Dead Sea Scrolls Prove Most of New Testament Predates 68 A.D. (Don Patton)

one of the most exciting finds involves cave seven and if I were speaking to a Jewish audience in Jerusalem you'd hear big groans right now in cave seven we have different types of manuscripts they're written on papyrus rather than the parchment the sheepskin and it is written in Greek not the Hebrew or paleo Hebrew cave seven has collapsed its sides and roof have fallen away and 19 small fragments of papyrus were found and they couldn't read them initially and then as they continued to study oh yes here is part of Exodus and here is part of Jeremiah and we can find that and of course with computer analysis they can see how these letters would fit into a text but they couldn't read the rest of 17 of the 19 fragments were unread and the reason was they had to find them in the Old Testament and they weren't old tested they were New Testament records one of the most obvious is from Mark and this particular fragment mentions gannett which is a peculiar word for the sea of galilee used only in the 1st century and so this helps date it together with the style of the letters and this is a quotation from mark 6 52 and 53 that mentions Knesset now in the way you do this is you superimpose text over this and you see if it fits and so even with just a few letters you can identify it well you superimpose this text over it and you can see the top two words fit pretty well but the rest of it then work well with computers you can adjust the margins and of course you don't know how wide the margins were and how wide the columns were in which this was written but when you adjust it bingo it fits up and down in sideways with the word Ganesh right that unique first estimate a first-century word right in the middle this is mark six 52 through 53 and as they continued to analyze it they found several other passages from mark and acts and Romans and first Timothy and second Peter which was what a more controversial and James verified and the real significance is this is necessarily before 68 AD when the Romans came in and destroyed all of this the style of the letters indicates about fifty eighty that's probably when it was written but it has to be before 68 eighty I think about that in mark style the letters indicating about fifty ad now we have verified Jesus says you see these great buildings not one stone will be left upon another which will not be torn down and what happened in 70 AD the Romans marched in and the stones were thrown down and here we see a first-century street that just pummeled by the stones that were tossed down in 70 AD and it was prophesied before 68 AD and we can prove it you see why they don't like that and why they don't want to admit there's New Testament now the same process that allowed them to identify the killing Jeremiah in the papyrus from the grief we use to find mark and they accept one and not the other because it doesn't fit their theological views this is ongoing we have we're finding more fragments and you don't hear a lot about this either their papyrus fragments maybe New Testament more of it will be found well they are fighting that tooth and toenail let's summarize with the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls first they reveal a sect whose approach to Scripture and whose view of prophecy is exactly what you see in the early church not like the liberal view today but like what we see revealed in the New Testament as Paul said when he wrote this they received it in Thessalonica as it was in truth the Word of God as he told the people at Corinth if your spiritual you accept this as the commandments of the Lord this is the way they viewed Scripture which is unique from what's taught in the Universities today it destroys the idea that the beliefs of the New Testament were developed over hundreds of years after Christ died and after the Apostles had died in this this tradition this myth grew now all day that's that's not the case at all like John the Baptist they believed they were in the desert as forerunners and they would refer to the passages which referred to John the Baptist and apply it to themselves but they saw that as preparation for the coming Messiah and believed it was imminent that it was time the time was fulfilled as John the Baptist preached like Jesus and the Apostles they believed they were living in the last days of the Old Testament era and that the Scriptures very definitely promised the coming Messiah and a messiah that was a suffering Messiah and one that would be resurrected the Apostles didn't get there you're in the lifetime of Christ finally when the Holy Spirit came they did but these people understood it ahead of time one of the lessons that we learn is the meticulous view with by which these scriptures were copied the accuracy of the transmission interestingly Josephus Sir Joseph Lewis as they call him comments on this he says we've been given practical proof of our reverence for our own scriptures for although such long ages have now passed no one has ventured either to add to remove to alter a syllable and it is an entrenched intrinsic with every Jew from the day of his birth to regard them as the decrees of God to abide by them that need be cheerfully died for them and that's reflected in the processes of copying that we see in the records in the manual of discipline and in the artifacts that have been excavated they counted every letter after they finished copying the page they counted sideways and they counted upside down and across and if the tally did not match they threw it away and started over so it wasn't just copying and hopefully they got it right they had ways to check and as we suggested every book of the Old Testament is written and we have now with this manuscripts a thousand years older than any manuscript that existed before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls the oldest that we had before they were discovered was the aleppo codex this was the Masoretic text that dated to 900 AD talking about Old Testament texts that's when the King James was translated that's the best we could do and up until the 40s that's that the best Manuel that this is 2,000 years after these prophets were talking well over a thousand years and all of this copying for a thousand years has to produce some changes it couldn't be like the original well now then we have the Isaiah scroll a thousand years earlier and so we can check what happened over the thousand years that intervened between the oldest in 1940 and the oldest than in 1950 a thousand years earlier now they compare perfectly identical word-for-word in more than 95% of the text and that 5% involves obvious slips of the pen and misspellings there is no significant difference at all and it is one scroll from beginning to end while all of these years of copying have to produce changes not so when we understand the way they did it the way they counted the letters and then when we compare what was a thousand years earlier from the oldest it's perfect and that is just no longer a reasonable charge it ain't so when we look at the youngest Old Testament book scholars will differ but conservatively the one that was written latest is about 325 before Christ BC the oldest Dead Sea scroll was written three hundred years before Christ we've got about 25 years separating the original now to like a PD as I suggested said that oldest Dead Sea scroll was 325 well certainly less than a generation removed from the original we have copies today now some of them why don't you have the original you can go back within 25 years well we know what happened to relics like that brazen serpent that they had to destroy because the people were worshipping it we see what our Catholic friends do today to claimed relics splinters of the cross there's enough of them around to build this building out up that is for stalled by we don't have the original but we have what goes right back to it and if you have less than a generation or move in the original the the generation closest to the original and you know you don't worry about a thousand years its how reasonable it is it to worry about the 25 years closest to the original if you are determined to disbelieve you have an excuse I think God does that to those that are not honest but to honest reasonable people it's not reasonable to think that this is not like the original we can get within less than a generation and then with the New Testament we have that which was written we know during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses who saw the crucifixion who saw these events take place it was written then probably about 50 ad before prophecies of events that occurred in 70 AD and we can prove that now that's significant our text is dependable our view of prophecy is not something that suspend hundreds of years later but was inferred directly from the New Testament even before cried the Old Testament even before Christ and the New Testament was written during the lifetime of the people who saw it we have dependable text and it's not reasonable to think otherwise and therefore we conclude just exactly what isaiah completed has inspiration from god the grass withers the flower fades everything around us goes downhill but there's an exception and it has to be a supernatural exception and it is by God's promise that the Word of God stands forever and we can defend that proposition and show that it's unreasonable to denied

Channel: BeYeSeparate (2 Cor.6:14-18)

Views: 22,042

Rating: 4.746479 out of 5

Keywords: Dead Sea Scrolls (Written Work), New Testament (Religious Text), Dead Sea (Lake)

Id: 1hwi_CGdPlE

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 04 2014