The Transmission of the New Testament

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Good morning everyone, it's good to see you this morning, how many of you were with us last night?
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Excellent. So welcome back, it's good to see you this morning. James White is here, he's going to be with us this morning, in this hour.
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Next week we'll go back to our regular schedule with a look at, and also
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I teach a class that is formulated by Grace Community Church and the character of God at the moment.
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So, but this week we have a special guest, James White is here with us, so those of you that were with us at the beginning of the issue,
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I think it's very important for us to hear from you. It's about how did we get our New Testament, and what way did it come to us, and very instructive for all of us, and for those of us that are believers in the
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Lord Jesus Christ, and we see what we hold in our hands, and worry about.
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I'm going to pray that we're going to turn it directly over to James, and give him the fullest time that we can, so he can share with us as much material as possible.
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So let's pray together, and we'll get right into it. Father, we thank you for this morning, we thank you for this day set aside to worship you.
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Father, we pray that our hearts might be drawn to you in this hour, away from the things that are our cares of the week, our concerns of the day that might be set aside, that our ears might be turned to you, to hear, to receive from you,
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Father, your holy instruction, that we might know you more clearly, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.
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We pray, our Father, that our hearts might be transformed by the work of your Spirit, with a greater degree of understanding, and Lord, that that would affect us in the life of Jesus Christ, with a greater degree of hope, a greater degree of dependence upon you,
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Father, also an increased understanding of how we might demonstrate the love of Christ that we receive. Father, we pray that you would change this as he speaks, in the clarity of thought, in the conciseness of his presentation, that all things might be done to improve the furtherance of your name in this world.
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We pray this in Christ's name. If I was willing to endure the
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Britney Spears microphone, I would be able to move around, but I just can't pull it off this early in the morning.
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It's too hard to do, so I will be stuck here, but that's okay. My assignment this morning, first of all,
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I have tested the remote, and it works. Last evening was a little challenging on that level.
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And also, for those of you who are over 50 years of age, like myself, I would challenge you to turn around and look at that screen up there on the wall, and then remember some of the font sizes of the quotes last night, and realize, wow,
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I was pushing my progressive lenses to the max. Especially as it got down toward the bottom of the screen, it was like, is that Swahili or English?
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I'm not really sure. You only have 20 minutes. You can't slow down much. My presentation this morning is based on two, really two debates that I've done.
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One in London, and one in Northwest University in Pachastunum, South Africa, which is about 100 kilometers outside of Johannesburg.
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In both of those debates, I have engaged in a comparison, a contrast, between the way in which we receive the
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New Testament and the way in which Muslims receive the Quran. Now, the vast majority of Muslims have no earthly idea where the
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Quran came from. Then again, the vast majority of Christians have no earthly idea where the New Testament came from either.
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A lot of Christians think that the New Testament came down out of heaven with a leather cover and gold edges on the pages and thumb indexing, at least so you could find
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Habakkuk and Hosea. But that's not how it came about.
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And unfortunately today, if we are ignorant about the history, there's Chris, if we are ignorant about the history of where our texts come from, then we are going to be liable to a tremendous amount of attack from unbelievers who are familiar with the history of our texts.
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And so, what I'm going to do is look briefly at how we receive the
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New Testament and then compare that with the Quran. Sometimes that comparison contrast, contrasting can help to emphasize what's really important.
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And probably for, for most of us, this will be new information to invite you to think about the difference between a controlled transmission of the text and a free transmission of the text.
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What I mean by that is, and I'm going to explain this, but a free transmission of the New Testament means that it was, it was freely distributed.
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It was copied widely. It was distributed to wide areas. There was no central governing body that controlled that text at any point in its production, distribution, or history in comparison to the
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Quran, which has always been controlled by an overriding authority. Now, it would seem to most people that it would be better to have the controlled text than the free text.
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The exact opposite is the case, as we will see. So let's, let's look at that. Let's take a look at that and see how that works out in, in history.
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Few today understand the history of ancient documents, that's for certain. The process of transmission antiquity is vastly different than today.
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Today, you want to write a book, you can write it on your computer, put it into PDF format, ship it off to somebody, and a few days later you'll have a whole box full of books sitting at your front door.
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It's amazing, the publishing industry today. But that capacity to engage in that kind of duplication and production is a very, very, very new thing.
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In fact, as far as exactly reduplicating a document, that was not a possibility in human experience until 1949.
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Printing, obviously, in the West, the Chinese had it long before we did, but printing in the West, Gutenberg's press, the late 15th century, but the reality is that that took time to catch on and you still have to typeset in printing.
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And believe me, I've seen many mistakes made in typesetting. And so until the photographic ability, the photocopier came into existence, you simply could not reproduce a document exactly until the middle of the last century.
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So how has mankind gotten along? Well, hand copying was the only way to produce documents for distribution until relatively recent times.
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Every document produced prior to printing and even after printing has been corrupted in its transmission. Corruption simply means that there is any difference whatsoever between the original and the copy that is made.
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So if you misspell one word, if you skip one period, one comma, that is a corruption.
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Obviously, it may not impact the meaning of the text. Sometimes corruption can. We all have probably heard about the adulterer's
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Bible. It was one of the early editions of the King James Version. We're in the typesetting process. The typesetter forgot the word not in the commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery.
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And many hundreds of copies of this were produced before someone got around to reading the
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Ten Commandments and went, whoa, wait a minute. And so that would be a corruption.
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It's not like anyone becomes confused. Oh, we don't know what that commandment is. But that is what corruption is.
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It's any variation or alteration of text, no matter how minor it might be. There are over 5 ,700 catalogued
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Greek manuscripts of the New Testament comprising ancient papyri containing only a few lines of text or complete manuscripts from the 15th century.
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When you hear that number, that would include even little small fragments. It might only have a couple of verses or even a few words on it, all the way up to complete copies of the
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New Testament from Matthew to Revelation and all sorts of mixtures in between. Especially common are collections of the
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Gospels together, Paul's epistles together, et cetera, et cetera. And so there are 5 ,700.
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I think right now it's 5 ,718. The number changes fairly regularly. As new manuscripts are found and as we also discover that some manuscripts being catalogued as a single manuscript are actually portions of other manuscripts or things like that.
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So the number changes fairly regularly. Including ancient translations such as Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, Boheric, et cetera, et cetera.
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There are more than 24 ,000 handwritten manuscripts up to the point in time of printing that are known for the
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New Testament. No ancient work comes close to the New Testament with reference to the number of witnesses and the number of early witnesses.
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No work of antiquity, whether it's Pliny or Suetonius or Tacitus or any of the other works produced around the same time as the
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New Testament. None have the level of documentation. Here is a graphic that sort of illustrates that for you.
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A fellow in Australia put this together. What you have up here are, like here is Homer.
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That yellow circle there is the number of manuscripts for Homer, 643. And then the distance from here to the circle is the number of years between the time when the work was originally written and the first manuscript we have of it.
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Alright? So for example, Homer is pretty good. It's only 500 years between when it was written and our first copies.
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Plato, poor Plato here, has seven manuscripts and there's 1 ,200 years between when it was written and the first copy.
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So one millennium, two centuries later, we have the first copy. That's a long, long, long time.
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You can see that for many of these works throughout this period of time. Sophocles, we're out here at 1 ,400 years.
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Tacitus is 1 ,000 years. Caesar is 1 ,000 years, et cetera, et cetera. And fairly small numbers.
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Now the big yellow blob is not the sun. That is the New Testament.
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And you can see in comparison to any other work of antiquity how close it is to the original time of writing that we have the first manuscripts of it and the large number of manuscripts that we have in comparison to others.
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So when you hear skeptics talking about the unreliability of the
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New Testament, our inability to know what the New Testament originally read, et cetera, et cetera, if they're going to be consistent, they need to be hyper -skeptics and basically believe that we can know nothing about antiquity at all.
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That we, even though these other works that are on the screen right now are the very basis of our knowledge of ancient history and things like that, if they're consistent, they'd have to say we don't know what happened in Rome.
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We don't know what happened in Greece. We can't trust any of these things. Because if they're consistent, the vast majority of them, of course, will not be consistent at all because they have an overriding bias against the
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New Testament itself. Now the more manuscripts, witnesses one has, the more variations one will have.
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I mean, think about it. If you only have one witness, how many textual variants are you going to have? None. Because you only have one manuscript.
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So there can't be any variants. There's nothing to compare it to. As soon as you have two, any differences between the two begin to introduce the idea of textual variation.
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If you have ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, the more manuscripts you have, the more variants you're going to have.
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But which would you rather have? Would you rather just have one manuscript of, say, 1
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John, or would you rather have 500 manuscripts of 1 John, coming from different times, different authors, at different places?
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Many people naturally go, well, I'd rather just have the one because I don't want any variants. But what are you really saying when you say that?
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If you only have one, what do you have to trust? You have to trust that that one scribe got it right.
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And we have no way of finding out. If he made an honest mistake and skipped an entire line, which is quite possible to do, we'd have no way of ever knowing that.
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And that one line would be gone. We'd never be able to recover it, historically speaking. So the serious student of this subject recognizes the more manuscripts, the merrier.
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And, of course, for the New Testament, we definitely have the more manuscripts. So the more witnesses you have, the confidence you have that you possess the original text increases.
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And that's where we are. Taking the most liberal estimate, we have about 400 ,000 variants in the manuscript edition of the
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New Testament. That's a lot. That's a big number. However, 99 % of these variations cannot be translated out of a brief.
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That is, they do not impact the meaning of the text. The movable new, for example. The movable new is very similar to in English.
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You're supposed to put an N between prepositions that are the end of the vowel and a word that begins with a vowel.
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So you're supposed to say an apple. You're not supposed to say a apple. But, of course, some people forget that.
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Greek had the same thing. And many scribes, as they were transmitting that text, didn't really get the idea of the movable new.
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And there are a lot of variations in the New Testament about movable news. It has no impact on the meaning. It cannot be translated out of the
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Greek. But that is part of the, again, any variation. Any variation in spelling counts as a variant.
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And so when you think that through, there we go.
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Okay. All right. There we go. Of the remaining variants, the vast majority are simple errors of sight or hearing, depending on how the manuscript was produced.
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Particularly common was homoiteleuton, homoiteleuton, which means similar endings.
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And what you need to understand is that for the first 900 years of the history of the text in the
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New Testament, it was written in what's called maguscule text. And what that means is you have capital letters, no space between the words, and almost no punctuation.
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So it's just a long string of capital letters is what you're copying on a page.
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And you can see what that would look like right here. Here, for example, is one of the variants that's found in 1
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John 3, 1. And in 1 John 3, 1, if you compare the King James with the modern translations, you will see that the modern translations have a phrase the
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King James doesn't. It says that we might be called the sons of God, and we are. The and we are is missing in the
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King James and the New King James. Why? Because it's been called homoiteleuton. You'll notice that you have what looks like M -E -N here and M -E -N here.
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A person's copying. He writes down the first M -E -N. He goes back to look at the manuscript he's copying from.
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His eyes see the second. He starts from there. The line continues to make sense. It doesn't change anything except you've now inadvertently skipped over a particular phrase.
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You didn't mean to delete it. It's not like, well, you know, this person didn't like adoption as sons of God, so he deleted it or something like that.
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No, it's a common error of sight. And since we have more than one manuscript of 1
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John, we can detect these things. If we only had one and this happened, we would never know. We'd have no way of knowing.
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And thankfully, there are no New Testament books that only have one manuscript. It is interesting. I can't tell you which of the
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New Testament books has the—guess which book of the New Testament has the fewest manuscripts in the transmission of the text?
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It's the book of Revelation. And the reason for that is because the book of Revelation fought for inclusion in the canon.
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And I think that's a good thing. I mean, the church wasn't sitting around going, hey, ten -headed monsters and beasts coming out of—can we have some more of these, please?
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You know, it wasn't—it had to fight for inclusion in the canon. And that's a good thing. And so we have the fewest manuscripts of that particular book.
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It's very interesting. Now, these kinds of scribal errors are common and expected in any widely transmitted document.
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As long as one has a robust manuscript tradition representing various geographical areas and containing early witnesses, these kinds of variations are rather easily detected, as they are in 1
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John 3 .1. But all of these considerations relate primarily to a freely transmitted text, not to a controlled, edited, or redacted text.
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This is the key issue in this comparison. A freely transmitted text is one whose transmission is not controlled by an external authority, such as a government.
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It is widely copied without constraint. A controlled text is one that is copied under the guidance of an external authority.
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A freely transmitted text will have more textual variance, but will have greater confidence as to originality.
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Why would it have more textual variance? Well, because it's being transmitted by a wide number of—it's being copied by a wide number of people, especially in regards to the
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New Testament. If you know your history, this is a good time for me to exhort you to possibly pick up at least one summary of Christian history and read through it, because a people who do not know their history are a people who are weakened thereby.
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The reality is that from the inception of the faith, actually starting around A .D.
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50 or so, all the way up until 313, Christianity was a religio elicita, an illegal religion under the
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Roman Empire. Now, that persecution against Christianity waxed and waned. There were periods where it was not overly intense.
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There were periods where it was extremely intense, from about 260 to 313 in particular. And then it might be more intense locally in certain areas, like around Leo and around 180 and things like that.
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But it was an illegal religion, and so the possession of the Christian scriptures was illegal.
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So the production of the Christian scriptures was likewise illegal. And so you might be a
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Christian, you're traveling, you go into—you find a Christian fellowship. Remember the fish symbol and stuff like that.
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And someone comes out, and they're reading a manuscript, and you've never heard this before. You say, what is that? Well, these are Peter's writings.
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Well, we don't have that in our church. Can I make a copy of it to take to our church? They're not going to sit there and go, well, are you a professional copyist?
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Could we see your papers, please? No, they're going to allow you to make that copy. Now, you may not be the best trained person to do it, but you're allowed to do it.
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And so you may make some mistakes. There might be some textual variance as a result of your less -than -stellar capabilities.
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But the Christians didn't care. They wanted the gospel to go everywhere. And that's why we have a freely transmitted text written by multiple authors at multiple times to multiple audiences and then distributed widely without any controlling authority whatsoever.
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There was no papacy. There weren't a bunch of black -hooded monks running around determining what books to copy and all the rest of that kind of stuff like you see in all the silly conspiracy theories on YouTube.
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So a controlled text will have more uniformity. It will have far fewer textual variance, which to a lot of folks is like, oh, that's great.
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The problem is it will have much less confidence as to originality because if you have a point in time in the early part of the transmission of the text where you have a group come along and make changes and say this is going to be the final edition and then you burn everything else, then your confidence has to be that these people got it exactly right because now you can't go past that point in time in history to go back to the original to find out if they got it right.
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You have to trust the people that made the redaction did it perfectly. And that's the major difference between a freely transmitted text and a controlled text.
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Now a freely transmitted text can promise to present the original readings in its manuscript tradition. We can have confidence that we have the original readings in the
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New Testament because of the way in which it was transmitted to us. Now the
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New Testament is sort of like having, it's been widely likened to having a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle and you have 10 ,100 pieces.
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Now which would you rather have? If you have a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle? Does anybody do puzzles anymore?
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You got any puzzle folks? Ah, I see, there you go. Because you can't really do that on a computer.
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That may be the one board game that still survives the computer revolution. I mean, Battleship was great.
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Now you can do it on a computer. Anyway, which would you rather have?
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If you're doing a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle, would you rather have 100 extra pieces you have to work through or would you rather have 9 ,900 pieces and have no way of actually getting to the final form?
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You've always got holes left in it. Working through those 100 extra can be tough, but it can be done because what it means is you have all the 10 ,000 original pieces there and that's what we have with the
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New Testament. A control text cannot promise the original text past the last redaction revision, especially if previous versions are destroyed.
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So you can only go back as far as that last major revision, as far as knowing what was actually in that text to begin with.
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Now, this is a graphic that I produced. You'll notice the manuscripts are moving around there on the thing.
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Since I actually did this, if you'd like to boo and awe and do things like that, it's okay. It took a lot of work.
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What this illustrates is the way in which New Testament writings came into existence. You know, for example,
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Paul writes letters to various churches and he does so from different places.
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He's writing from prison, maybe in Corinth, maybe in Philippi, because sometimes we don't know where he's writing it from.
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But he's writing in different places to different people, so the letters are going to different churches.
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Peter's writing and Luke's writing, and you have multiple authors. They're not all writing at the same time.
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The earliest New Testament books could be in the late 40s, mid to late 40s, to as late as 70.
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Some people would say John is in the 90s, so over the course of about 50 years.
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They're being sent to different locations. The point is there was no governing authority that was controlling all of these things.
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They're going from place to place to place. Then what happens over time is you start getting collections.
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The church at Colossae is told to read the epistle coming from the church at Laodicea, which is probably in the
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Book of Ephesians. It was a circular letter that went around the churches, and they'd want to make a copy of it before they send it on to the next church.
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So now you've got two letters. Then someone gets the brilliant idea, let's put all of Paul's letters together. That's called manuscript
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P46, and it contains all of Paul's letters. Or you then have
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P66 and P72 and P75, and some of these are gospel manuscripts.
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Some are 1 Peter, Jude, et cetera, et cetera. So you have multiple books being put together into a particular collection, as we have there now in the center.
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Then those get distributed around the Mediterranean world as well. So you have this widespread dispersion of the text going all over the place as people traveled, especially, thankfully, during the period of the
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Roman peace, the Pax Romana, when you had general travel capacity around these areas before Rome began to break down.
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So this is how the text of the New Testament was transmitted over time. So it's vitally important to realize the transmission of the text of the
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New Testament did not follow a single line of transmission. The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors, with books being sent to multiple locations.
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This means the text was never under the control of a single individual or group at no time in its history, at the time of authorship or at any point during the time of its transmission, or the
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New Testament documents under the control of an individual or a particular group. As a result, we can look forward to finding even earlier manuscripts and New Testament documents as the free transmission of the text has provided us the solid basis for asserting that we continue to possess the original readings of the authors themselves because of the way in which the
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New Testament has been transmitted to us over time. The transmission of the
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New Testament textual tradition is characterized by an extremely impressive degree of what's called tenacity. Once a reading occurs, it will persist with obstinacy.
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It just simply won't go away. Now, why is that important? Well, think about it. This is how
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Kurt Allen put it. It is precisely the overwhelming mass of New Testament textual tradition, assuming its wellness of teaching is the
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Greek phrase, of New Testament textual criticism that provides an assurance of certainty in establishing the original text.
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We can be certain that among the New Testament manuscripts, there is still a group of witnesses which preserves the original form of the text despite the pervasive authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the prestige of later texts.
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What's he saying? Since once a variant appears, it's going to persist in the manuscript tradition.
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That might sound bad. That means the mistakes continue on. That's true, but what does it also mean? It means the original readings continue on as well.
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And that's the foundation we have when you're looking at a textual variant. And there are a couple of really tough textual variants in the
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New Testament. You can have an assurance that one of those readings is the original reading. If you couldn't have that assurance, then it's all just an academic exercise.
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But the tenacity of the text assures us that the original readings are still in our possession. So, free transmission versus controlled transmission.
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Multifocality, multiple authors, multiple audiences. And the tenacity of the text. Very, very important in understanding how the
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New Testament was transmitted to us today. Now, I need to have our gentleman up front there escape out of that and move over to There's one of my fractals, by the way.
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I've done fractal art for years now. And we'll move over to the
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Quran. Quran 1. Another one.
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Yes, that's a Quran. Multi -layered, correct. There we go.
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All right. Now, let's compare what we just looked at with the New Testament to what we have in the text of the
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Quran. We are to apply the same standards here that we did in examining the New Testament.
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Was the transmission of the Quran a free transmission or a controlled transmission? Well, Muslims and non -Muslims both agree.
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Now, this is a quote. This is a quote from a Muslim source. Muslims and non -Muslims both agree that no change has ever occurred in the text of the
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Quran. The above prophecy of the eternal preservation and purity of the Quran came true not only for the text of the Quran, but also the most minute details, its punctuation marks as well.
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It is a miracle of the Quran that no change has occurred in a single word, a single letter of the alphabet, a single punctuation mark, or a single diacritical mark in the text of the
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Quran during the last 14 centuries. That's the kind of stuff that is being produced and read by Muslims.
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And most Muslims actually believe that that is the case. The reality is that the
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Muslim has significantly less basis to have confidence in the text of the Quran than the New Testament believer does.
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And that's despite the fact that the Quran is 600 years younger than the New Testament, and hence had to go through a much shorter period of transmission by means of handwriting.
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That statement from that text there we'll see is completely wrong. At this point, there is truly no question that scholarly sources,
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Islamic and non, both attest to the same story. What is that story? Well, here, for example, is an
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Islamic -produced one page of about a five -page chart that is found in the
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Al -Mushaf al -Sharif, which is a top copy manuscript published 2007. I have the cheapy version of that, which was the $250 version.
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The full -size version was like $5 ,000. We couldn't quite afford that. But this is a chart showing variations between the major Mushaf, or manuscripts, of the
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Quran. Quranic scholarship, historically, has known that there are variations, and not only in the punctuation marks and readings of the
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Quran, but in the actual wording of the Quran, from the very beginning. The earliest
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Tafsir literature, Tafsir is commentary on the Quran. The earliest Tafsir literature is filled with references to variations, especially those found in the manuscripts of Ibn Masud, as we'll see here in a moment.
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But here in 2007, a Turkish group of Islamic scholars producing material like this, further demonstration that the
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Muslims are aware of this as well, at least the Muslims who are in a position of studying scholarship, and not just repeating what is being told.
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Here's an example. Let me explain very quickly here what a palimpsest is first.
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A palimpsest is a manuscript. Many of the manuscripts were made of what's called vellum, or parchment, which is made from animal skin, extremely thinly sliced animal skin.
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It's amazing how thinly they could do this, how high quality parchment could be made in the ancient world.
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But since it is animal skin, and not like our paper, which is very brittle and fragile, you could wash off the ink and reuse it for something else.
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So a palimpsest manuscript is, we discovered that you would find these manuscripts, and if you look really carefully, it looks like there's some scratches on the surface.
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Well, lo and behold, when you examine it under ultraviolet light or infrared light, depending on what kind of inks were used and things like that, you can still read what had been scratched into the surface of the animal skins in the original.
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And so you've got an undertext and an overtext. And through the use of ultraviolet light, primarily you can read the undertext.
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And so we have discovered some palimpsest manuscripts of the Quran that may well give us a text that goes farther back.
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And so here's an example of that. You have the Fawq's palimpsest manuscript at Surah 2, 222.
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A surah is one of the 114 surahs of the Quran, so it's a chapter of the Quran, basically. And here's the upper text and the lower text.
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And as you look at it, you can see just simply by comparing where the words are, the grammatical terminations and things like that, that this is not just a textual variant.
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That is clear, purposeful editing that has taken place in the text. You're changing grammatical endings.
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You're moving the position of words in the sentence, et cetera, et cetera. And so clearly, in those early years, there was a redaction process going on that is represented in these palimpsest manuscripts.
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In one of the earliest manuscripts of the Quran we have, called BNF 328a, you can see right there in the picture, in the center, you can see very clearly that one word has been scratched out and another word has been written in over top of it.
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And what's interesting is that this is a very significant word that early
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Tafsir literature demonstrates that the later form, many Muslims didn't even know what it meant.
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But it was related, interestingly enough. There it is in full size, and it's right there.
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You say, why do you know where that is? I have two museum -quality editions of the
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Quran, one BNF 328a. I've got the one from London and the one from Paris.
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And these things sit. They're this wide open, about that big tall, and they were $1 ,400 apiece.
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And there are only a few of them in the United States. I have one of them. And so this is actually pictures I've taken from my own, and you can see very clearly the variant there.
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But it impacts the meaning of things. And so what's interesting is when you look elsewhere in this particular text, you discover right there that a page, see the stub?
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A page has been removed from this manuscript. Because remember, these pages are folded over and then sewn in.
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If you just completely remove the page and don't leave a stub, what's going to happen to the other page on the other side? It's going to fall out.
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So you have to leave enough of a stub that the other page will stay in. So a page has been removed.
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And then when you look at what that would have involved, we discover this page.
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Now, anything look interesting there? Notice how small and close the lines are up here.
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And as you get farther down, they get a little bit larger and a little bit larger and a little bit larger. What's happened is, editing has taken place in this manuscript very early on.
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In light of that variation to insert a verse into the
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Quran. And then the scribe had to look at the book and go, OK, if I'm going to insert the verse here that needs to fit in this space.
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So if I take this page out, I'm going to have to add that verse in. So I'm going to need to write smaller and have the last word on this new page fit the first word on this next page.
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And so you see that you start off smaller to get more on the page. And as you start going,
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OK, I think, OK, I'm going to make it. And you can just see the whole process of editing in one of the earliest
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Quranic manuscripts right here in front of us. It's fairly plain, but I can guarantee you that less than 0 .0001
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% of the Muslims in the world have ever seen this. And so they're just not aware of the reality of this aspect of the history of their text.
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Now, they could be, however, quite familiar with this. And that is what the
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Islamic sources themselves say. Narrated Zayd bin Thabit. Here we go using the progressive lenses once again.
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Abu Bakr al -Siddiq. Abu Bakr was the first caliph after Muhammad. Sent for me when the people of Yamama had been killed.
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That is a number of the prophet's companions who fought against Musalima. Abu Bakr then said to me,
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Umar has come to me and said, Casualties were heavy among the Qur 'an of the Qur 'an. That is those who knew the Qur 'an by heart.
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On the day of the battle of Yamama. And I'm afraid that more heavy casualties may take place amongst the
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Qur 'an on other battlefields. Whereby a large part of the Qur 'an may be lost.
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There's this great battle. A number of the Qur 'an, people who had memorized the Qur 'an, had died. And so someone comes to the caliph and says,
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You know, if we lose any more of the people who have memorized all the Qur 'an, We're not going to have any of the Qur 'an left.
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What does that mean? That means it was not in written form yet. If a large part of the
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Qur 'an could be lost in another battle, That means it's not written down. It's only in the memories of individuals.
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And that's what the concern is all about. So, therefore
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I suggest you, Abu Bakr, or the Qur 'an be collected. I said to Umar, how can you do something which Allah's apostle did not do?
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So there you have the first caliph saying, Muhammad never wrote down all the Qur 'an. Most Muslims today think that he did.
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That he had it written down before he died. That's a later story. The earliest stories say otherwise. Umar said, by Allah, this is a good project.
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Umar kept on urging me to accept his proposal to Allah, opened my chest for it, And I began to realize the good in the idea which
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Umar had realized. So I started looking for the Qur 'an and collecting it from what was written on palm stalks, thin white stones,
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And also from the men who knew it by heart. So I found the last verse of Surah Al -Tawbah, Surah 9 on repentance,
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With Abu Kazami Al -Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him. So here is the process for the original collation and collection of the
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Qur 'an. It happens after the last prophet. After the last inspired person. And it involves collecting thin white stones, and palm stalks,
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And things that, you know, individual verses have been written on. But primarily, the memories of individuals.
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In fact, there's one verse that's mentioned here that only one person remembered. Well, might there have been other verses that only one person amongst the
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Qur 'an that had died at Yamamah had known? It's a question that has to be asked.
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The verse is, Verily there has come unto you an apostle Muhammad from among yourselves, Agrees that he should receive any injury or difficulty until the end of Surah Tawbah, In other words,
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Surah 9, 128 through 129. That was the one that only one person knew. Then the complete manuscripts of the
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Qur 'an remained with Abu Bakr until he died, Then with Umar until the end of his life, And then with Hafsah, the daughter of Umar.
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So there's one manuscript. Now it exists, but it's not being copied. It's being, it's in the possession of Abu Bakr's family.
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Hudaytha bin al -Yaman came to Uthman. Hudaytha was afraid of their, the people of Sham and Iraq's differences in the recitation of the
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Qur 'an. So he said to Uthman. Now Uthman, now we're about 18 years later. Uthman is the third Caliph. He's after Umar.
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And so, O chief of the believers, save this nation, listen to this, Before they differ about the book, the
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Qur 'an, as Jews and Christians did before. They're concerned there's going to be disagreement as Jews and Christians had disagreed.
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And so that's an interesting admission. So Uthman sent a message to Hafsah saying, Send us the manuscripts of the
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Qur 'an so that we may compile the Qur 'anic materials in perfect copies. Return the manuscripts to you. Hafsah sent it to Uthman.
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So that one that was collected before is sent to Uthman. So they just copy it and send it out?
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No, because notice what else is said. Uthman then ordered Zayd bin Thabit, Abdullah bin
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Az -Zubair, Zayd bin Alas, and Abd al -Rahman bin Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies.
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Uthman said to the three Quraish men, In case you disagree with Zayd bin Thabit at any point in the Qur 'an, then write it in the dialect of Quraish.
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The Qur 'an was revealed in their language, in their tongue. Why are they doing an entire revision of this?
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Why not just copy the other one? But they are doing an entire revision of the Qur 'an at this particular point in time, about 20 years after the death of Muhammad.
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They did so, and when they had written many copies, Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsah. Uthman sent to every
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Muslim province one copy of what they had copied in order that all the other chronic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burned.
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Now if you're just copying what you had before, why are you burning the stuff that you're making the copies with? And why are you commanding everybody else to give up their manuscripts and have them burned and now accept your official version?
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It would be like the current administration sending out a new translation of the Bible and saying, use this, burn what you have before.
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Probably wouldn't work real well, would it? No, I think most of us would be hiding stuff all over the place. I do not want the
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U .S. government edition of the New Testament. Not interested.
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Zayd bin Thabit added, a verse from Surah Az -Zaab was missed by me when we copied the Qur 'an and I used to hear
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Allah's Apostle reciting it. So we searched for it and found it with Qasayni bin Thabit al -Ansari. That verse was, among the believers are men who have intruded their covenant with the law,
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Surah 33, 23. So even 20 years later, they're still finding verses that have never been written down before in the process of the collation of the
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Qur 'an. And again, this is from Sahih al -Bukhari. This is from the most reliable collection of hadith among Sunni Muslims.
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This is not something we've made up. This is from their sources that we're reading up to this point anyways.
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The result was in Nahir. Now we're leaving Islamic sources and now we're going to one of the earliest
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Christian sources writing in response to Islam. And this was the Christian al -Tindi. And it's fascinating that he has access to pretty much the same information as Bukhari here.
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Notice what he says. The result was in the Caliphate of Uthman. It was discovered that there was no consent to the true text.
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One man then read one version of the Qur 'an, his neighbor another, and differed. One man said to his neighbor, my text is better than yours.
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While his neighbor defended his own. So additions and losses came about in falsification of the text.
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Uthman was told that various versions were in use. The text was being tampered with and that strife with all the mischief of party spirit was being engendered.
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They said, we do not believe that matters can continue as they are. It is an affair of urgency. We are slaying one another.
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The sacred book is corrupted. A second apostasy is imminent. Ubaid, son of Ka 'b, was dead before it was made.
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While Ibn Masud refused to give up his copy of the Qur 'an, they drove him from his post in Kufa and appointed
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Abu Musa as governor's place. Now, let me just mention, Ibn Masud, Abdullah Ibn Masud, was one of three men that in the
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Hadith, Muhammad had said, if you want to know the Qur 'an, go ask Ibn Masud. And when Uthman created his version of the
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Qur 'an, he did not ask Ibn Masud's help. And so Ibn Masud wanted nothing to do with Uthman's version.
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And he said, I'm the one who knows the Qur 'an. And early Tafsir literature is filled with references to where Ibn Masud's Qur 'an differed from Uthman's in a number of different places.
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Not just in dialect, but in the actual wording of the text, the number of surahs that he had.
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Ubaid and Ka 'b had a different number of surahs that are in the current Qur 'an today. Again, the vast majority of Muslims are utterly unaware of this.
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This isn't something that is a general topic of discussion in the vast majority of Mosques in the
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Islamic world today. Though in the past, it was more generally known. When the revision had been completed, according to various manuscripts, four copies were made in large text.
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Now watch this. al -Kindi knows where they were sent. He has more information than even Bukhari records.
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One of which was sent to Mecca, a second remained in Medina, a third was sent to Syria, and is today in Malatya.
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He knows where it ended up. Next, Uthman gave directions that the leaves and sheets of the Qur 'an should be gathered in from the provinces.
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He ordered his agents to collect all they could lay their hands on and destroy them until it should be certain that not a sheet remained in possession of any private individual.
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This is a governmental redaction of the text, and a governmental suppression of other versions of the text.
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Now watch this. So is this a free text or a controlled text? This is a controlled text that we're talking about here.
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Heavy penalties were threatened against the disobedient. All the leaves they could secure were shredded and boiled in vinegar until they were sodden.
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Nothing remained, not even the smallest fragment that could be deciphered. That's a pretty major project.
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You know what happened between Ali, Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman, how they hate each other and quarrel and corrupt the text.
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Though each one tried to oppose his neighbor and to refute what he had said, pray, how are we to know which is the true text and how shall we distinguish it from the false one?
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This was one of the earliest Christian writings responding to Islam. And he is clearly, he's done his homework.
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He's done his homework. Al -Kindi is a fascinating, fascinating reader. It really is. Now which methodology gives us the most certainty as to the real question?
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Do we possess the original words of the authors we believe to have been inspired by God? The free transmission of the
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New Testament text precludes editing and revision. And the manuscript traditions show us tenacity. The original readings still exist in the manuscript tradition of the
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New Testament. But the controlled transmission of the Quran together with the Uthmanic revision, the possible later work of Abd al -Malik around 705 or so, and the evidence of the differing traditions of Ibn Masud, of Ubay ibn
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Ka 'b, and possibly others such as the Su 'ana manuscripts raises serious questions as to the originality of the
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Uthmanic tradition. Now if you talk to a Muslim today, they're going to whip out this Arabic Quran, and they're going to say, this is it.
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This is exactly what was given to Muhammad. And they believe that. What they don't realize that actually was put together
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July 10, 1924 in Cairo by the educational system because they wanted to have one printed text of the
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Quran that didn't have any variants. And so they printed one edition. It wasn't a bunch of scholars that got together and compared the best manuscripts, anything like that.
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They just produced one edition, and it has become the worldwide standard. So much so that many,
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I've listened to Muslim scholars who were trying to quote a text from the Quran out of the top of their head.
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I know this one who is a Hafiz. He's memorized the entirety of the Quran. And normally he just quotes it off.
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But we all know sometimes your tongue gets in front of your eye teeth, you can't see what you're saying, and you stumble over even verses that you've quoted over and over and over again.
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What, did your mom used to say that too? Yeah, your mom, you're my mom. Because that's where I got it from.
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Is that a new western thing? I'm not sure. Anyway, he was trying to quote a verse one day.
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Couldn't get it to come, and so this is what he said. Well, it's in Surah 33, right -hand side of the page at the top.
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Now, you and I go, huh? But because the printed edition of the
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Arabic Quran is so consistent amongst Muslims, that was a meaningful reference. They could look at that Surah, and there's only going to be one right -hand page at the top, and so it's going to be there.
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That's how consistent it is. And so they think, well, that's what came from Uthman. And for the vast majority of it, they're probably right.
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They're probably right. But the point is, they cannot know that that's what was originally written down, because of the control, the control transmission of the text and the destruction of those preceding materials.
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Islamic scholars and apologists must recognize that merely asserting the perfection of the Uthmanic tradition proves nothing.
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The realities of the varying traditions must be embraced and examined before the Quran can be proven to have been accurately transmitted.
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Does anybody here have with them their critical edition of the Greek New Testament? Any geeks today?
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Oh, yeah, I'm on your iPad. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know if there might be any Nesiallan text hiding out there or something like that.
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We have numerous editions of the New Testament. The two right now are the
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Nesiallan 28th edition and the United Bible Society's 5th edition just came out a couple weeks ago.
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And if you look at them, they'll be textual footnotes. They're critical editions.
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They give you the variants. They give you the manuscripts. No such thing like that exists for the
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Quran. If you look at the 1924 Arabic printing, there are no notes. There's no variant readings noted.
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There's no manuscripts listed. It's just the text. And we are much richer for having the notes.
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Now, the Muslim thinks that the notes destroys the validity of our text because they don't realize their text needs notes but doesn't have them.
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So they think that means the perfection of their text versus the imperfection of ours, not realizing that their text has come to them with a history they just simply don't know.
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And the study of the Quran on this level is in its infancy. It is in its infancy.
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And the impetus behind most of this study today is not coming from Islamic scholarship.
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It's coming from Western scholarship, actually. Okay? So, there is a comparison.
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Free transmission of the text versus the controlled transmission of the text.
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Once you have a controlled text, your confidence can only be as great as your confidence that the original people who controlled the text would not have tampered with it.
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One of the problems is, remember I showed you where the tampering in that one text had been? That particular word that the variance is about is very much a part of how authority in Islam was to be transmitted over time.
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And those of you who know history know that the fundamental reason for the split between the
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Sunnis and the Shiites was over succession and power in the Islamic community. It was the central issue and lo and behold we have tampering with the text about that very issue.
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So how can you have confidence? That's the question. Will more manuscripts of the
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Quran be found? Well, I'm a little concerned because when I first started studying this we all of a sudden hear about a palimpsest manuscript of the
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Quran coming up for bidding at Sotheby's in London or something like that. One of the big, important houses where things are sold.
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And then all of a sudden it would be bid on by an anonymous bidder and disappear. No one knows where it is to this day.
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There's a lot of money in Saudi Arabia. How many manuscripts are locked away in vaults someplace that scholarship has no access to that might shed tremendous light upon some of these important variants.
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But will we ever see them? I don't know. Have they already been destroyed? I don't know. I don't know.
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The study of the Quran is in its infancy at that point. But hopefully you can see that it is...
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We are wide open with our texts. Anybody can buy the Nesiallan text. Anybody can buy the
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UBS text. Our Muslim friends do do those things. But you cannot buy anything that corresponds to that for the
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Quran because it simply does not yet exist. So, free versus control.
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You hear the difference? And do you understand the difference? Do you have any questions about it? We've got about two minutes.
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Yes, sir. Is the Sunni and the Shiite used the same
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Quran? Pretty much so. I've had some people tell me that the Shiites have a secret
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Quran or something like that. I've never seen it. And I've had very little interaction with Shiites to be able to give you much meaningful discussion.
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The Shiites represent less than 10 % of the world's population. The reason we hear so much about them other than the massive violence and the fact that Iraq is really three nations, one
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Shiite, one Sunni, and one Kurdish, and hence was only held together by the brutality of its government.
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The reason we hear so much about the Shiites is even though they represent less than 10 % of the world's Muslim population, they sit on 50 % of the world's, of the oil controlled by Muslims.
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So that's why you hear so much about them. But that's, as far as I know, yes, they use the same text.
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But I've heard rumors of other things. Yes, sir.
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Did God carry along the Bible for the Sunni? Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the
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Holy Spirit is Peter's answer to that. And what that means is that unlike the
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Quran, which is allegedly a dictation, the Sunni perspective is the
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Quran is co -eternal with the law. It's uncreated, which raises all sorts of theological issues.
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And then it was sent down on Laylatul Qadr, the night of power, to Jabril, the angel who then dictated for 22 years to Muhammad.
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Our perspective is that God used men in their language and in their situation.
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That men spoke, it's very clear. For example, I can tell the difference between the vocabulary of Paul and John or Mark or anybody else.
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There are grammatical differences and things like that. It's clearly not dictation. But men spoke from God as they were carried along by the
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Holy Spirit. So the result is, as Paul puts it, all scripture is theatristas, not scripture writers.
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It's the result of the process that is God -breathed. And so all those who say, well,
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Paul may have been moved by the Spirit, but we can't really know if what he wrote ends up being what we need to know.
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The point of the promise is that what is written is theatristas.
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It is God -breathed. Now, if God created mankind, if God's big enough to use mankind in his language to communicate what he wants us to have, then that's what he's done.
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That's what he's done. Yes, ma 'am. You mentioned that the Torah, a number of them died.
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Yes. And so my question is, from what did they memorize the
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Torah? How did they get to memorize it? When Muhammad would sort of enter into this trans -like state, sometimes shaking, sweating, curling up in a ball, there were some interesting phenomenon that would accompany these periods of revelation.
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When he would come out of that, he would then recite what he had heard from Jabril, and his followers would memorize what he then recited to them.
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And so he was followed around by a group of people. And once they memorized it, then they passed it on to other people.
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Now, the problem is, memorization, that kind of memorization versus written form, is a little scary.
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And there's much more likelihood for variation within that than there is within a written document, which is much more stable in its format.
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But that's how they received it. Are we pretty much out of time? Okay. All right. We're out of time.
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Thank you very, very much for your attention. And hopefully that was useful to you. And these debates, both the debates
59:45
I mentioned in the beginning where this material was discussed, are on YouTube. So you can watch the one with Adnan Rashid from London, and the one with Yusuf Ismail from South Africa.