to him in the cross -examination from our debate.
01:27:50: On the Unbelievable Greater Program in London, you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the
01:27:56: Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years. You described this time period as enormous.
01:28:05: That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?
01:28:16: Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. Ginormous doesn't cover it.
01:28:25: In the New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book of antiquity. Did you catch that?
01:28:31: For the New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book of antiquity.
01:28:38: And that's the leading English -speaking critic of the New Testament. You don't hear that.
01:28:43: You don't get that on MSNBC or any of that kind of stuff. They skip it.
01:28:49: Now, this is really important. You've got to think with me here. I know it's been a while. And I'm about to show you some graphics
01:28:55: I worked very hard on, just so you know they're coming. Often the transmission of the text of the
01:29:01: New Testament is likened to the phone game that we played as kids, where one person whispers something in the ear of the person next in line and so forth around the circle until the last person repeats what he has heard, and it's inevitably changed in often humorous ways from what was originally said.
01:29:16: But is this an accurate way of thinking of how the New Testament is transmitted over time? That's how it'll be. So, copy of a copy of a copy.
01:29:23: There's an error in this, and more errors, and more errors, and more errors. Single line. Is that how it happened?
01:29:29: Well, that's not how it happened. So, for example, the New Testament is written in various places, and then copies are moved to other places.
01:29:41: Did you catch that? Did you see the manuscripts moving? That's not easy to do. Manuscripts are manuscripts.
01:29:49: So, we know Paul writes in one place, and sometimes he wrote from prison, he wrote from various places he was visiting.
01:29:58: He didn't write from all the same places, and they're going to different locations. And so over time, what happens is you start getting collections, like B46, of Paul's writings, and they're going to start going across to North Africa, and up into different parts of Asia Minor, and so on and so forth, as people are making more and more copies, and they want to have this type of material.
01:30:24: And so what ends up happening then is these collections start taking place, especially in Rome.
01:30:32: Rome, Ephesus, places like that, where you have major, major cities, and then they end up being codices, and those end up being copied and being transported from place to place to place.
01:30:45: So what you have are multiple lines of transmission. You don't just have one line.
01:30:52: It's not just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. We don't know how many copies were made of the originals, but there would have been many of those.
01:30:59: For example, how many of you this morning did your devotional reading in the epistles of Laodiceans?
01:31:08: You might have. Remember Colossians 4 .16? What does Paul say to the
01:31:14: Church of Colossae? Read the letter that's coming from where? Laodicean. Was that lost?
01:31:20: Probably not. What's he probably referring to? Ephesians. Ephesians is clearly a circular letter.
01:31:27: It's meant to be circulated around the cities in the Lycus River Valley. And if you ever know something, how long was
01:31:34: Paul in Ephesus? A long time. Multiple years. What's missing from Ephesians?
01:31:41: Any personal references at all. He doesn't read anyone by name. But he was there for years.
01:31:49: So why? Because it was meant to be... You have read it. You may have done your devotions in Ephesians this morning.
01:31:57: But the point is, that means that the Church in Ephesus would have made a copy of what Paul wrote to them and sent that along, not the original that he sent to them.
01:32:06: And then each of those churches would have made copies that went along. So you've got multiple lines. You don't have just a single line of transmission.
01:32:13: This is really, really important. Multiple lines is very important. Finally, it's important to realize that the transmission of the text of the
01:32:20: New Testament did not follow the phone game. Not only are written documents less liable to corruption than what is whispered in the air, but the phone game involves a single line of transmission.
01:32:28: The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors, with books being sent to multiple locations.
01:32:36: And I might add, with multiple copies being made in the process of that taking place. So, this multifocality leads us to the final considerations that demonstrate the bankruptcy of the modern text on the
01:32:47: New Testament. To make specific changes in a text like the New Testament. Does anyone remember...
01:32:54: Why can't I... Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb. Do you remember
01:32:59: Shirley MacLaine? Okay, we've got three... Oh, good. Yeah, this guy is short. I'm going to tell you something about this guy over here.
01:33:05: He's sitting there going, I could do a much better job than this. I can just tell. I can just see it.
01:33:12: Shirley MacLaine, some of you younger folks don't even know what she was, but she was sort of a Broadway star, singing star, acting type of stuff like that.
01:33:20: Who was her mom? Didn't she have a famous mom or something like that? I've never been good at stars and stuff like that, but anyways.
01:33:28: She did this thing back in the 1980s, where she got into the New Age movement.
01:33:34: She had a spirit guide. There was this whole mini -series that was done on TV.
01:33:39: I remember very, very clearly where this guy is teaching her what to say. She's out on this beach. He's teaching her what to say.
01:33:45: She's going, I am God. I am God. I am God. We're all sitting there going, no, you're not.
01:33:51: You're not. You're not. She was telling us very, very confidently that the
01:33:57: Bible used to contain the doctrine of reincarnation. But it was taken out at the
01:34:04: Council of Constantinople. Now, you sit there and you go,
01:34:09: I don't believe that, but I also have no earthly idea what happened at the
01:34:15: Council of Constantinople or even when it was. Right? That's how they get away with this kind of stuff. But this is so all the time.
01:34:23: YouTube is filled with a historical trash about everything that happened at the
01:34:29: Council of Nicaea or the Council of Constantinople. And those of us, first class ever taught was church history. I've been teaching it for over 30 years.
01:34:36: And we watch this stuff and just want to scream because it is just horrific. But it's out there.
01:34:43: And we have to deal with it. And so when people say, well, there used to be an entire doctrine in the
01:34:52: New Testament documents. But it's been taken out. How do you respond to that? The Muslims say that. The Mormons say that.
01:34:59: Shirley MacLaine said that. Is she even alive? I don't know if she's still alive. I think she's still futzing around someplace. But so is
01:35:04: Henry Kissinger for that matter. So there you go. So to make specific changes in a text like the
01:35:10: New Testament, which originally circulated as a group of texts, not as a single body, would require a centralized, controlling body that can make wholesale changes in these widely dispersed texts.
01:35:21: And you'll see videos on YouTube where you've got all these hooded monks in dark rooms making decisions and all this kind of stuff.
01:35:29: But the problem is, the fact of the matter is, no such central agency ever existed or could have existed.
01:35:36: Christianity was a persecuted religion made up mainly of the lower classes. There was no central authority that could ever have gathered up all the texts and made wholesale changes, despite what
01:35:43: Dan Brown said. Such was impossible in the earliest days of transmission. And given that we have such ancient texts now, obviously it could not have happened at a later point without giving clear evidence.
01:35:56: So it's only been the past hundred years we've discovered the papyri. We didn't have it before then. So if someone had gathered everything up and made changes after the papyri were written, and then we discover the papyri, they're going to be massively different than later texts, right?
01:36:10: But they're not. They're not different at all. There's been no change. So, what that means, we can prove beyond all doubt this kind of corruption did not happen, since papyri were found to date back to the second century, not only within the past hundred years.
01:36:24: And any later centralized organization sought to alter the texts, those later texts, would show stark differences as older and older manuscripts were found, but just the opposite has been the case.
01:36:36: So, all allegations of purposeful corruption, such as those made by Muslims, fall upon the mere consideration of the historical context and data itself.
01:36:45: The rapid widespread distribution of New Testament manuscripts in the first two centuries precludes any purposeful centralized corruption.
01:36:51: It also gives rise to the need to study the relatively small number of textual variants. The word variant became a textual variant because it disappeared.
01:37:00: This leads to another important point. When scribes copied their text, they were very conservative, often incorporating marginal notes into the text, since they could not be sure if the note was original or not.
01:37:08: So, if you're reading somebody else's manuscript, they maybe just died in persecution, you don't know who wrote this manuscript, you can't ask them questions, and you find a marginal note.
01:37:19: Any of you take notes in your Bible? A few of you do? Now, obviously, you'd be able to tell the difference between a handwritten note and a printed, but when it's all handwritten, how do you know?
01:37:32: And so, oftentimes, somebody would be copying something and realize, oh, I skipped a whole thing, and so they put it in the margin.
01:37:40: Well, when you're copying it, do you copy that? Where do you put it? Or do you not copy it? You don't want to lose anything, and so scribes would tend to copy whatever was there.
01:37:50: And that explains a little something. They preserve mistakes or silly readings.
01:37:57: This may sound bad at first, but consider what it actually means. The New Testament text is tenacious. That means readings are preserved in the text.
01:38:03: All readings, including the original readings, are still a part of the manuscript tradition.
01:38:12: That is why the believing textual critic can persevere in even the most difficult variants. One of the readings is the original, and that also explains that.
01:38:22: John 5 .4. Remember, we started here at Salmon State. I know for most of you, it feels like it was a lifetime ago. But it wasn't.
01:38:29: We talked about John 5 .4. What was John 5 .4? John 5 .4 was a marginal note. Just think about it.
01:38:35: What does it contain? We had somebody read it. It's the story of the angel coming down and stirring the waters. Well, when you read it without that note there, you are wondering, why are all these people laying around this pool?
01:38:45: The pool of the desert. What's going on here? And so you can see exactly how this happened. Someone who knew something about the
01:38:53: Jerusalem context, maybe in a sermon, is mentioning, this is why all these sick people are laying around this pool, and someone goes, oh, wow, that's interesting.
01:39:01: Writes it in the note, that manuscript gets copied, and voila, it ends up being something a lot of other people thought that was helpful to know, too.
01:39:09: But that's how it ends up in the margin, even though it is not found, as we pointed out, in P66, P75, P78.
01:39:18: So it was centuries down the road before that ended up. I'm sorry, I'm looking at John 7 .3.
01:39:24: John 5. I think it's actually in here someplace. But how about John 7 .3,
01:39:30: 8 .11? We'll talk about that one, too. There are, really quickly, I'm rushing because I do realize it's getting later.
01:39:37: There are two major textual variants. I thought it was John 5 up there, but that's the answer to John 5, too.
01:39:44: There are two major textual variants in the New Testament. When I say major, they are 12 verses long each.
01:39:50: There's only two. Only two. John 7 .3 through 8 .11 is one. It's the story of the woman taking an adultery.
01:39:59: As Daniel Wallace says, it's his favorite story that's not actually in the Bible. It's such a favorite story that Mel Gibson stuck it into the
01:40:09: Passion of the Christ movie, though it had nothing to do with the movie. It was a flashback. He still had to stick it in there someplace, and he did.
01:40:16: Everybody loves the story. There's one problem. It's omitted by P66, P75, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus.
01:40:26: Look at all these. The first place it appears is Codex D.
01:40:33: What's Codex D? Codex D is Codex Bezae Canterburgiensis. I call it the living
01:40:38: Bible of the early church. It is the most unreliable early manuscript we have.
01:40:43: The author was not trying to copy. He was trying to edit. In the Book of Acts, for example, Codex D gives you the number of steps that Peter descended to get to the street when the angel got him out of jail.
01:40:55: It's the only manuscript that does. When Codex D is your first manuscript, that's a red alarm bell.
01:41:03: When it's not found in all these others, then it's real obvious this is a later edition.
01:41:12: That's 12 verses. By the way, you know the real reason that we know that this is a later edition is because you'll notice that it's found after 753, after 83, after 736.
01:41:30: It's found after 2125, and in some manuscripts, it's in the Gospel of Luke. So when you have a body of text trying to find a home someplace, that is clear evidence of a later edition over 400 years after the death of Christ.
01:41:50: For John 753. What's the other longest one? The longer ending of Mark? Mark 16, 19, 20.
01:41:57: And I did a debate on that during COVID last year. You'll want to go get more into that as to what the evidence is for that.
01:42:06: Real quickly, I can cover this tomorrow night.
01:42:12: You know what? I'm going to cover it tomorrow night. I'll throw it in the King James. We'll look at the Communion.
01:42:17: Let me just talk to you real quickly about CBGM, and we'll wrap up, because I know you've been sitting there for a very long time now.
01:42:30: I passed Mark around. Here again is what is currently published. I really doubt that you're going to want to be tracking this down for yourself, because I know that the general epistles were $180,
01:42:47: Acts was $320, and Mark was $280 each.
01:42:54: And so when it gets done, it will be multiple thousands of dollars, because it's primarily designed for university libraries, seminary libraries, stuff like that.
01:43:03: All of it's online for free. All of it is online for free. It looks different.
01:43:10: It doesn't look nearly as impressive when you're doing your webcast and you have to show in your library and stuff like that.
01:43:16: It looks really cool, but there you go. Not only is it online, but let me show you.
01:43:26: I had it queued up. Oh, I don't have the web.
01:43:34: Well, let me see if I can get it on my phone. Good, yeah.
01:43:40: My phone is doing okay. It's LTE.
01:43:46: It's only got a few bars, but it'll be fine. Hopefully I can pull this up for you, because I think you might find it interesting.
01:43:57: Yes, go away. There. Let me see if I can,
01:44:03: I wonder which side it's on. Oh, there it is. Okay, here is, doing this backwards is going to give me vertigo.
01:44:23: Here is Mark 1 -1. Remember Shamir Ali mentioned Mark 1 -1, whether it says the
01:44:30: Son of God or whether it doesn't say the Son of God? This has just been put up, because as I said,
01:44:36: Mark was just published last month, a month before last. And so here you see the
01:44:41: Son of God is in red. Look at the amount of information. This is available for free online.
01:44:48: Here is the apparatus for the ECM. If you had stopped on that page and looked at it, this is what you would find printed, though.
01:44:56: This is sort of clearer to me, anyways. So here is all the manuscripts that say Son of God. And then
01:45:02: Son of God without an article, and then Son of the Lord, 1241.
01:45:09: The Son of God both with articles, just simply of God, and then omitted. And then
01:45:16: ZZ down here at the bottom. What did I do with my thing? There it is. ZZ down here at the bottom means these manuscripts, like my
01:45:22: P45, doesn't even contain this because it doesn't contain Mark 1. It only contains stuff later on in Mark.
01:45:28: So these manuscripts just simply do not contain Mark 1 -1, though they are cited elsewhere.
01:45:35: So this gives you an idea of which manuscripts, again, this is the most extensive material we've ever had available.
01:45:42: But then watch what you can do now. Here is CBGM. There's no way in five minutes
01:45:51: I can even begin to explain this to you. But I just want to give you some ideas because if you start hearing about this, at least you'll have one leg up.
01:45:59: CBGM is not a system where you just feed in the data and the computer tells you what the
01:46:05: New Testament says. That's not what it is. It's a tool. And it is a tool that takes advantage of the fact that your computer can keep track of so many more points of data than your mind can, than any human mind can.
01:46:22: And so the computer can see relationships between manuscripts that we can't see. We've been trying to, scholars for years and years have been trying to create families of manuscripts based upon how they agree on certain readings and stuff like that.
01:46:35: The computer can now do that with many more manuscripts and with thousands of more data points.
01:46:42: And so what that allows us to do is to look at what's called coherence. Coherence.
01:46:49: Let me give you an example other than this one. One of the early major changes that's resulted in the
01:46:56: Nasty Olin text was in Jude 5. In Jude 5, up until recently, the editors had chosen the reading, the
01:47:07: Lord delivered a people out of Egypt. Kurios is the term Lord. But we always knew there were certain manuscripts that didn't say the
01:47:15: Lord delivered a people out of Egypt. It said Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt.
01:47:21: Now Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt. What does that tell you about Jesus? Who's Jesus? I mean, that's relevant to the deity of Christ.
01:47:29: Well, CBGM analyzed those manuscripts. And what the system demonstrated was that the manuscripts that say
01:47:40: God, very quickly, there is pre -genealogical coherence, genealogical coherence, and schematic coherence.
01:47:49: Pre -genealogical is not asking the question about how the manuscripts relate to one another. It's just simply the bulk, how often they agree.
01:47:57: Genealogical coherence is where editors look at the manuscripts and they say, in each one of these places, this reading gave rise to this reading.
01:48:06: And once you do that over reading, over reading, over reading, you start getting an idea of which manuscript is derived from another manuscript.
01:48:13: And then schematic coherence is where you take all that and put it together and let the computer do it. Point is, that when they looked at Jude 5, the manuscripts that say
01:48:22: Jesus, their closest relatives also say
01:48:29: Jesus. So there is high coherence amongst those manuscripts. But when they look at the manuscripts that said
01:48:36: Lord, many of them had close relatives that actually said
01:48:41: Jesus. Now Lord would be the easier one to understand because that's the standard terminology.
01:48:49: So the point is that CBGM is able to look at all those manuscripts in all the places where they have differing readings and say these manuscripts are more coherent with each other and more consistent than these manuscripts.
01:49:02: That's what CBGM is doing. Okay? And so that's why your ESV, when it first came out, said the
01:49:11: Lord. And now if you have your ESV, it says Jesus. Because CBGM is changing your
01:49:18: New Testament. Now there are only, if I recall correctly, there's only 30 some odd, between 30 and 50 differences between the
01:49:30: Nessie Island 27th and the Nessie Island 28th in the general epistles. It's like 30 in Acts. I've forgotten.
01:49:35: I think it's 50 in Mark. And the vast majority of them do not impact the translation.
01:49:42: But that one in Jude is sort of important. And it is, I was really wondering what it was going to do with Mark 1 .1.
01:49:50: And it says Son of God is the most coherent reading. But you can do so much of this.
01:49:58: Look at this. Here is coherence in various passages. I can change various of the parameters which will change these numbers.
01:50:08: And then watch this. Here is coherence in various passages, coherence in attestations.
01:50:19: And I have to, look at this. See the human mind could not keep up with this amount of data.
01:50:30: But here is how all these manuscripts are related to one another. There we go.
01:50:37: Look at that. We've never had that kind of data before. Now you may be sitting there going, yeah, what does that mean to me?
01:50:44: What it means to me as an apologist is the people that are trying to tell me that someone changed the New Testament are now up against a computer that says you're an idiot.
01:50:56: Because the computer is saying, no, here's the data. You want the data? Here. We now have it. It's no longer, we would have
01:51:03: New Testament scholars would say, well, I would estimate there's a certain percentage difference. No, the computer now tells you exactly what the percentage is.
01:51:10: It's no longer an opinion thing. It's here is the documented data. I like that.
01:51:16: That's good. We should be happy about this. You might say it just looks really complex to me. Yes, but it's a good complex.
01:51:23: It's a good complexity to be dealing with. So I'm figuring, to be honest with you, there weren't any major whoo -hoo in Mark.
01:51:36: John's the one. When John hits and we've got the woman taking an adultery,
01:51:42: John 118, is it monogamous theos, unique God, or monogamous huios, unique son?
01:51:48: That's an important one. When John comes out, I think finally it's going to hit the consciousness of a larger portion of evangelicalism.
01:52:00: And unfortunately for a lot of people, it's just going to be computers are now determining the original text.
01:52:06: That's not the case. That's not the case. But right now, to be honest with you, Dr. Peter Gurry and Dr.
01:52:13: Tommy Wasserman have written an introduction to this CBGM, which is very readable. I recommend it to you.
01:52:19: Dr. Gurry teaches at the Phoenix Seminary, and a couple of years ago I met with him to talk about my project on P45 and CBGM.
01:52:26: And I asked him, who's working on this aspect of examining CBGM from the papyri?
01:52:32: He said, you. It's just that new. It's just that new.
01:52:38: So I have a feeling that you're going to be hearing more about it. Just be aware that probably what you're going to hear about it isn't even close to being accurate.
01:52:49: It's exciting. It's very positive. I still have questions about how
01:52:56: CBGM interfaces with history, and I want to be doing more work on that.
01:53:02: COVID has messed us all up and stuff like that. So being published, it's a positive thing.
01:53:09: Just be aware that that's coming. I think it's important. Okay. That's called drinking from a fire hose.
01:53:15: Okay. That's a lot of stuff. I understand that. What I hope you really got hold of is the fact that the mechanism that God used to transmit the text of the
01:53:28: New Testament to us was to have it explode across the Roman Empire, multiple lines, multiple authors.
01:53:35: There was no way for anyone to come along and take doctrines out, put doctrines in.
01:53:42: And when you actually look at the New Testament manuscripts as they exist, they are astonishingly accurate in the material they give to us.
01:53:50: We do have to examine textual variance because that's what happens when you have bunches of people copying manuscripts.
01:53:59: If you don't like that, then you know when God would have been able to first give us the
01:54:06: New Testament where we wouldn't have this problem? 1949, because that's when we invented the photocopier.
01:54:13: So if you want to have a non -variant transmission, you need to have photocopiers.
01:54:19: So God couldn't have done that until 1949. I'm glad he didn't wait until 1949. And that's important.
01:54:26: Okay. All right. Wow. I've got almost 8 o 'clock, so that's when we're supposed to wrap up.
01:54:34: So that's pretty close. Did you say we were going to do something, or should I just close in a—I think it would be best if I just prayed and said good night.
01:54:43: Especially the little ones are ready to go. I put one completely out over here, just gone. I mean, that's perfectly all right.
01:54:52: It's better than when the adults are gone. That's good. So let me just dismiss this with a prayer.
01:55:00: Thank you for being here tonight. As I said, tomorrow evening my application is going to be much more specific in dealing with the claims of King James Onlyism.
01:55:09: But I hope you recognize you're going to be in a much better position to really understand tomorrow night.
01:55:16: I feel for anybody who comes just tomorrow night and didn't hear tonight, because I'm going to have to build upon what we've talked about this evening.
01:55:25: So you're one step ahead at that point. So let's pray. Father, once again, we do thank you for the freedom that we have to gather in a place of comfort, a place where we have technology that we're able to access.
01:55:39: We do ask you would help us to remember these things so that when challenges come to us, we will be able to give an answer.
01:55:45: But the hope that's within us, we thank you for the way you've preserved your word. We thank you that you have desired us to possess your word and to be able to understand what it is you reveal to us.
01:55:57: We ask that we would be able to communicate these things to our children, our grandchildren, the people in our churches,
01:56:04: Lord, that their faith may be built up as well. We thank you this evening. We thank you for protecting us from distraction.
01:56:11: And we ask that you would be with us tomorrow evening and that you would be honored and glorified in that discussion as well, for all these things in Christ's name.