Avoiding Big Mistakes in Defending the Bible: Interview with Dr. Peter Gurry

important questions for Christians and skeptics and really anybody asked today can we trust the New Testament as being reliable now it turns out that there's a lot of people who've been making this case for a long time it also turns out that there's a lot of myths and mistakes that are passed on by apologists by pastors but also by those who are more skeptical and today we want to get the record straight I don't know anybody who's more qualified or interested to talk about this than my friend Peter Guri who's the author he's a professor at a Phoenix M&E the author a book that I highly recommend called myths and mistakes in New Testament textual criticism we're gonna unpack this book today I'm gonna ask him the toughest questions I can come up with and we're gonna try to make time for questions at the end but first if you're new to the channel make sure you hit the subscribe button because we have a number of interviews come up with people like Stephen Meyer aust guinness randy alcorn dealing with some most important apologetics issues today dr. peter Guri thanks so much for coming on hey it's great to be here with you Sean thanks for having me so tell me first your interest in textual critisism actually let's start with tell us just what textual critisism is in case people are watching they don't know then I'll know your story that motivates you to care about this sure well you know like like most people I didn't didn't didn't really know what text criticism was either so but real quickly text criticism is the attempt to recover the original text of a writing that's been lost where the originals been lost so in the case of the New Testament we don't have what's called the autographs the original original documents that say Paul wrote to Romans to the Romans but we have copies of it and those copies don't always agree with each other so we have to try to sort out the differences and decide which one is most likely the the earliest or original reading at every every place where they disagree and really my interest in it started in high school where it started because I did not want to take Spanish that really is the simple reason so I when I went to the high school I had a chance to take Spanish or Greek and I was youngest of five kids I always hated doing what everybody else did and everybody else pretty much took Spanish and my family so I decided hey I'll sign up to take Greek and four years later I had had four years of Koine Greek and had developed a real fascination with the fact that my English Bible that I had grown up with had something behind it you know I gotta just grown up and all I ever knew was the English Bible I just kind of assumed that's all there was and then I realized there was a Greek New Testament behind that and so went off to Bible College actually with the intention of doing Bible translation and it was while I was there and I was still studying Greek that I discovered textual criticism and realized that if behind my English Bible there is a Greek New Testament then behind my printed Greek New Testament there was a whole large number of hand copied manuscripts and so it's really just this continuing fascination with kind of not wanting to go further and further behind the veil of my English Bible and say well what's really back there what's really back there and so textual criticism was just a fascination for me it was kind of to me it felt like the closest I could get to the words of the original authors and so I wanted to want it to work with that and then I also had a fascination with the manuscripts too as manuscripts their formatting how they're copied I mean you know we take a printed printed book so for granted today just right yeah or electronic book maybe but to imagine a world where any book you want to read has to be copied by hand that was just fascinating to me so that's that short version that's great by the way for audience this isn't just for biblical writers this is for all ancient writers it's the same process to do our best to reconstruct what the originals wrote I love here in a high school you're studying interested in Greek what a fascinating story now that brings us to your book which I've said to many people to pastors to apologist just to lay leaders that want to know why the Bible is true your book really is a gift to the church and again it's called myths and mistakes in new testament textual criticism and we're gonna walk through some of these chapters and myths that are made today and how we can best make the case for the new testament but tell me in our viewers what motivated you to write this book kind of at this stage yeah so you know I finished my PhD in this discipline just a couple years ago and as a Christian I'd always been interested in the reliability of the Bible and because I was interested in text criticism I was naturally interested in that aspect of the question the reliability the Bible and I just kind of kept seeing that that popular apologists often had to rely on outdated information when they talked about this specific issue and so it just struck me that you know most of the people they were getting their information from weren't trained in textual criticism and I knew from personal experience just how technical the discipline can be so so even other even other New Testament scholars like yourself Sean they will often look at text criticism is like you know that's the field where the Nerds of the Nerds go right so like I was having a compliment to say well it depends on the person saying a star wars shirt on so being called or no I would say usually it's not a compliment okay but usually it's something Sean it'll be said something like you know I don't really like textual criticism but I'm glad that there are people that do it yeah right so it was once compared to the person that comes and cleans the gutters right in the old days right something you don't wanna do yourself but somebody's got to do it so I just have always had a fascination with it and realize it is something that needs to be done so I wanted to do it so during my PhD I just thought you know what apologists need is a good resource that that actually correct some of the misinformation on our own side right it's one thing to write another book against Bart Ehrman but I thought you know what that's already been done four or five times I think there's good there's there's plenty good responses to him and that's been done but what we need because of the responses to is we actually need to kind of tone back some things dial some things back and say you know what actually we've gotten some things wrong now right in responding to Bart Ehrman we've actually sometimes overstated the evidence for our case or Mis stated it that's great so so it was really designed to be a resource very similar to my doctoral dissertation on the fate of the Apostles realizing that we had oversold some of the deaths of the Apostles we can still make this argument but let's more careful how we do it you know when I read your book I gotta be honest with you when I picked it up I had a little bit of fear and trembling knowing that you would be taking evidence that demands a verdict and just being like oh man am I gonna get my you know mic mic cleaned here but I was pleasantly surprised tell me some of the thoughts reading evidence I just be curious to know yeah sure so so yes we mentioned mentioned evidence of demands verdict a few times and actually we were pleasantly surprised when we came to the kind of final edits of the book the second edition or I guess maybe not second edition but the edition that you and your dad did together had come out just a year or two before and so we realize we actually needed to check that that edition and interact with that one and we were pleasantly surprised at a number of points where the rhetoric had been dialed back so like on first century mark for example we were really really happy to see the caution on that right and that was I think a one that for apologists the first century mark which we all know now is not first century yeah that was just like it was too good to be true and so a lot of popular apologists I think I ran with it too early and ended up getting burned by it a bit and so things like that were actually the update that you and your dad did we were we were pleasantly surprised but you know I was telling you before we started that nobody nobody comes off completely clean in this book that's right so if you read the footnotes carefully you'll notice that both of the editors get criticized at various points for for misstatements as well so you know nobody I think you guys had a real desire to help the church but egg rity as well which is just desperately needed you know I see some questions coming in the side if you'll hold just for a little bit because I think a lot of these questions are going to get answered as we start working through this in the introduction you talk about how misinformation on the side of those who want to defend the Bible is sometimes more severe than critics and you give a few examples for example you talk about how apologists will use outdated information and sometimes in reference like F F bruises are the New Testament documents reliable so unpacked out a little bit for us if you can yeah so this I think is one of the temptations as apologists we we believe that Christianity is true and we don't just believe it's true but we believe it's good right and so we naturally want people to we want to convince people we want people to see the goodness and beauty and truth of Christianity and the temptation can be that we go out and find whatever argument is most compelling and then we use that and we don't take the time to do due diligence to see if the argument really stands up right okay so this is the danger of apologetics that we have to constantly be careful about and so the FF Bruce example is a classic one I think because what happens is apologists come to the number of manuscripts for the New Testament and they want to find the latest biggest number they can find right okay so if they find a number that says fifty eight hundred manuscripts of the New Testament that's the one they're gonna go with right but then when it comes to finding the number of manuscripts for a classical document they'll go back and read FF Bruce whose data is now 5060 years old and they'll continue to cite him without realizing that hey in 50 60 years we've discovered and catalogued and studied more classical manuscripts as well and so those numbers have gone up so what you end up getting is a comparison that's that's unbalanced and unfair and it's because we've we've actually been biased in favor of the New Testament we've you know if we pull the biggest number we can find for that without doing due diligence to say well what's what's the latest number for the classical authors that we're citing right now this issue wasn't as big of deal in the past because nobody could check the numbers now people can check the numbers so it undermines our attempt to show that the Bible is true that's right that's and part of the issue with that argument is what are we really trying to prove with that if we have ten times the number of manuscripts that doesn't itself mean the New Testament is reliable right you could have a thousand manuscripts that are a thousand bad manuscript and that doesn't necessarily help you at all right and even then do we need classical works to be unreliable in order for the New Testament to be reliable well no it's actually we can quite happily live in a world where they're both reliable you know so you just have to part of it it's thinking through the nature of the argument itself and what it can and can't work work for you know what I can and can't do for that's great so the first mistake you mention is outdated information a second one you mentioned is abusive statistics and now you're critiquing on both sides but Airmen would famously say there's 400,000 variants in a text you compare that to the 138 thousand words that are in the new testament yeah there could be a different word for every two or three other words yeah you unpack why this is unhelpful and an act yeah walk us through that a little bit yeah so it's you know Herman likes to say there are more variants and there are words in your New Testament which makes it sound like oh my goodness then we can't ever know what it says right which is just kind of a there's a logical problem there but it is he is right numerically that are we still there we are still there yep my screensaver came up for a second I like to say it's the one point where we're earning is more conservative than I am okay because he gives 400,000 variance and I actually tried to count and then extrapolate from the count and so there's probably like half a million of them and no and if I can cut in those are distinctly Greek that's correct so this is one of the problems and this is a problem with ermine it's a problem with everybody who gives these estimates nobody ever really tells us what they're counting you know so maybe one scholar thinks he's counting all me all variants in Greek manuscripts and another another scholar thinks he's estimating the number of variants in Greek Syriac Latin and all the other versions of the New Testament that we have right well that's those are two very different things right so I try to be real careful and say it's 500,000 estimated variance in Greek manuscripts alone so I'm not counting patristic citations I'm not counting you know variants that are in Latin or variants that are in Syriac which you know we have variance in those as well but then the crucial thing is to think through okay but what what kinds of variants are there mm-hmm so that's the bare number how many of them matter and I like to give the example of John chapter 18 where we know there are about 3,000 variants in our sixteen hundred plus Greek manuscripts for John 18 and there's only about 800 words in John 18 okay so yeah a lot more variance two words a lot more variance than words but if you look at those variants how many of them make it into my Greek Greek New Testament that I use as a scholar you know the answer is a couple hundred and then if you look in the great New Testament that's designed just for Bible Translators there's like a dozen okay and then if you look at the footnotes and say the ESV or even like the net Bible which the NetBIOS tons of that's right if you've ever used the net Bible you know it's tons of footnotes there's again there's none none of them are discussed if you look at a commentary like CK Barrett I think he discusses like eight you know and none of them are especially hard to resolve so it just puts in perspective that that we have a lot of variance but most of them are very easy to resolve they're very easy to figure out which what the original reading is or in some cases where they're not easy to resolved they don't really affect the meaning notice notably right okay so the simplest way to tell how many variants matter to say an English Bible reader is to pay attention to your footnotes and your English Bible like these things and this is a big part of the right people when they learn about this the the first reaction often is I've been lied to Wow right the Wolves been pulled over my eyes and I'm being deceived all along there's all these variants in my Bible and nobody's told me about them and the short answer is no you do know about them if you pay attention right just read the footnotes now I know most people don't read the footnotes in their Bible people read their Bibles but absolutely let's start there but um but the most important variants are already in your English Bible footnotes okay just look there and see and you can you can tell for yourself how significant do you think they are not now one of the things that your book kind of kicked me in your ear I thought oh man I got a state that more clearly is these are non spelling they're that's true seventy-five eighty percent of these are spelling but they're non spelling and yeah one of the examples I'll give you comment on this is the beginning of mark yea and Mark starts out and talked about this is the gospel of Jesus Christ and there's a statement the son of God and there's differences whether that statement is in mark 1:1 or not so your point in the book is this isn't a question about Orthodoxy what mark teaches about Jesus and his identity it's whether or not a scribe came along later and added that for clarity at the beginning sohcahtoa talked about that example and what the variants mean for core theological doctrines being at stake yeah that's good question so in mark 1:1 it reads the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ son of God all right however in in some important manuscripts we don't have the phrase son of God and so this has been a this has been one of those variants that is hard to resolve and does affect the meaning okay so it's been debated quite quite a lot by New Testament scholars and there are good arguments on both sides of this okay I happen to think that son of God is original for various reasons that we can get into if you want but let's go to your question about how much does it affect right and this is one that I think Herman will sometimes appeal to and say hey this this gives us a different Jesus in Mark's Gospel and I want to say well no no that's overstating it because you don't have to even get out of the first chapter of Mark where we have the voice from heaven at the baptism saying this is my beloved what son right so clearly Jesus is the Son of God right from the right from the first chapter and then of course climactically and mark Mark's Gospel climaxes with the soldier at the cross saying surely this man was the son of God right and then the demons say it at various points throughout and so son of God is actually a very important theme in Mark's Gospel and the question that the variant touches on is whether mark starts the first verse with that or not right but it's clear that by the first chapter we as readers know this about Jesus and Mark wants us to read the Gospel through that lens so I wouldn't I wouldn't ever say that this variance doesn't matter right but it does it certainly doesn't doesn't change whether or not the New Testament teaches that Jesus is the Son of God good it doesn't even it doesn't even change whether mark teaches whether Jesus is the Son of God that's good right so it's it's it affects the start of Mark's Gospel sure but it doesn't affect marks gospel and certainly doesn't affect a question of whether Jesus is actually the Sun God or not right yeah Peter I'm gonna throw a question at you that I didn't prep you with ahead of time but I want to know is that after I read your book I thought gosh I need to be so careful how I make a case for the New Testament and I find this tension saying I want to make the case as strong as I can because I believe it's true I've done this defensible but I also in an audience sometimes I'll say things like in in in evidence demands verdicts we have a statement where we say archaeology is one way to support a larger case for the New Testament some people are like that's it archaeology doesn't prove it completely and so some people are disappointed because I try to nuance things carefully yeah though for apologists that work with non scholars yes your advice for putting forward a strong hand without people finding these variants and in turn being disappointed feeling like we didn't present the truth to them yeah no that's a good question so I think there's a lot we could say about that one thing I would say though is as an apologist you need to keep in mind the long the long game okay and so it may sound what may work great with an audience tonight you have to ask yourself the question yeah okay may work tonight but is it actually gonna hurt us in the long run okay so it's not just a it's not just about you and your audience tonight it's about the Christian faith right and and certainly in principle as Christians we care about the truth right so we're not just interested in what works and what what gets people excited or whatever we're in certain what's actually true and then I'd say that maybe the third thing in terms of just strategy is oftentimes a more narrow argument is stronger and so so keep that in mind sometimes you can actually kind of like an arrow right the sharpest point of the arrow is the narrowest point and that's the part that actually works the best right so try to find the strongest argument you can make and focus on that and make it really strongly and don't don't worry if not every piece of evidence out there supports your case or not that's okay so take the strongest argument can make but also be fair and honest and I think especially I'm sure Sean you know this working with with high schoolers and young people so much young people rightly care a lot about authenticity I agree right and they know after a while they know if we're just blowing smoke yeah and so actually it went just a lot of credibility with our audiences if we can be up front and say look here's one here's a here's a problem for my view here's why it's not fatal right okay here's why it's not fatal to my view but I don't you know this this piece of evidence is is a bit of a challenge or or it just doesn't completely support my view right it's ambiguous or whatever I think that actually can go a long way with young people who who don't necessarily need us to have the evidence a hundred percent nailed down every single time and we're always right and there isn't even an ounce of doubt you know what I mean that's really helpful and wise I think this generation resonates when we're just honest with them right you can get a million opinions on the other side of somebody trying to sell them something right yeah but it's a strong enough let's state it is and I think it's partly shown as a matter of it's it's always fine to say I don't know you know like I got a questions about the New Testament about the Bible that I don't have good clean answers to doesn't mean I lose my faith over them I sometimes say to people of half of what the Bible says is true then my goodness your whole world is turned upside down you know if the resurrection is true then some of these other questions I have are trifles you know preach it brother amen hey let me a few people have commented on this in in the section is the mark fragment yes though talk about just in case some listeners aren't aware of this how it first came up some of the MIS statements about it and maybe lessons we can learn in the church from some of the mistakes tied to this mark fragment yeah that's a great question alright so we can trick we can't recount the whole story but if folks want to Google it because of the fascinating story and apparently one of the main people behind the whole problem may or may not be in jail right now as a result of this okay so people should know this is a real this is a big deal okay I'll start with the lessons though the main lesson we can learn from it is wait till something that's published to use it as evidence for Christianity okay so when a manuscript is is discovered all right we can talk about what discovery but when a manuscript is discovered it has to go through a vetting process okay and just because one scholar immediately thinks it should be dated to second century doesn't mean that that later more careful scrutiny won't show that it's actually a different century okay and then here's another important lesson earlier is not always better okay right okay yeah so if Mark like we know now that the mark fragment is second or third century does that mean Mark's Gospel is less reliable than it would have been if if that fragment had been first century the answer is no right we actually didn't learn anything real significant about the text of Mark's Gospel from this fragment okay so yeah it would have been at one level would've been fantastic and fascinating to have a first century New Testament fragment but on another level the New Testament didn't become any more or less reliable because of that fragment okay so and here's the way to think about this before we discovered the papyri over the last hundred plus years we're Christians on bad-bad logical grounds or historical grounds to trust the New Testament my answer is no they weren't okay so the fact that I think we just want to be careful at saying like well this one fragment if we can just get this one fragment now Christianity will be proved true well but what does that imply about previous generations that they didn't have good evidence for their Testament right so a question part of it's just a matter of getting things in their proper proportion right and not not overbearing the overbearing on things so and then I would say okay so the mark fragment here's what happened essentially all right this is what we now know okay we now know that Dirk Bob Inc who was the director of a very significant collection of ancient papyri at the University of Oxford was more than likely trying to steal papyri from that collection and sell them to people at the Museum of the Bible okay and one of the fragments that he took out of that collection that was not his to take was this fragment and at some point he told them that he thought it was from the first century okay and that information got passed on to Dan Wallace who is my teacher and professor mentor Dallas seminary and Dan shared it in a debate with Bart Ehrman and from there it exploded I remember that remember yeah it's hard to forget and then the problem was Dan had thought it was gonna be published very soon well it that turned out not to be the case right and in fact when it ended up when I ended up getting published it surprised all of us who had been following it that it was published in this Oxford collection that's part of it because all of thought for sure that the Museum in the Bible was gonna own it and then they didn't and so that's what started this trail of questions about well what happened here and that's how we we discovered that sure enough it had been it was an attempted theft okay so then the other part about it is again had been it had been proclaimed as a first century mark fragment and a lot of apologists got excited about this and thought that this they could use this as evidence for the reliability the Gospels right and prove that they were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses okay and and so that became part of a larger argument about the reliability of the Gospels and the resurrection of Jesus well it turned out Wender Cobbing who who was one of the publishers of the papyrus when he finally published it he decided to no it was more likely to be second or third century not from the first century and that's probably right there's all kinds of reasons to be skeptical about a first century fragment it could certainly happen but it would be really unlikely that we'd have a first century copy the New Testament is not just because of the age and how few copies there were in the first that's right that's right so let's say you know even if you date mark to say 80 40 rather than something like 80 65 you've only got 60 years for it to be copied before you're in the second century right and there just weren't that many copies and it just so happens that mark is the is though the one gospel of the four that we have the least copies of early on and there's reasons for that it's probably because mark is largely incorporated into matthew huh right if you're gonna if you got to go through the expense of copying a gospel in the first and second century do you want mark or do you want mark plus you know you want more sense you want mark with the special bonus features at the end of the video yeah you do right so if you're going to go to the of making a copy you're more likely to copy Matthew rather than mark so that that's that's probably one reason why we have more copies of the other ones then then mark for example so but yeah that's kind of a nutshell the first that really helps I took on the word of people that I trust then this is a first-century fragment and probably some people took it from me that they trust and I've learned you know what like you said I'm gonna wait and hold off until we know with confidence I think there's a lot of lessons that have been learned from this yeah talk to me about how we date manuscripts cuz one of things reading through this book I was amazed that some we can narrow down a few decades almost like a century century and a half is the smallest window so yeah how do we actually date manuscripts yeah that's a good question so it remains true that the most reliable way to date manuscripts is based on the style of handwriting okay and this may seem odd but it's only odd because most of us only ever encountered one period of English handwriting that we're familiar with but if I were to show you say a copy of the Declaration of Independence you would immediately realize oh that's old right you may not know how old but you would know that was not written recently and in a similar way that English handwriting has changed over time Greek handwriting changed over time as well and so once we get some pinpointed manuscripts were say the scribe has told us when he wrote or there's some other means of dating and accurately we can use those as hooks on a wall that we can then string other manuscripts on and kind of chart a development of handwriting okay now the reason why you can't be very precise with that is because one scribe may work for 50 years okay so so you've got at least a fifty year window usually before handwriting develops into some kind of new form okay that's usually the window the Paleo first that's the technical term for people who date date handwriting paleography is usually are very reticent to go any narrower than 50 years 50 or so 25 years 25 behind that's right and see the problem is what happens with something like P 52 one of our earliest manuscripts of the New Testament people see a date range and then they may be either pick the earliest part of that or may be the midpoint and it's easy to give P the wrong impression that the midpoint is the date it was actually copied okay which it's not right we don't know that that's just a midpoint of the full range so I often like to just give the whole century I just think that's that's the best way just give the whole century so let's talk about P 52 for a minute and yeah I'm gonna audience will recognize that by its number some will think what on earth you talk about yeah so talk about what that is its significance and why you date that if I'm correct from 80 100 to 200 is the nearest range you give yeah so P 52 is the name that's given to a very small manuscript of John's Gospel and the P stands for papyrus because that's the the material it's written on and then 52 means it's this it's the fifty second papyrus that was cataloged okay so that's all the 52 means it's kept in a library in Manchester England and it's still considered the earliest or one of the earliest copies we have the New Testaments so it's it's gets a lot of fanfare and for good reason but again because we're dating it primarily in fact in this case entirely on handwriting on the style of writing it's best to say look it's second century right rather than saying it's 80 125 because again if a scribe is action if the scribe works for 50 years then you have at least 50 years and then it's not a perfect science and it's not like the script changes every 50 years on the 50 year mark right so actually you can have a style of handwriting that lasts easily for a century or more because one scribe passes that style of handwriting on to to his understudy for example so this is a portion of the Gospel of John chapter 18 correct and it's believed to be the earliest physical manuscript we have of any New Testament writing especially the Gospels right now the typical comparison that's made is say hey look at look at Herodotus look at Josephus look at these other writers we have five hundred seven hundred a thousand years removed yeah how significant you think it is to have that portion that if it's one hundred two hundred could be a decade or could be a century and a decade right house if Kent is having that in your mind to reconstruct in the original oh okay okay for that particular question not very much at all honestly I mean you get a we get a handful of verses out of this manuscript because it's like a credit card size right so what's the significance of it is that it's it's early and the real significance that is that when it was published it was taken as proof that John's Gospel was from the first century not from the second century that's really the main thing it's been the main way it's been leveraged in New Testament scholarship and that and that is important because many scholars many some scholars wanted to date John's Gospel in the second century yeah and p-52 was pretty significant in changing a lot of people's minds now whether it should or not I I don't think John's Gospel should be dated the second century no matter what but p-52 did change some people's mind and if if p-52 can be dated anywhere in the second century well then it's not as strong an argument for that does that make sense yep so yeah maybe there's some loss there I guess for us but I I mean I think you can argue the earlier date for John's Gospel on better grounds I don't think we really need p-52 frankly okay what are the other manuscripts that would be considered competitors or close to p-52 oh man be in the earliest yeah well gosh you put me on the spot it'd be something at p1 something criticism blog it's it's on there but here's an important fact okay and again I say earlier is not always better I mean early is great and any manuscript that's early is great because it tells us something right there's all kinds of things that we learn from manuscripts like did described abbreviate sacred names and which which names did he abbreviate in what's the style of handwriting and are there new variants in this manuscript and things like that but you know give me a give me a good 12th century manuscript of the New Testament and guess what I have a good manuscript does New Testament I mean the other day I was working in the Church Fathers I forget well i think it was clement of alexandria who's like us you know second century church father and one of his writings we have like two or three medieval manuscripts for his text hmm you know and and patristic scholars don't complain about that you know that's what they got so they work with what they've got in there and they're happy to work with that you know I'm glad the Bible is not based on such thin evidence but you know you can have a twelfth century manuscript that's really really good you know and I guess that's the point is to say it's it's not necessarily about early and more it's about good it's about quality over quantity so how do you determine good then yeah okay not on your mind earlier and more how would we know that right so and remember it's not that early is bad it's just that it's not necessarily better okay often times it is but not necessarily I would say that the the best way is by doing text criticism okay so what does that mean well it means where manuscripts disagree with each other we ask ourselves questions like okay which manuscript has the reading that's more likely to be the creation of a scribe okay and and scribes are not likely to make the text more unclear for example they're more likely to smooth out the text so if there's a little bit of an ambiguity in the text they're more likely to remove ambiguity than to add it okay if they add ambiguity it's usually by accident it's usually a slip of the pen okay so so we do we look at things like that like well what are scribes most likely to do and there's a whole set of criteria that we use to try to determine that things like what a standard Greek grammar and then how does Greek grammar change later such that scribes might be want to might want to update the grammar to to the way they wrote and spoke later on okay are there parallel passages we know from the Gospels for example that scribes were tempted at times to make Matthew sound more like mark okay right not necessarily even intentionally it might have just been they they had just copied Matthew's Gospel now they're copying mark or the other way around and so the one is familiar in their mind and so they they changed the one to fit the other one for example right the most common mistakes of course are simply things like changing one word for another changing the tense of a verb changing simple conjunctions in Greek that overlap and meaning or leaving words out by accident because the words end with the same ending you know and that's a real easy mistake for scribe stone this is the nitty-gritty work you're talking about that people don't want to do but you can look across these scribes and make assessments of what's more likely original and what's what's right up so one of the criticism that Airmen and others have raised is even if our first copy say p-52 small portion of John you get into the into the second century I think there's six manuscripts or so and as you go over the centuries we get more and more manuscripts but they're still removed complete manuscripts by at least a couple centuries plus right how do we know it wasn't corrupted in that window before we had these manuscripts right so that's that's a good question and I think one way to address that question is to turn it back on the person who's asking it okay and say well how do you know it was okay so if Orman says we can't know what the original text in the New Testament is then I would just say to him well then you don't know it's been corrupted I mean you know there's Scrabble mistakes in the manuscripts we have but that doesn't mean that my printed Edition that's based on scholarly work isn't exactly word for word the original because you're saying you don't know what that is right I know there's a one way to answer that is to say your skepticism doesn't have to be mine and just not just just not even go there with them frankly right I think that's one way and then the other thing I would say is well because when we compare the manuscripts to each other we just so often don't see significant changes so things like you know the big ones like the ending of Mark's Gospel we have the ending of Mark's Gospel and a woman caught in adultery and we have a variant at the end of Romans the conclusion of Romans which is which is interesting and that's about it as far as big textual changes right and so you have to ask yourself the question if these things were wholesale corrupted we'd probably have some some evidence for it some some kind of you know sign that this had happened so for example I like to give the example of codex BAE's I which is a fifth-century copy of the Gospels and acts and it has a little bit of one of the Johannine letters in it and it's a funky manuscript like it's got a lot of funky readings in it and to me it's kind of the exception that proves the rule okay right like we know it's weird how do we know it's weird because it looks so different from everything else right so if everything else looks similar or different from codex BAE's eye I can either assume well they're all corrupt or I can assume that no just one of them is is messed up okay okay so we're manuscripts agree I just don't think there's any reason to doubt that they preserve the original text right why would I doubt them I think the way you put it in the book was it's possible but it's not reasonable to clue that yeah I think the thing I think I think you'd say Sean is think think for example the Gospels okay eventually the Gospels came to be copied together almost always so at a certain point from say third century on the Gospels always come as the four Gospels but before that they're always there they must have been copied separately at first so what you have at some point is actually a dual dual trajectory where you have Mark's Gospel being copied as Mark's Gospel by itself and then eventually it's incorporated into the other four and copied with those and how if if Mark's Gospel begins to be copied around the Roman Empire how are you gonna change all of those right I mean and same it's a great question same with Paul's letter letters right okay so he sends the letter to the Romans okay and presumably at some point they make a copy to send it to another Church which is exactly what Paul tells us in Colossians he wants his churches to do he wants them to read each other's letters and so they they make a copy and send it to somewhere else they make a copy and send it to somewhere else within a couple of generations how are you gonna manage to change all of those hmm it's gonna be impossible you can't you can't do that right so yes there is there are places where corruptions enter but the important thing is that we have evidence for when they do and if we have evidence for when they do then we also have the material to to recognize them right and that's the key there's some great comments and questions coming on let me go to one first off if you're enjoy give us a thumbs up it just helps with the YouTube metrics for more people to see this potentially watch it so give it a thumbs up if you're enjoying this conversation Pine Creek has a question that I love to throw your way Peter he says does do you agree that airs increase in the manuscripts the further back in time we go that's a good question yes and no I think it's clear when we look at our earliest manuscripts let's say up through the fourth century that they tend to preserve the most interesting variants okay and then as time goes on you don't get as many new interesting variants okay does that make sense so I think that's one way to say it okay what is it's definitely not the case that you have more variants early on for the simple reason that you have fewer manuscripts and so ermine will sometimes say is and this is just so just statistically wrong okay well not if you say more variants this would not be per manuscript it would be as a whole compactly exactly yes so the more manuscripts you have the more total variance you have even though you may have fewer unique variants per manuscript that make sense yeah so yeah it's tricky right because you got to think through how these things work statistically yeah that's right how does this question how do we why is it so difficult to count manuscripts well okay it's it's it's if you're like why is it that hard to count it and it's a great question the answer is because they're spread out all over the place right and here's the thing as New Testament scholars we come and we just think I want to know exactly how many there are why why is it a big deal well if you go to a place like let's say the British Library in London which is a wonderful place I recommend you going and you ask them for a New Testament manuscript they won't they won't know it as a New Testament manuscript I mean they do they but but if you were to say can I see manuscript zero one you as a New Testament scholar would know that's codex sinaiticus they might not they know it as codex Sinaiticus right and same thing with p52 if you were to go to Manchester and ask for p-52 they'd probably know because it's so famous but they would notice John Rylands P whatever it is the shelf number that it has in the library so right a library has may have thousands and thousands of manuscripts and only a couple of them are New Testament so what that means is our New Testaments are spread out all over the world mostly in European libraries and institutions but all over the world and the places that keep them that housed them they own them their collections are much bigger than just their handful or so in some cases they're single New Testament manuscript and so you know things the realities things happen they get misplaced they get reshelve they get a new number and so what happens is there's an institute in Germany that tries to keep track of all these but it's a big it's a lot of work to keep tabs on all them because they do move around sometimes they get sold you know so they end up in a different country a different library they get a new shelf number and you've got to track that down sometimes they do get destroyed right in wars and things like that so yeah it's a lot to keep track but i can't imagine when we were updating that chapter in evidence it took an incredible amount of work to do our best and we still knew that we were given the best estimates we could and that's one of the advice that you give to apologize is don't say there's 46 identities but they're roughly 50 or better isin it says that's right and you were you know you know from reading the book there's a chapter on exactly this question right yeah how many do we have and Jacob Peterson the chapter kind of gets to the end and as an editor Sean I was hoping he would give me an exact number right I was like I was like bro I want the exact number so I can use this right and he didn't give it to me he was based like look it's probably a fool's errand to try to give an exact number but he helpfully goes through and explains why it is so hard and so I just finally I I'm at that point the same thing I just tell people about 5300 manuscript manuscripts are over 5,000 because it is hard to keep track down to the to the tenth you know degree how our manuscript discoveries made today yeah that's a great question all right the simplest way they're discovered is in big libraries where they have so much in their library that they either lose track of or don't know what they have so for example Dan Wallace and his organization the Center for the Study of New Testament manuscripts it's not unusual for them to go and digitize a manuscript to take up take photographs of it and to find it when they get to the back of it I've had this experience myself you get to the back of the manuscript and you find that the binding of the manuscript has been made from another manuscript that's incredible you spend some time trying to read it and you figure out sure enough hey this is a New Testament manuscript and it's never been cataloged by the folks in Germany right and it was when is most exciting is when you get to tell the librarians and they don't know that's when it's really fun and you get to say hey did you know you have this and they go oh no we had we never flipped through the whole thing right because most the manuscripts are not archaeological digs they're not something that finds a cave above the Dead Sea that's really have these that's right just discovering new fashions right for example a good example shown is is the mark fragment it came out of Oxford it had been sitting in an Oxford library for over a century and just hadn't been catalogued if you go there if you go to the Sackler library where they have these they have boxes and boxes full of papyrus that was pulled out of a trash dump in Egypt and they've tried to go through what they think are the biggest pieces and the most legible pieces and the most interesting ones but they just have boxes and boxes full of stuff that they haven't been able to catalogue yet so do you think it's unreasonable to conclude that the church altered the manuscripts to fit their theology yeah I think in some cases it's clear that they did in individual cases yes but as a whole no I don't think so at all so you can find certain variants where you can say I think you know you can where it makes a lot of sense to say hey this variant probably arose because they were trying to solve some theological problem okay I'm trying to think of an example often like a first John 5:7 would that be an exertion 5:7 okay now when I'm actually I don't think that was created to solve a problem that was probably more an interpretation of the text okay that eventually made its way into the text okay but something I'll give you an example in in Acts there is a place where Paul speaks about the and speaks about the church being gods and God redeeming it with his own blood and that's theological II a bit awkward right because God as God does not have blood right in the Incarnation when God takes on flesh of the person of Jesus Christ now you can talk about blood okay and God in the same sentence but but he seems to be speaking about God the Father there and so there's a couple variants there that do seem designed to kind of clear clear up the confusion there okay and that's a good example of where I would say scribes did at times think well that can't be what the text means it has to mean this and so they changed it and part of this frankly is because they lived in a world where everything was copied by hand okay so it wasn't hard for a scribe to say say to the guy in front of him who copied the main strip he's working with you idiot you know yes I'm saying I mean all of us we have our printed Bibles and we would never think about changing the words and that's partly a factor of print you know but when you live in a world where everything is copied by hand it's not at all hard to think the world of the guy before me just made a mistake so I'm not correcting Paul I'm correcting the scribe that came before me right so it's easy to think of these changes nefariously but I think in most case in the vast vast majority of the cases these are these are perfectly innocent intelligible changes that that scribes are making to the text one of the chapters that was really help from the book is it responded to the claim that we cannot trust the scribes from the first couple centuries because they're not professional scribes yes and the author of this chapter says there's a difference between a professional scribe and a competent scribe correct and made a distinction that even like how beautiful some of the paleography is doesn't mean it's actually more accurate a threat so unpack why we might have good nation as a whole if you think we do to trust some of the first scribes in arguably 1st 2nd 3rd century yeah that's good so so again it gets back to this question if we of examining the manuscripts and evaluating the quality of them okay so once you've once you've worked with a lot of manuscripts you can start to detect the kind of common mistakes that scribes make and so you look at an early manuscript like P 46 which is our earliest copy of Paul's letters and one of things we can see is that overall P 46 the scribe is copying a very good text of Paul's letters okay however this particular scribe is a bit prone to leaving words out accidentally okay which is the kind of mistake that all scribes make she just happens to describe a P 46 is a bit more prone to it than the average scribe let's say that makes sense uh-huh so in cases where P 46 doesn't seem to be accidentally leaving words out P 46 is often preserving a very good early text right so that's why I think we have to be careful and thinking through untrained or unprofessional doesn't necessarily mean bad I always use the example of Michael Jordan and LeBron James okay now you're talking my life I know and now we're gonna get in some trouble here okay with your audience because like I've heard Bart Ehrman kind of make this point like our later scribes are so good and therefore our early scribes are bad that's the impression he gives and I always say well look is Michael Jordan better than LeBron James of course right of course Michael Jordan is better than LeBron James that doesn't mean LeBron James is bad see so do we have some bad early scribes yes we do p72 I think it's not a great manuscript okay codex Bayes I already mentioned a fifth-century not a great manuscript I wouldn't want to translate an English Bible from codex Bayes I write but just because later scribes are in fact better than early scribes doesn't mean that early scribes are bad great so one of the claims that I've made it's been a number of years is its following popular apologists who have said even if we had no New Testament manuscripts they could reconstruct all of the New Testament except for 11 verses on their word I've repeated that line yeah I know there's a chapter in this book yes author traces that down and shows you how that myth has gone through the century after I know what happened and maybe what we can learn from this so you know the first thing to say is a reading book like this you have to remember that God is gracious right he's kind to all of us who've us has not repeated son who of us has not talked about the high priest going into the Holy of Holies and having a rope tied around his ankle right only to learn later that's not true and yet the Lord is gracious and uses even our misinformation to help people at times yeah so that's a common trope and frankly it comes from bruce metzger actually it comes from bruce metzger and barter and it's still in their fourth edition so even even bruce metzger was guilty of peddling this this mistake so you're in good company on this but yeah if you track that down that originates in some 18th century person who wanted to see if this was true and it's basically it's gotten muddled since then and it and it comes out as we could reconstruct the whole New Testament even without manuscripts there's a couple problems with this one is there's a logical problem right you can't use the church fathers and identify a citation in their Testament if you don't already know what the New Testament says you see so you know unless they say Peter says in first Peter 3/5 which they never do because there was no there were no verses yeah how do you know it's first Peter 3/5 right so there's a logical problem here to begin with but then the bigger problem is actually when you when you when you we do track down the verses that they cite it doesn't cover the whole New Testament it just doesn't however I'll say this the one redeeming feature of that argument is this the patristic writers do cite the New Testament a lot thank you lot right and the patristic writers can be a really good resource for studying the history of the text and how it was transmitted over time precisely because we can often put the Church Fathers in a particular time in place does that make sense so we can open that's often really helpful in doing text criticism one of the things that surprised me a lot of things surprised me was I was reading this book is going back to 1993 the number of manuscripts new manuscripts that are discovered and how significant they actually are compared to the some some of the great findings of the past like say the Dead Sea Scrolls did you unpack what some of those over the past couple of decades what their significance has been or has not been yeah yeah that's that's a good question so in the last man there's nothing quite comparable in New Testament terms to the Dead Sea Scrolls okay there's no I mean the Dead Sea Scrolls were just it was just such a massive find right there's just so many of them so there's nothing really comparable to that the closest thing we might have on the New Testament side is the discovery of codex sign Atticus in the 19th century okay and the publication of it that was really significant and it had a significant influence on the discipline and then maybe since then the discovery of things like the Chester Beatty papyri which is P 46 the earliest copy of Paul's letters one of the earliest copies of Romans and then our sorry of Revelation and then P 45 a very early copy of the Gospels and acts so all these are kind of second third century in that range and they're they're significant precisely because they're so big okay whereas something like P 52 is really just a tiny thing big you need size in the manuscript in the amount that it contains the amount it contains that's right so so P 46 is is almost all the Paul's letters except for the past whirls and then P 45 is you know it's fragmentary around the edges but it's like a lot of the Gospels and acts you know so that's that's significant because that gives us a good snapshot of what the text looks like in a second and third century and takes us back at least a hundred years before things like codex sinaiticus and vaticanus which had been our you know had been our best witnesses to the text we have just a little bit of time here for maybe a handful questions some of you have been asking them throughout the conversation I've been doing my best to address some of these if you have any questions I missed or new ones for dr. Guri throw them in there and I will do my best to ask them but let me ask you this I realize you're working in academia and I work in academia and I love to popularize stuff for people sure if you were gonna make a popular argument for the reliability of say the New Testament or the Gospels how would you translate in a way that number one people could kind of remember and understand but that's also accurate and faithful to what textual critics do and what we really know about the rely than you test in it you don't have to lay it all out but what's Marin one or two points you would include and how you'd approach that well I think so you in mind I'm mainly doing with the text so it's a bigger question is how do you prove something like the resurrection itself okay but if it came to the text of the New Testament I would I like to go to example that I worked on in my dissertation of a group of manuscripts that we know are that are from the 15th century some of them okay and yet because of some information in the manuscripts and some other details we know their text goes all the way back to the early 7th century or 8th century excuse me I know seventh century and it the reason we know that is because they're so remarkably close hmm and that's eight those are that's 800 years apart over 800 years apart right and so I just like to say people are often people just assume that the more you copy something the worse it gets it's like the telephone game right and that just couldn't be more wrong in my opinion because scribes didn't just always mess things up they also fixed things that they messed up right and also they could be incredibly competent in copying things things well across centuries and so the main thing that I try to do for people is is help debunk this assumption that a lot of modern people have that if if we have a lot of time between things then certainly the message must have been garbled in between and that's just not the case when it comes to this we have clear evidence in the case of this group of manuscripts we know what the texts look like in the seventh century we know what it looked like in the fifteenth and they're remarkably the same right and so if that can happen there there's no reason to think that can't happen between the first century in the eighth century from the eighth century to the sixteenth century and then from the sixteenth century to the 21st right that's a modern example but you would work back from that that's right people are sad you cited something really important for apologists namely that what you're doing with textual criticism isn't arguing that this is true that's right simply showing we have this document copied faithfully close to the original is that correct that's correct yep absolutely yeah so there's another step right no there's another another we have to do in the process of helping people appreciate the new testaments beyond just textual criticism but if we don't know it the new test intruders claimed then there's no point arguing about whether what they claimed is true or not right so textual critic prior work of saying well do we know what they actually claim or not and the answer is in almost every case yeah absolutely I think a question popped up that that you addressed but well - one says how does dr. Wallace respond to your book and by the way if you know it's in small print it says foreword by Daniel Wallace mistake said because it helped me to be more accurate so yeah yeah no that's right and Dan is Danny like as I said he's my mentor and professor at Dallas so he was very very gracious in this and I think this is just helpful for all of a sean i we had one scholar that we criticized in the book who's a very senior New Testament scholar I respect his work enormous ly in him as a person and we emailed about ahead of time to kind of warn him and get his feedback and brother I just can't tell you the the gracious response that he gave to us and I replied to him and I said when I'm at your stage in life I absolutely want to be that gracious Wow and I think that's the key for all of us is look we all are going to make mistakes right so I really hope people do not read this book or think of it in terms of oh here's these young guys thinking they've never made a mistake in their life I hope instead that it's received as saying when we make mistakes and we as evangelicals as apologist let's own them must have the integrity as Christians which is what we should have to say you know what I was wrong and I want to do better I mean that's that's what we're all about right well that comes through in the book I think it's a model not only of how to make a better case for the New Testament but to how to make correction yourself and to others and own when we've made mistakes and I own reading this book yeah and I could see you guys own reading and you know yeah I had asked myself do I love truth that's ultimately what this is about and if I'm peddling things that aren't true that undermines the nature of our faith that's and that's why the reasons why Sean we won right this book we kind of we kind of styled a self-corrective because we said look either we can wait for the Bart Ehrman's of the world to call us out on this or we can do it ourselves all right we can do it ourselves but somebody's and the fascinating things we've heard from some apologist who said this they've been like I've been in a debate with an atheist and they called me out on my bad stats Wow and it really did discredit me and my credibility so I think we actually we again we helped ourselves in the long run it is painful but the Bible says faithful are the wounds of a friend and that's kind of the aim is okay let's how can we do better as a church right let me kind of wrap it up this way and there's a few other questions I think we got to two most of them here but I think in the minds of some people the further we move away from the events of Jesus the less confidence we have that we can reconstruct the words as a whole I think you're saying it's actually the opposite because of the techniques of textual criticism that's right is that fair that's right think think in terms of Martin Luther okay in the sixteenth century launching the Reformation and he is using a good printed edition of the Greek New Testament and mine is better like I just have no no hesitation saying my print agreed intestine is better than the one that Luther used so if Luther's New Testament which is not as good as mine was good enough for the Reformation how much how much better ground am I on now right how much more should I be confident to proclaim the good news of the gospel and the message of the New Testament today when we do have I think better manuscripts we have better scholarship a lot it's not perfect we still have work to do in text criticism have no problem admitting that but I just think overall I have no problem saying I have a better greet New Testament than Martin Luther did and my question is do I proclaim the gospel half as clearly as he did and if I if I don't that's rebuke to me not to textual criticism you know I apologize but I have one more for you yeah I realize you're not a prophet and like me you work at a non-profit if you made predictions and I realize this is dangerous yeah two five 10 years yeah how do you see textual criticism changing and adapting and some of the new challenges coming up well I think the most important thing is a discipline is that we're gonna continue to leverage the power of computers and some people may be listening I've heard of big data in the corporate world and I think text critics are gonna hopefully get better and better at using big data in in textual criticisms and the key with data always is it's great to have it but it's better to be able to use it wisely and so I think the computer is gonna be one of the key ways we will continue to discover new manuscripts and and hopefully that will help us as well and refine our methods and and revisit textual problems that have been real real conundrum for us and hopefully resolve those and get better Bibles than we've had before I think part of the exciting thing to me is that you have douve into this with a commitment to the truth which I love not diving into it as an apologist but going saying what's the truth that's here yes and I think you'd agree with me that even if we got rid of all of our text right now and New Testament textual critisism stop today as a textual critic you say we have confidence on a high degree of the New Testament is that correct Shawn I would be out of a job so I cannot answer that but yes I mean this is why I say if you want to pick up a great New Testament from 50 years ago one of my favorite great New Testaments is published in 1881 I'd have no problem basing my faith on that and same with you know same with the one that Luther used I'd have no problem basing my faith on that again can we do better than what Luther used yes we can and so we should but what Luther used was more than enough for what he needed and what we have is more than enough for what we need that's great I think that's a good night to wrap up on I really want to encourage our viewers to get a copy of your book myths and mistakes in New Testament textual criticism I hold up there for a second just so you don't miss it apologist you've heard from pastors heard from skeptics and critics thanking them just because you have a commitment to accuracy that's really commendable so I was thrilled that both me and Clay Jones although you had some Corrections in there as a whole sauce trying to do good work and that's what we're committed to at Biola so those of you who are watching we are committed at Biola we'd love to help train you this is brought to you by biola apologetics we have a certificate program there's a discount code in the bottom or if you've ever thought about getting master's degree come think about studying with me at Biola and we need to get you to come teach a class on this at some point in the future like let's talk preferably in the summer in like July Sean when it's about 120 degrees here that would be the great great time for me to come out to Biola I will see what I can do for you I've read again pick up Peter's book also you're on Twitter follow on Twitter you do some regular updates which is helpful to me and your blog what's the address for your blog's yeah contrast the blog I contribute to is called evangelical textual critisism and these where the URLs a bit long because it's on blogger so the easiest thing is just to google it and it'll come right up for you hey one more time evangelical textual critisism you got um your name it'll come up I follow your blog and it helps me stay in touch with some of the scholarly world great well go hey again thank you brother for your work thanks for coming up and this has really been a treat and for those of you that I see people from all over the world trust this has been enjoyable and helpful to you when it airs if you want to share it with somebody else that would help what we're doing here at Biola apologetics as well so thanks so much god bless you guys have have a wonderful night thanks a lot Sean you bet

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 66,415

Rating: 4.9259524 out of 5

Keywords: New testament, reliable, defend, critic, skeptic, variant, manuscripts, evidence, case, church history, Paul, Jesus, proof

Id: EPXY2PF7eB0

Length: 66min 3sec (3963 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020