Can We Know the Exact Words of Scripture - Peter Williams

you thank you for coming this afternoon we're gonna be looking at the topic that you can read one of the things about this whole subject of knowing the exact wording of Scripture and a doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is this is an area where Christian Christians recently have been using some of their very worst theological vocabulary let me explain often we talk about the original text where you what go and we believe in the original text the only problem is that our word text is ambiguous it's polyvalent it's it's got more than one meaning text we might use just for words wording we might also use it for a physical object we might say I have an a text in my hand and it weighs 25 grams all right you understand the difference so we use text for manuscript physical copy and for the words on the manuscript so when we say we're interested in the original text what are we actually interested in I would say we're not interested in the original physical object I mean we can be a bit interested in there but that's not our main interest when God spoke and said in the beginning was the word that sequence of words is what he spoke and it's given by him before it gets written onto the manuscript and if you copy it from a manuscript to another manuscript it doesn't become less from God and if you copy the manuscript from there into your mind your neurons and synapses and wherever we keep things in our mind it doesn't become less from God if you transfer it to sound waves or two bytes if you transfer it to a different medium it doesn't become less from God because God's Word is indestructible so when we say we believe in the Bible in its original text and someone says but you don't have the original text they were lost all those years ago you realize we've used a word which is multivalent and as a result we've created confusion so text comes from into English I think from French text which comes from late Latin text us which means the texture of verbs the web of words so really we should be talking about the original wording we often say but we believe in the original manuscripts but again did God breathe into papyrus did he breathe into leather or did he speak words which were then written on papyrus and leather you see God spoke words we believe God spoke that's different from believing there's something particularly sacred about an atom or a molecule that came from the leather of the earliest manuscripts you see what I mean we believe in the wording and it's very important to maintain that because often people say you evangelicals like the original manuscripts but you don't have them oh no the doctrine of Scripture falls apart now this is a one that gets a bit closer to home it's the word Bible I want to advise you that the word Bible is sub-optimal in many situations if you look in reformed confessions if you look in Reformation statements of faith you will find them on the home using the word scripture script or think in your own language of what are the older words that they were using and you'll realize that the word Bible has become more common really even in the last a hundred years and when you study the history of this it has a seeming long history but there have been some changes so the word Bible comes from the Greek word biblia which is a plural and biblia gives Latin biblia which is a plural but biblia plural in Latin neuter plural could easily become biblia feminine Giller in Latin and that's happened across a whole load of European languages and it happens sometime between the tenth and the thirteenth century so we are then left with languages which have for their word for God's books a singular singular word in anglo-saxon the word for Bible was bibliothèque aid the the library there was a sense of plurality that God had given now what then happens in English once you have the word Bible which you remember is a plural but it's become a singular they then put an s on the end to make it plural again and you have Bibles and I can make a pile of Bibles right but you realize by this stage it's drifted from its meaning of the collection of books so when I look in the Oxford English Dictionary now and I look at the word Bible again I realize it's multivalent it's got meaning number one which are the books of Holy Scripture meaning number two and I'm not I'm paraphrasing a physical copy of the books now if the word Bible has got more than one meaning then the word biblical has got more than one meaning any word you derive from it he's gonna have more than one sense so when I say biblical inerrancy I may mean meaning number one God gave books and they're without error someone may think I mean meaning number two physical objects with no error error in them you see the how we can get into trouble now if we stick with the word scripture we don't have the same problem skillett Torah Latin means writing and it comes into all sorts of other languages like that now in American English by my search of corpuses you find that Americans use the word Bible 11 times more than the word scriptures in British English it's six times more but if we go back several hundred years the proportions were reversed now one reason we like the word Bible is because it enables us to dialogue with non-christians easily secularists love the word Bible they love it because it allows them to say okay the Christians have got the Bible and the Muslims have got the Koran and other people got their holy books it domesticates what we're talking about and we want to emphasize that God has given us words in books okay we want to emphasize the library we want to emphasize the plurality we want to emphasize what God's given I'm not saying you should not use the word Bible I use the word Bible and I will use it again in this talk but I think you need to be careful about the word Bible because it doesn't always do the work we want it to do when a sceptic like Bart Ehrman attacks the scriptures what he tends to do is attack using the word Bible how the Bible has changed or something like this and one of the things he believes is if we do not have a perfect physical copy of this thing then the whole of the doctrine of Scripture doesn't work it's pointless but think about it before there was any printing and people copied manuscripts everyone knew that there was no perfect manuscript imagine having a conversation with Saint Augustine he has his Latin manuscript of John in front of him and you say to st. Augustine st. Augustine don't you know that when people copy things by hand they make mistakes your Latin copy of John may have some mistakes in he would say well yes of course it's copied by hand aha so st. Augustine you are not allowed to conclude that God has spoken to us and given us the book of John he would say well that doesn't follow at all because he was able to distinguish in his mind between the doctrine of God spoke God gave up and the physical copy in front of him now in English Bibles we rarely have typographical errors I know that in Bibles in other european languages there are more commonly errors I've seen them in French Bibles Romanian Bibles and others that there are such things so but as typography improves our expectation of higher and higher perfection in our printed text has improved and that's why our tolerance for the for making that distinction between God giving words and the physical copy I have has been lessened another bad word is the word inspired I mean one of the problems about inspired it's breathed into and we might say that Mozart was inspired so it again it's multivalent any word that has multiple meanings may be problematic because we speak it meaning one meaning other people understand it meaning another now the expression of course comes from second Timothy chapter 3 verse 16 where it says all Scripture is god-breathed meaning God breathed it out God speaks the words of scripture out of his mouth now we know God doesn't physically have a mouth and we know that these words are used metaphorically for many reasons one of the reasons for instance would be when it talks about the hand of the God of God it's always in the singular so it's a pretty good clue that this is meant metaphorically and so on so God doesn't physically have a mouth but the words attributed to him are so closely connected to him that we may imagine them at and think of them and conceive of them as coming from his mouth without trying to visualize it you understand okay another word we might use is autographs the first written copies but of course again we need to distinguish between the first written copies and the words on the copies so I want to say we believe in the wording on the autograph some people say wording of the autographs some people say wording in the autographs I like the wording on the autographs because I think that makes most clear the distinction so when we're looking at the New Testament what we're looking for is the original wording the original wording that goes back to the those whom Christ commissioned with his authority some of these were of the Twelve Apostles some of them were not but even those who are not mark Luke the writer to the Hebrews are people who are trusted by the Apostles whom got a Christ himself trusted so in other words Christ commissioned this group as a whole to be competent to get hit the message about him out you can't say I trust Christ but I don't trust his selection of group to convey him to others so we're really looking at the Apostolic wording with the Old Testament it's more complex because we're looking not just at what is the final text but that final text may have come through a long time for instance the books of kings the books of chronicles may have been written over many centuries by different prophets and there may be in a school of history writers we don't know and so that means that God may have been upholding the truth of their record writing over a long period of time but then what we're interested in is the the wording which is finalized and then at the origin of the copying process to us and it's authority is recognized by God's chosen people of Israel so in other words it's the and this is relevant to what book should we have in the Old Testament there's no better group to agree with on the subject of what books have in the Old Testament then God's people Israel now in the title I had the word how can we know the exact words of Scripture and we got to think about this word no for a minute because the word know has changed its meaning in the last 200 years so many people in the past would talk about knowing things and they would understand that God upheld knowing so God makes it so that our language works God works it so up so that unknowing works but then along comes skepticism and says how do we know anything at all you know Descartes starts with I think therefore I exist Hume has this idea of you you build up gradually David Hume from knowing very little and you gradually infer more and more and you'll get more and more confident in your belief by repetition and then what people believe nowadays sometimes is that when we use the word no it's really is a shortcut for very high levels of belief and confidence so when you get to 99% or 99.5% belief confident belief you then as a shortcut say I know okay and of course on that definition you never really know or anything I mean because after all you could be in the middle of the Truman Show now you could be in the middle of the matrix and you looking at all of these things that you think you know but really it's just people stimulating electrodes on your mind and making you perceive things okay so you never really know now I think this is a wrong definition of no it's also an unhelpful definition for the word now you may as well not even have the word if you're going to use that so I use it in the way that Alvin Plantinga dis are defined which is warranted true belief this is true belief which has adequate grounds adequate evidence and reason to believe it and so warranted true belief and of course what that means is there are all sorts of things we can know in life generally because they're true and because we have got grounds to believe them and those grounds can be upheld by God himself we believe that there is a God and we there are men things we don't know how they work but we know that they do work so we don't know how consciousness works but we know it does work we don't know how language works we can't fully describe how language works but we know that it does work we don't know how life works but we know it does work you see and we know bits of how life works once life's arrived but how you know what makes something alive or not I mean you know there are all sorts of things we don't know and I think we can say the same with knowing we don't have to know how knowing works to know things think of a young child what is their epistemology how do they know how knowing works you have to be able to describe that before they can know their mother this is an absurd idea of course you can know things without knowing how you know now this doesn't mean it's all irrational but it does mean we have a benevolent God upholding knowing so therefore for us knowing that we have the right words of the true words of God depends on one it being true and to their being warrant now let's think about this imagine an analog clock which is stopped you know these old older types of clock when they stopped but it's a 12-hour clock so twice a day it's correct okay and so you look at it twice a day and you happen to look at it at the right time and you say aha because of the clock I know it is this time unfortunately that is not knowing because that's not proper warrant for your belief okay so it's true belief but it's not warranted true belief so in order for it to be warrant it has to be something that's based on a correct foundation now you could know something because someone who's a true witness told you so for instance my parents were Christian believers and they told me about God and they told me about Jesus and because that's true and they told me and then actually that is warranted yeah it's warranted true belief it's knowledge now this is where we can go dig down on oh and what constitutes warrants but there are all sorts of things that we believe for adequate reasons they aren't necessary things that we can prove for instance we cannot prove that we are not a brain-in-a-vat of chemicals being stimulated by electrodes but it's perfectly rational for us to believe that we're not you see so in other words there are also things we may not be able to prove which are normal I mean you can't prove that everyone wasn't created five seconds ago with their memories right can't disprove it but there's no reason to suppose it so what we're saying is at this point our our minds working correctly so knowing one of the things we've have seen happen with text of the Bible and I'm here I'm using the word text I'd get out of the habit is that we've moved from presuming something's original to presuming it's not original until you prove its original so someone like Matthew him Henry what might might a write a commentary and would say in the Hebrew original it says and he presumes that his late Hebrew manuscripts have what was originally given unless someone has some very good evidence against it and what happens is of course as people discover earlier and earlier manuscripts you realize how correct Matthew Henley was to do that we may also have legitimate disprovable presumptions someone could make a perfect fake banana okay they make it looks very very good close up even when you hold it it look but it's not a banana it's a fake okay and I look at it and I say that's a banana now actually I'm wrong it's not a banana it's a fake but I've got a disprovable presumption I've got a legitimate disprovable presumption you can also have that so I might believe that the text of the earliest wording is one set of wording and then an earlier manuscript might be discovered and I then say well okay I was following the right thing at the time but actually I'm I'm now revising my belief in the light of this newer evidence but another way we can look at this is that if God is speaking in Scripture then this is God's voice and God's voice can be directly recognized so Jesus my sheep hear my voice God offered in Scripture portrays himself as speaking directly to people now in a materialist world the way they believe it works is that my mind inability to speak are emergent properties from my physical self and let's say I want to speak to someone say Andy at the back he's very very back and what happens is it's not that I sort of recognize him but the that he's made of chemicals and somehow the emergent property that arises from my chemicals recognizes the emergent property that rises from his chemicals and somehow an illusion of of communication might go on perhaps real communication but it all arises at the physical that's an incredibly complicated and unnecessarily complicated view of just saying one person directly recognizes another person you know so we've actually got a far simpler view of this and so we can say voice can be directly heard and God's voice can be directly recognized now I want to say in addition when we look at scripture a lot of people get into the who wrote this book you know and they'd like to get there which is very important but they get down into the individual styles and the way many people would like to study scripture is you study Johan inés style that's good and you study matthean style and you study eyes ionic style and you build up what you're going to say that they all say and then you synthesize it together there's something very good about that but often what people do is they like to say we look at what the human meant and from that we try and work out what God meant right see so you've got the human meaning which is the primary meaning and then the God meaning which is the secondary meaning and I say no gods meaning is the primary meaning the human meaning is the secondary meaning and I would want to say we can be more scientifically confident of God's meaning than we can about the human meaning let me explain if we have 66 books of God's writing style an only one of Matthew's writing style then we have a bigger sample of God's style than of his so even from a grammatical point of view and I know there are different sorts of grammar in the different books we can be more confident about God's style than about Matthews or even about God's intention than Matthews the question of what Isaiah meant is interesting but it's not an overriding question because after all in first Peter it says that the prophets were wondering what the Spirit of Christ in them meant so in fact I'm looking at that bigger meaning I'm very interested in breaking things down and analyzing them so of course I'm going to look at how did the style of one book differs from the style of another book but I don't give that primacy in the way I look at things and when I'm trying to work out what things mean sometimes they the piece is bigger than the whole think of an orchestral piece there's the significance to what the violin does and the first violin and so on and you can analyze it and you have a score which won't give you just the line that the first violin doesn't just the bit that the trombone doesn't so on that's very interesting but you also want the conductor score in which you have the hole now how can we argue for textual reliability there are many different sorts of manuscripts when we talk about manuscript that word manuscript is not a clear word manuscript means written by hand anything written by hand is a manuscript we still write manuscripts today I can see someone two people producing manuscripts right now so and keep writing your manuscripts and yeah they're very very good I mean by the way this is interesting that when you get a new technology like printing it doesn't get rid of manuscripts it just displaces them partly when you get you know the computer and IT again it displaces print partly but the print stays on as well so you just add new technology so here we have you could write on stone or pottery you could write Bible by hand and it would be a manuscript but usually not counted as one because what we like to do when we talk about manuscripts is usually talk about papyrus whoops sorry papyrus here oh no that's not the one either I'm gonna be careful with this papyrus and leather but you could have a manuscript that is this size or a manuscript that is this size and has 400 500 pages you can have a manuscript which is a continuous text or as many many manuscripts are you can have extracts you think about the cost of writing out a Bible if it's a year to write out a Bible and that's a minimum then it's a very expensive thing it's about two 300 animal skins again very expensive by the way that's one very good reason to think that Bibles don't get forged in large numbers think about the expense of forging manuscripts if you're writing on leather is incredibly expensive so and what often you have with church services is you have just the manuscript with the readings for the church services it's called a lectionary now one argument that's been used for the reliability of the New Testament is it goes like this is by F F Bruce and it's a good argument it goes like this classical scholars accept the authenticity of all sorts of classical works which have fewer manuscripts than the New Testament so that's something you can attest now don't just use his writings from 50 60 years ago because many many more manuscripts have been discovered since then and also he chose a few examples there are some like Homer where there are many more manuscripts so much that there are fewer so but basically this is sound if you accept that he can then say well New Testament manuscripts are earlier and more numerous therefore if you accept one it's reasonable for you to accept two now notice this is an argument from consistency it's saying you already accept something therefore by consistency you ought to accept the other thing now some people pervert this argument by simplifying it and they try to make it work without the first step and that is you don't have the person already accepting something you see and so what they say is the New Testament has more manuscripts than any other work therefore it should be accepted as as authentic and this is a fallacious argument it's a very very bad argument and there are all sorts of problems with it for instance the day after John's Gospel was written let's say in Ephesus there was probably only one copy of it imagine the Apostle John going out and saying you should accept this because there are more copies of it than any other book in the world people would have looked a minute said how stupid can you be you don't need lots of copies you know imagine he'll kya finding the book of the law in the temple bringing it to to Josiah who says go back unless you can find at least ten copies I'm not listening this is absurd you only need one copy one copy is enough now I'd want to say that as far as copies of the New Testament or the Old Testament are concerned we have enough copies and more okay enough and more what why don't need to do is prove that we have the most now it is true that there are more manuscript copies of the New Testament than there are of classical works there are about five and a half thousand manuscripts of the New Testament there are also about five and a half thousand manuscripts of John Chrysostom now of course John Chrysostom was a Christian father quoting lots of the Bible so we could add that as more evidence for the New Testament but the point is you know what gets produced in multiple copies can depend on all sorts of things you know there may be huge numbers of a particular best-selling book at a particular time so just be very careful about using this because this thing can be surpassed in China for many years there were more copies of Mao's little red book you see so in terms of the superlatives you need to be careful but also it doesn't work logically there is no connection between multiple copies and truthfulness I mean there are lots of copies of yesterday's USA Today there are more copies of probably you know the local Polish newspaper than there are manuscripts of the New Testament does that mean the local polish newspaper is somehow more from God more correct and so on it doesn't make sense so we have lots of copies we have enough copies but the argument is FF Bruce set it out was correct because it was an argument from consistency and this is a sort of argument Jesus uses so Jesus very often when he's asked a question says well why do you do this in other words he turns the question back and he asked people to look at the consistency because consistency and inconsistency is one of the quickest ways of showing people's true heart their true intention and we see this so much in politics don't we where one side doesn't like a particular way of voting until it suits them to get through what they want and this is happening plenty of it in Britain but it happens in all sorts of countries all sorts of times and it's a very interesting way because when you do that you show what your heart really is okay so we've looked at some problems there so one way we can argue for the reliability of the Bible is from vindicated trust for instance we can say all of these people HUS Calvin and and so on trusted that they had good scripture and they did so before there was any archaeology because archaeology really begins with Napoleon Bonaparte around 1798 so we can say they've been seventeen centuries of martyrs people suffering for the Christian faith confident in the Integrity's of Scripture if we ask any Christian from the seventeen hundreds of sixteen hundreds and we asked them a question like can you tell me the name of the Assyrian King who surrounded Jerusalem they will say well it would look it might look in their Bible they might search their memory but they said Sennacherib you can ask them all sorts of other things and actually it turns out to be correct I mean I like to do this one um if you think of the enemies of the Israelites in order in the Old Testament you basically say well these sort of earliest enemies tend to be the amorite yeah they get mentioned a lot at that early stage then you get the Philistines then you get the assyrians then after them you get the babylonians and then after them you get the Persians but isn't an amazing thing that that is what you would see Carter you would have got from someone 250 years ago before there was any archaeology then people dig things out of the ground and they discover all those cultures and they discover them in that order that's a rather remarkable thing so here we have a bit of the old King James Version from second Kings chapter 18 and verse 13 and it so it's 1611 and we're just going to read it so we we like to go to older English a slightly odd print now remember for many of us how many of how many Finn's do we have here fins or Estonians okay one so probably all of the rest of us are speaking indo-european is that right so everyone else speaking an indo-european language now the great thing but you know European languages as you get Hungarian or so Hungarians yeah many hungar how many Hungarians do we have bless you there are some of our lone words in your language thank you very much yeah so probably all of the rest of us are speaking some sort of indo-european and as you go back in time they get closer which is really good so this is why reading older English is going to be easier than reading modern English isn't it maybe not okay so here we go now in the 14th year of King Hezekiah did Sennacherib king of Assyria that's an S as sit that's an R as Syria come up against all the fenced cities that means walled cities of Judah and took them and Hezekiah king of Judah sent to the king of Assyria to lakish saying I have offended I've done something wrong return from me that means please go away that which thou puttest on me will I bear which means whatever you tell me I have to pay I will pay and the king of Assyria appointed under Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold that's not that he gave it he said this is the fine dude okay and hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the house of the lord and in the treasures of the king's house now i hope you notice a few things about this 400 year old english firstly it's in twin a twenty four letter alphabet not a twenty six letter alphabet that is the letter i' and the letter j are just the same and the letter U and the letter V are just the same so when so when people say it's the KJV remember there was no J and there was no V at the time but more to the point there's also no apostrophe one the form back in the days before the apostrophe as well horrible things that people have invented since then part of the general corruption of sin now what we see here is if we were to try and dig out the facts here we'd say well it's telling us that there's a Judean king called Hezekiah all the fortified cities of Judah were captured except for Jerusalem that's in the wider context this was done by Sennacherib king of Assyria Sennacherib particularly fought against lakish again that's in the surrounding context Hezekiah was fined thirty talents of silver of gold sorry and thirty-three hundred talents of silver and then this is the strange bit having been found three hundred talents of silver he gave him all of the silver that was in the king's house the palace and in the temple okay God's house and you wonder what was that coincidentally just exactly 300 well this is then archaeology begins and you remember that the French beat the English to decipher Egyptian so in 1822 seanpauley Rd ciphers in Gyptian then in the 1840s and 50s people decipher old Persian and Akkadian and as they decipher Akkadian they then find Sennacherib own records of this attack on Jerusalem and this is what he says as for Hezekiah the Judean I beseech 46 of his fortified walled cities now that phrase is very similar as in the walled cities i conquered them and took out two hundred thousand one hundred and fifty people now this is when we see some political spin because he didn't actually capture Jerusalem so how can you put positively I didn't capture Jerusalem if you're not allowed to lose this is what you do he himself I locked up within Jerusalem His Royal City like a bird in a cage I mean this is very positive spin on but you didn't get into the cage did you know um Hezekiah was overwhelmed by the splendor of my lord eNOS and he sent me thirty talents of gold eight hundred talents of silver Wow what I find is absolutely fascinating and you can see how many talents of gold was it in the Bible thirty and how many talents of silver in the Bible three hundred and how much did he actually pay all the silver that was in the palace and in the temple now I find the agreement on the amount of gold more interesting or more fascinating than the difference in the amount of silver the number of talents because I do not know of any ancient story be it Herodotus ESOP Homer the Quran where you have something so precisely mentioned handed down in manuscripts over time and then something is deciphered and it turns up and says exactly the same this is astounding particularly because numbers are so easily changed if you miss copy a number you know it's very hard to correct that now when the King James Version was made the earliest manuscripts they had in Hebrew were from the 11th century so you think about this this event is 700 BC at 700 years to BC plus eleven hundred years of AD eighteen hundred years in total and that number has been correctly handed down by scribe after scribe if one scribe had got it wrong it wouldn't have got correct got through correctly it's a phenomenal thing then we have the difference in silver now of course there are various possibilities if you just have two Tech's you could have text a and text B and it could be that a is wrong B is wrong a and B somehow fit together all they're both wrong okay so you can note those your permutations now of course I believe in the scriptures and so the scriptures right but I'd say I can actually have both of these because I think that it's very difficult when you're being besieged by someone by the way because if you pay them what guarantee do you have they're going to withdraw at all now there are different orders people can read the events but one option is actually to have all of this happening together now that's an argument for the earth so that the he actually sent all of 800 he was fine told 300 and he for some reason was scared and sent more now of course that can't have been before the earth after the Assyrian soldiers had been killed this is the opening of John's Gospel in Erasmus is 1516 Greek New Testament so here we can see a nice big letter a you see that letter and then n n R in beginning and ha log gods that's a nose okay so in the beginning was the word and this is an and chi-ha log goes and the word and Pras that's a ton Theon and the Word was with God in the Word was God and so on now the great thing about this is you can read every letter you just need to get your eye attuned to it I mean even if you've not done Greek you can read it learn to read it quite quickly it's it's John 1 as we all know it but the earliest manuscripts that he had when he printed that Edition in 1516 were 12th century manuscripts and now we have manuscripts a lot earlier this is a manuscript of the end of Luke and beginning of John from probably the early 3rd century we can go in and so here we have and so that isn't as big but it still the same letter and out of here in O log Gauss etc you get the idea now this is an amazing thing we can go back even earlier here's another manuscript maybe the year 200 and how long gosh okay this is how it begins in the beginning was the word and you can search it out and you can find here's a word foes for Soto photosynthesis says Zoe Zoe Zed Oh Zoe life in him was life and the life was the light of men Zoe means life you can just find it all it's all you just beautiful and you could learn to read it really quite quickly I mean here's the word name actually that's nice n well it's got forget the O at the beginning which part name n om number yeah as in anima okay it's the word for name so it's easy it's all there I mean it even looks like it's there now we then did a edition of Greek New Testament at tinder house and this is my beautiful daughter I like to show she doesn't like to be shown but you know um no she does give me permission and somewhere now I didn't bring it with me we produce the Greek New Testament here we have the oldest bookshop in the english-speaking world and in its windows we have the tinder house Greek New Testament published by cross way and came to University Press nice thing we found out when we had edited the opening of John is that we had exactly the same 188 words in a row or hundred eight hundred and twelve letters in a row as Erasmus has had five hundred years earlier in fact when we looked at our Edition and the German Bible Society Edition and the majority text edition and the secular society of biblical literature Edition in our own Edition they all had the same eight hundred and twelve letters in a row at the opening of John they say a ha you've just given me a good example I bet that it doesn't all work as well as that ok that's true that's fine um so here we have Erasmus is not just his commentary on the new edition of the New Testament well now we have his actual annotations and this is where he wrote what he thought and this is really interesting because we're going to go to John chapter 8 now remember John chapter you have this passage about the woman caught in adultery and most of the modern Bibles will say it's not part of the or the original text as they might call it oh I don't know what they call it in the footnotes so we read a bit of Latin how many have done a bit of Latin great will be fine so it we got big letter A and a D ad Dukan they led however they led who led the scree by at fattest I the scribes and Pharisees led a muli am a woman thank you now then you have a close brackets because that is setting apart the biblical text before the bit that he comments on okay so he's now going to go into the comment and so this is the way they would do it so there's another one of those brackets it where they they each return to the house and it comments on that okay now historia which means the story de Moliere a adulterer about the adulterous woman known her bait or anyone want to translate for me yeah is not contained in player Rhys Quaker Ikeys X M pluribus anyone want to translate that for me yeah in the Greek manuscripts that's gray ki sex and pluribus what about this play race clay many is actually the majority okay so it's he's saying that that's the case in non ulis which means in not a few ad yekta air at it was put in calc eight at the bottom you know or in the margin so what we see here and Chrysostom makes no mention of this okay so hopefully can follow a certain map now the point is this this is Erasmus without the early manuscripts we have now already knows there are some questions about that passage so why does he put it in well one of the reasons he puts it in is because he is a Catholic and in 1516 he does not want to make a break with the Catholic Church he's trying to produce an Edition which lines up as much as possible with the Latin Bible and so he does this now I am giving you one particular take on this passage there are many wonderful evangelical Christians including some great scholars who will disagree with me okay but I will give you how I put things together and the way I put it together is this and the Reformation there was a reform on the subject the doctrine of salvation but people didn't reform everything for instance I mean a lot of reformers still kept printing Epoque refers in their Bible for a little bit you know about 50 years 100 years they still kept wearing robes and so on which you could say don't have much warrants in the New Testament those some of you may wear robes and that's fine bless you I've done it once when I was given short notice and was a bit surprised but anyway is I think it's okay very forgivable sorry if you are how many anyone want to admit to being a robe wearer fine I mean there's as much reason for wearing long flowing things from the Bible as jeans so but the point is this I think we could argue that on the eve of the Reformation 1516 when Erasmus comes out with his text the problem with it is it's good enough so when the Reformers want to have a dialogue with the Catholics do they want to be dissipating everything at once or do they rather want to be narrowing their debate to the things that really matter the doctrine of salvation and the doctrine of the church and questions of authority those are the things they really want to do and so they want to have a ground that they can discuss together and so that is why a passage like this is kept on but what I want to say is the really good thing is this there are only two passages of length in the Gospels or in the New Testament entire New Testament where there are any such questions one is the woman caught in adultery the other is at the end of mark and over the last four five hundred years no new passages have turned up of this kind as people have discovered more manuscripts and the thing is these weren't too surprised because if you read the history of the Church Fathers church fathers were discussing these things people knew about them so there is no surprise you know it's not that actually is a massive amount of certain uncertainty about the the text of New Testament I would say if you are following Protestant principles of trying to use the earliest text you can in a careful way then you will end up whatever method you apply with some pretty similar editions of the New Testament in Greek looking at Erasmus I take Erasmus new about 77% of the verses in the Textus Receptus he knew that there were questions about those this is what became the basis for the Reformation translations and all the European languages remember of course that Czech and French and all sorts of languages have complete translations before English gets one because you know English was a far less important language back then I would argue that if you were willing to break with the Vulgate so you could have got far closer to the modern text okay said that one so what do you do when managed to get to disagree one thing you can do is you can look at things positively it's like in life there are people you trust there are people you don't trust and you can look at this with manuscripts you can have really scruffy manuscripts where someone's got multiple levels of correction on and they don't seem to be taking much care and they also differ from all of the other manuscripts I mean a bit like when you have a number of witnesses to an event one of them is completely different from all the other ones well you're not going to trust that so much and so what you can do also is you could look at eliminating bad witness now there are certain mistakes that regularly get made for instance when two things begin with the same beginning or a word begins the same and ends the same sometimes you substitute a word there are all sorts of things that can go on as a scribe is thinking and copying out because often you have to vocalize than the the word in your head before you put it down and one of the things this does is often it produces an important variation so you can say Jesus as the Jesus or simply Jesus but it doesn't make a difference to who you're talking about you can say he said to them or to them he said again it doesn't make a difference at that sort of level but even then the great thing is with the evidence that we have we're able to get more and more and more precise about the words of the New Testament but at the end of the day our job as editors or translators or whatever we are is not to produce something any better than we have already received our job is like a scribe a scribe is not supposed to look at the manuscript he's copying from and think hmm I don't like that I'm going to write something better as an editor my job is to look at the very best management we can and to pass on what we judge to be best for people but to remember we are only editors and that's very important that's very liberating so one of the things we decided is we would only print something which had at least two manuscripts in support of it and had at least one early manuscript in support of it now why would we make a room like that we made a rule like that to constrain our FAL ability in our sinfulness so we wanted to take some of those decisions out of our hands and that was a helpful thing now one thing that some people believe is that you have to have all of the Bible in order to have any of the Bible if you say I mean and this is the way sometimes bar sermon would argue it's as if you need to have all the verbal sequences that God gave in order to for it to work it's a bit like in you know Harry Potter where you get you know if you say the magic spell wrong let's say you say diagonally when you mix a Diagon Alley you end up in the wrong place this is the sort of thing in a magic spell if you mispronounce one syllable it doesn't work similarly in some recitation of the Quran it's invalidated if you mispronounce one syllable now do we believe that if the Book of Proverbs is translated into a Papua New Guinean language that it is unable to work if they don't also have the book of Job no no no we believe that that book works on its own in fact what we can't say is because there's one bit of a speech we didn't hear we're going to ignore everything imagine you're your mother calls you for a meal or whatever you know child you can't say well there was a word in that very long sentence I wasn't quite sure about so I stayed in my room you know this is not a good excuse so so our uncertainty about one particular word our uncertainty about the meaning of a word is not an excuse for lack of obedience so this is where we've got to realize that when God speaks he speaks with moral compulsion he calls us we have to obey and any analogy that tries to make an excuse because you're uncertain about one bit is unhelpful I want to give you two analogies some people when they three when they think of the doctrine of Scripture they think of it as like the Burj Al Khalifa something very tall and you know it basically everything stands on top of one thing and so they have some belief and if you shake that the whole tower shakes I would want to say your doctrine of Scripture should be more like a spider's web or in American English spider web okay because what happens is a spider's web can be attached to a corner of the room by many different nodes many different bits of stickiness and there are so many grounds for believing the scriptures that you don't need everything to be depending on one of those nodes you can actually have a it's much better to have multiple reasons for believing the Scriptures such as the resurrection my mother told me prophecy I mean these are all good reasons you know and you know so archaeology you go on you know the gospel the transforming power of the gospel who could ever make up a story of like this supremely the person of Jesus I mean you just go on all the reasons you have to believe and it's important to have that widespread the other thing when it comes the integrity of scripture and I'm sorry about this analogy but someone's given it to you me up Muslim once said to a Christian if you had a glass of water with one drop of urine in would you drink it and the answer is usually no unless you desperate thirst first and that was their analogy it's as if scripture is somehow you know easily corrupted and if there's one bit wrong it doesn't work like the magic spell and I would say a better analogy for Scripture is uranium you don't say because your uranium is not 100 percent enriched nothing is going to happen it's an extremely powerful thing the word of God is so powerful that in a bad Java's witness translation or a bad medieval latin translation there's still so much of the undestructible word of God then it's life-changing and that's important to recognize that in terms of how these things work so that means we can focus on what we're certain about now one of the things that happens about the way the evidence for the New Testament comes a funny thing is that as the gap between our earliest manuscripts and the time of the New Testament has got smaller doubts in the West have got bigger so we see in fact that that gap is never going to completely close I said to another group the other day um that you know imagine you had had you know Moses coming down the mountain you know with the tablets and someone had photographed that you know you wouldn't prove that it hadn't been changes before we came around the corner so this you can never completely narrow that gap but we can say there's basically an inverse relationship between the amount of of data the amount of evidence and people's confidence in the scriptures and this is a very interesting thing to notice going on now let's get back to the Old Testament text for a little bit of time the way many people view the Old Testament text do you say say well okay I accept that in the medieval ages Middle Ages Jews were incredibly careful about how they copied okay get that but then they say but before the Year 70 when the temple was destroyed actually has plenty evidence for more varied copying and there's a level of truth to this in the Dead Sea Scrolls there are some very copies are very close to the ones a thousand years later and there's something a bit more varied they'd also say there were variant Greek forms and that these can be earlier than the Hebrew and people would say that the New Testament writers use something called the Septuagint and that's what they were quoting and there's so much truth in a lot of this and so they say well there's basically a problem with the evangelical doctrine of Scripture namely that the text of the Old Testament was not fixed at the time of Jesus so therefore the argument that evangelicals like to use that Jesus quoted the Old Testament he therefore gives it his authority it doesn't work if the Old Testament still changing after Jesus you see so that's an argument and it said there are many layers of technicality into this I'm just going to touch on how I deal with this so I'd want to say that the Old Testament books were fixed by the time of Jesus I'd want to say that the evidence that there's a they start fixing things after the year 70 and not before is exaggerated I want to say that already by the 1st century BC there's a type of translation into Greek which is a revised translation into Greek often called the Kai gay version that's Kate a I GE got that word and the Kai get it's not complete copy of the Old Testament of its parts of it showing that they are really concerned to be super literal and that's already going on and their aim is to get closer to the the Palestinian Hebrew copy and in fact the Jews are incredibly dissatisfied with the earliest Greek that's made and how do we know that because they did lots more translations as a guy called Aquila Symmachus feodosia you can look them up they all made translations of the old testement into Greek I also want to say that although we often talk about the word Septuagint today it's a bit of a confusing word because really there was a story about seventy two translators just having done the first five books of the Old Testament and they were always referred to as 72 plus a noun 72 translators 72 elders then that changed to 70 to simplified after a while they decided to drop the noun and just talk about the 17 not the 70 elders or 70 translators then they decided rather than talk about the 70 as a translation as translators they talk about 70 as a translation and finally 70 became a singular so we now say the Septuagint is in English not the Septuagint are likewise the books extended from fur just the first five books of the Bible then the whole Old Testament then we find people add apocryphal books then they add apocryphal books that aren't even translated they were written in Greek originally and now if you buy a Septuagint today or have those books in and there are even some bits of the New Testament in the Septuagint bits from Luke which you can behind a copy today so it's expanded more and more and we can see how this happens in various European languages where over time the plural has switched to a singular so I've written about this if you want to know so just watch out for that and so my argument is basically this there's no reason for us to think that when Paul used a Greek version of Isaiah he thought it was made by the same people who's made the Greek version of the Pentateuch that the first five books there's no reason to think there was a singular translation into Greek it's more complex if you want to get into it get into complexities but don't say because one person New Testament quotes this Greek version therefore every bit is is validated like that the other thing is when you're looking in the books of the Old Testament we don't differ as Protestants from two very prominent Catholics at the time of the Reformation Cardinal humanize was the guy in charge of the Spanish Inquisition so obviously in Spain at the time of the Reformation and he did this multi-volume polyglot Bible I'm sorry to have some more Latin but Wes it's good fun isn't it and this is what he says he has his Latin the multi-volume thing and he says this but indeed books outside the Canon which the church rather for edification of the people than for authority of establishing I have to jump to that word now ecclesiastical dogma the church has received these so these books which it's received only have Greek Scripture Greek writing now the point is this he's saying all sorts of bits of things that are now in the Catholic Apocrypha should not be used for establishing doctrine okay so this is a guy basically writing the same year that Luther writes his theses and what happens is in the Council of Trent the Catholic Church digs its heels and thank you and says we're gonna say the Epoque FERS just as important as the rest and he's not the only person of that and he actually dedicates this book to the Pope it gets an imprimatur from the Pope so you know this was not heretical within Catholicism at the time and as you look at it it will talk about for Joshua the book of Joshua we'll call it that the lxx the seventy but actually four other books there we got the book of Maccabees it won't call it the book of the seventy you see there's no 70 up there and skip over that now do you want to do Bart Ehrman or yeah I do bit bottom so Bart Ehrman when he aims at the New Testament texts he has this wonderful quotation this is how he one of the things he says he lost his faith over I kept reverting to my basic question how does it help to say that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God in ever it's never inspired but only the words copied by scribes now this is fascinating because of course if someone actually copies a word it is the same word you know we don't have the words but only the words copy by scribes like sometimes correctly but sometimes many times incorrectly well how many times what is the good to say that the autographs I the originals were inspired sorry about the wording we're using we don't have the originals we have only error in copies and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them evidently in thousands of ways well I mean yes but you have two point six pages that million pages of manuscript so I'm not sure how that really matters so anyway um so look at this first question well of course if you say we don't have the original I want to say who says we don't can you prove we don't are you proving anywhere that we've lost anything I don't think we I don't think we've lost anything from the New Testament you know no one's demonstrated to me we've lost any part in the New Testament so um who says we don't have what God's inspired so you're saying that but and even if we don't the doctrine of Scripture doesn't depend on the availability to us at every moment of everything any more than the book of the law was uninspired the day before it was found by Hill Chaya but we only have words that are copied won't there than the same words they don't get less inspired by being copied many miss copying x' don't destroy the words actually miss copying just simply replicate something else the words are still there I mean you don't copy a manuscript and destroy the one you copied from so he said what's good it's to say that the autographs were inspired we don't have the originals I want to say sorry we've been on using unclear terminology I'm very sorry about that we have only ever ridden copies but Augustin was aware of that so still believed in complete scriptural truthfulness many of these are removed by centuries well yeah Christians have been aware of that over the years I mean imagine going to John Wickliffe young HUS and say are you aware that you know the manuscript copies we have are from centuries later at which point he says I'm gonna give up on my face I mean I'm not going to die for that you mean the mask it's come from hundreds of years later but you could go to a young Christian today you know and say you know the copies I hope you come from oh you know so why is it that young hustle Taylor yeah and and and the person that Oh God you know what what psychologically has changed you know because the evidence is actually better than in the days of us so it's there's something about the way we are taking this doctrine on and appropriating which we're not quite getting away it works copies from Lodz later Wow how carefully God can ensure a copying process over a long period I'm

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Published: Thu Oct 03 2019