welcome to the faith bridge sermon podcast be sure to keep watching immediately after the sermon for PostScript a weekly podcast with in-depth content and answers to your questions submitted during the sermon you can also find it on itunes or at faith bridged org slash PostScript welcome glad that you were here whether you're in center court west or pseudo court east or at the woodlands campus or online worshipping somewhere near or far we're just glad that you're here today welcome and it's always a treat when one of our favorites Ben Stewart brings us God's Word and he's gonna do that today in a great way about God's Word so you're gonna want to take some notes on this one so get out your pencil and your little note sheet and let's welcome Ben as he comes to preach to us now all right well howdy it's good to see you guys if you have a Bible I want to read to you a couple verses from 2nd Peter chapter 1 so if you want to follow along that's where we'll be second Peter chapter 1 if you don't have a Bible raise a hand and they'll hand you one and if you don't have one I don't want one didn't you can just listen because I'm gonna read it and it will we'll pray after that and then jump in so 2nd Peter chapter 1 beginning in verse 16 says this before we did not this is Peter speaking by the way before we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we were making known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty for when he received honor and glory from God the Father and the voice was born to him by the majestic glory this is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased we ourselves heard this very vorse voice born from heaven for we were with him on the holy mountain and we have something more sure the prophetic word to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart knowing this first of all that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit now let me pray for us Lord thanks for this day thanks for this moment to gather around your word I do pray you would help us this morning think clearly about what is it - to have communication with our maker and I pray God you would give us some information today that would help us think rightly about what it is we're looking at here and if these words truly are the words of God and and God I pray that in the midst of getting more information I do pray you would stir affections I pray you would birth in US conviction about what we are holding in our hands and comfort that we can know it's a communique from our maker and so help us God think clearly and respond rightly and I just pray you would bless this time it would help us and I want to ask you guys if you're willing to take a minute and you pray and ask him that say lord please teach me today and then if you would please pray for me that the Lord would use me and I'd be helpful to you well father we love you and we trust you use this time and we pray that in Jesus name Amen well Ken asked me if I would ask and address a question that maybe you've asked or people you love have asked and it's a question about the Bible and the question is how can we have any confidence that the book you hold in your lap now contains the same words that they wrote back then and it's a good question he said been Jesus lived in the first century we're now in the 21st century that's a lot of centuries so how can we have any consonants that what they wrote back then made it through the centuries and is now what we're holding now I mean hasn't the Bible been through countless revisions in countless changes and didn't Constantine adapted in the fourth century when he was rising to power and then when King James got ahold of it oh my gosh it was a free-for-all so Ben how can you have any confidence that what we're reading now even remotely resembles the words and deeds of a guy named Jesus thousands of years ago that's a good question and some of you have maybe asked that question or struggle with that question or someone that you love struggles with that question and it's a good ones to ask how do we know how can we have any confidence the words haven't changed and the meaning hasn't changed and often what's presented in this midst of this struggle is an image of Bible transmission that's kind of like the telephone game I don't know if you played that game as a kid where you know you would line up little kids in a line and how do you play it the kid the front of the line comes up with a sentence and whispers it in this kids ear and that kid whispers its to the next kid and on and on it goes and how does the telephone game in by the time it gets to the last kid he stands up and says the sentence and usually the words and the meaning are a distant memory right from what was originally spoken I remember when I played in elementary school when I sat at the front of line I came up with a sentence about sandwiches and by the time I got to the end of the sentence it had become a cuss word and I got in trouble with a teacher right because the words had changed and their meaning have changed and some of us look at that and go we'll VIN how can you have any confidence that's not what happened here and the reality is that this issue of textual transmission has been pushed into the public square a lot really over the last 20 years like I remember when I was in college I had a friend that was a new believer in Jesus Christ and he called me in a panic because around this time every year Easter magazines like Time and Newsweek put out articles about Jesus in this particular year was about the Jesus Seminar the Jesus Seminar was a collection of biblical scholars and you can still read their books they're in Barnes & Noble guys like Dominic Crossan and Robert Funke Marcus Borg these men had gotten together and dubbed themselves the Jesus Seminar and they read through the Gospels line by line and voted on whether or not these different verses were authentic meaning go back to a historical figure named Jesus and they would vote by throwing colored beads into a bucket red meant yes these words really were the words of Jesus pink meant they weren't his words but the general concept was from Jesus gray black means no it's not connected to the historical person Jesus and by the time that Jesus Seminar was done under their opinion only 18 percent of the four Gospels in the New Testament were considered historically accurate one verse from the Gospel of John and it wasn't even a relevant one it was like and Jesus was like what and they were like yeah okay that one was legit the rest is kind of made up right and he read this article and he was like Ben they're scholars like what am I supposed to do and he was panicking I gave my life to this Jesus and now these guys are saying that we don't have his actual words and deeds or several years ago the book Da Vinci Code came out and I don't know how many of you read it or even care about it or think about it again but I remember when it came out people were quoting it to me everywhere because there's a a scholar in this fictional book by Dan Brown who says at one point and I'll quote him the Bible has evolved through countless translations additions and revision history has never had a definitive version of this book and I remember sitting around a campfire with my dad's friends and then having all read The DaVinci Code that was their introduction to textual criticism and they were saying it makes a lot of sense to me why would we think these are the words of God or even more recently on The Daily Show John Stewart or The Colbert Report just several maybe five six seven years ago a scholar by the name of Bart airman was featured three times in a five year period and with Bart airman you're dealing with something far more serious in these last two I mentioned the Jesus Seminar has been dismissed a bit you know they called themselves the premier biblical scholars on Jesus with scholars such as the producer of striptease starting Demi Moore so you're like maybe that titles a bit inflated right so some people are not as into what the Jesus Seminar was doing cuz they were voting based on their personal convictions Dan Brown and The DaVinci Code no historian takes very seriously even liberal scholars who don't believe the Bible's the Word of God or Jesus the Son of God they don't believe any of that even liberal historians say yeah dan brown's book is fiction all of it including that which claims to be history nobody really believes the da Vinci Code accurately presents how we got our Bible but with Bart Airmen you have a bonafide textual critic textual critics are people who study the ancient manuscripts that have survived through the centuries and see where the differences in wordings are and try to discern what the original set and bard airman is a legitimate textual critic and he wrote a book he's written several popular level books over the last few years his most popular was entitled misquoting Jesus who changed the Bible and why and as he was interviewed by John Stuart and Colbert he said not only do we not have the originals that is the original writings of the New Testament not only do we not have the originals we don't have first copies of the originals and that's true we don't even have copies of the copies of the originals or copies of the copies of the copies originals now there's no way he can know that and yet he said that statement and then the very next statement he made in this public venue was so how can we have any confidence in the reliability of this text ring and then he went on to say in those interviews we have more textual variants in existing New Testament manuscripts than we do words a variant is where two different ancient manuscripts would disagree he says we have more variants than words and as he said that by the end of this interview I remember on The Colbert Report they weren't laughing at sort of the idiocy of thinking Jesus was God and that he died for you now what do you say to that how does that make you feel well I would say the attitude you get from a Bart Ehrman and people like him is one like total despair would be the word for it there's no way at this point we can know what a guy named Jesus legitimately thought twenty centuries ago right and so my professors warned against that total despair which we'll talk about in a minute but they also warned against the opposite extreme called like a an ignorant certainty like if the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me you're like wait a second right uh so you don't want to be this guy but you don't got to be that guy see you go we'll then Ben where are we well we were with more notes than time but let me ask an answer three questions this morning and they're this number one is an issue of quantity how many scribal alterations are there how many places in the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament that we still have how many differences are there textual critics count them right down to the very number one of the most premier textual critics alive today teachers at the seminary I graduated from they count every time there's a little textual variant these guys are colossal nerds that the church is grateful for so you go how many you what's the quantity we're talking about that's question number one number two is quality what kind of textual variations are we talking about here because that matters and the number three is orthodoxy what theological beliefs are dependent upon textually suspect passages like are there some old copies of the Bible to say Jesus died on the cross and others have said no he didn't like what's at stake in this conversation and before I go any further let me just say this I'm getting the vast majority of what I'm going to share content and format is from Professor Daniel B Wallace he is the executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament manuscripts he's a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and he's the author of Greek grammar beyond the basics a great book if you're having trouble sleeping massive tome about Greek grammar two-thirds of seminaries in this country use his book to study the language of Greek he literally wrote the book on Greek and he's written several popular level books too so I would highly recommend checking out Daniel B Wallace but let's dive in and see how far we can get today and the preliminary question I want to ask is this do we have the original New Testament documents now and the answer is no we don't all 27 books of the New Testament were written to the churches and by the end of the second century so unit active like 199 by the end of the second century AD they had likely all turned to dust and that's because they were written on papyrus papyrus is a paper it's not paper but it's parchment made from smashing together of reeds of plants it has the consistency of like a grocery bag so they survived for maybe a hundred years maybe two hundred years right and then they would disintegrate right we actually have papyrus today but it really just comes from three places Egypt Qumran around the Dead Sea and Herculaneum at the base of Mount Vesuvius right extremely dry climates papyrus has survived but in a normal climate it's pretty brittle stuff it disappears so we don't have the original writings John's handwriting we have copies and they were copied many times as they went through history that's where the telephone game breaks apart it works on the assumption that it's only whispered once and then disappears no this document would have been copied many times and many times over and could be referred back to over and over again and so we have many copies right and they were copied many times before they disappeared but here's the other reality before they disappeared all the manuscripts that we have disagree with one another two of our earliest manuscripts of the New Testament disagree about six to ten times per chapter there's 260 chapters in the New Testament that means between two of our oldest and most reliable New Testament documents there's about 2,000 differences mm when you start adding other ancient Greek manuscripts we've discovered that you get more variances thus you get a whole career field called textual criticism right where they evaluate these things so number one what's the quantity of variants how many little differences between the ancient manuscripts are there out there been well words in the Greek New Testament there is around 140,000 actually there's exactly one hundred and thirty eight thousand one hundred and sixty two how do I know that number nerds 140,000 words in the Greek New Testament how many variants are there little changes differences between manuscripts 400,000 140,000 words 400,000 variants if you're running the math on that that's about 2.5 variants per word there are more very instant words now if we stop the conversation there that's a pretty discouraging place to stop it and let me say this Bart Ehrman says this in every single interview what he doesn't address next is the quality of those variants and we'll get to those but he likes to mention that because it sounds a little scary but let me tell you something they don't say in those moments and that is this the reason we have so many textual variants is because we have so many copies of the manuscripts if you only had one copy of an ancient document you'd have no variants because you get one copy if you get a second copy this is before the printing press some guy had to write it by hand you would get little differences spelling differences little mistake word left out letter left out right if you copied the entire New Testament by hand you'd probably mess up once or twice right right and so the reality is a document the size of the New Testament 2000 differences would make about cents so how do we get four hundred thousand men well the reality is because we've discovered so many ancient manuscripts we have what biblical scholars call an embarrassment of riches so before the printing press how many ancient handwritten copies of the New Testament do we have in existence today as of February 5839 5839 now most of them don't have all of the New Testament only one percent does about fifty nine of them are copies of every word of the New Testament but that doesn't mean they're all tiny little fragments either the average size is 550 pages that's a lot right that's just in Greek the language the Bible was written in we have five thousand eight hundred Greek manuscripts ancient Greek manuscripts but in the second century Jesus lived in the first century in the second century Latin became the language of the day because the capital was moved to Constantinople right it was Istanbul now it's constant to moments constant so I'm not Istanbul everybody got that that's when the capital moved there of Rome Latin became the lingua franca the language of the day and so the Bible was then copied into Latin and we have over 10,000 ancient copies of the Bible and Latin and even if we didn't have those we have the New Testament translated into other languages in that day like Coptic or Syriac or Ethiopian are medium Arabic Hebrew Aramaic if you add all those you get another 10,000 more so we have 25,000 ancient manuscripts in existence today but let's say we lost them all some guy was like I lost every single copy of the ancient new Testament let's say he lost them all would we still be completely in the dark about the Greek New Testament no because they're a prophet alive today that have it all memorized nerds and because we have what's called the early church fathers these are the guys that were the first Christian bishops and elders and teachers and they would quote the New Testament so like Ignatius who died in 107 ad wrote the second century Ignatius quotes Matthew there's an organization in Germany that counts biblical quotations in the writings of early church fathers they are currently up over a million up over a million there's 8,000 verses in the New Testament we have over a million quotations and the Church Fathers so even if we lost every ancient copy of the Bible you could easily put it together just what the quotes from the father's now some of you go bin wow this is fascinating but I'm not totally lost well let me try to help you with some comparative information right you go five thousand eight hundred Greek ancient Greek manuscripts hand written in the Bible twenty-five thousand ancient manuscripts and different languages been is that a lot I mean can you compare it to something yes so let me pick a couple guys don't try to write their name down just sit back and enjoy Livie Tacitus and Suetonius are three ancient scholars from the 1st century AD much of what you and I know about ancient Rome comes from these three men right through Citadis and Herodotus from from the 5th century BC and they were Greek historians much of what we know about ancient Greece is from these men so let's collect all their works together and say how many ancient copies do we have from the men on whose writings we base most of what we know about ancient Rome in ancient Greece Livy there are 27 surviving manuscripts he wrote 140 volumes we have 35 of them 27 surviving manuscripts Tacitus who many argue is the most important Roman historian we have how many copies do we have three and the oldest copy we have is from 800 years after Tacitus done Suetonius same thing 800 year gap right the acidities and her Odyssey Herodotus we have a few slivers from the 1st century it's several hundred years before we get more so if we add up all 5 of those guys you get less than 400 ancient documents upon which we base most of our knowledge of ancient Rome in ancient Greece 400 and the oldest you get comes from 300 years after those men lived 300 year gap less than 400 copies the New Testament almost six thousand copies in Greek alone 25,000 ancient copies and the oldest they get is within one to two decades of the life of the Apostles 300 years 1 to 2 decades less than 425 thousand so how many ancient copies do we have been the technical term is bunches bunches and you go how does this help us because the more you see that when you see little spelling errors now what happens is we have grouped them there's the Alexandrian text types the Byzantine we get to see if this guy misspelled this word and that guy got it from there it helps you trace back these streams of translation hasn't been translated by hand it gets you closer to the original not farther away right if you took the average at classical Greek author author I said how many of their works do we have the average classical Greek author how many surviving manuscripts do we have you get about twenty twenty if we were to stack them how high would that go about four feet right if you were to stack what we have in the New Testament how high would it go about a mile about a mile we have an unbelievable amount of ancient resources from this book unbelievable when you start to look at the math it stands alone in a very interesting place now what about the dates of those manuscripts well there's a lot we could say but let me just tell you one fun story in 1934 we discovered P 52 when you find papyrus those ancient little pieces P 52 you name them you name one piece something so P 52 is one we found in 1934 90 years before that 90 years before that FC bauer was a german scholar at the university of two began bauer had studied under hegel hegel who you know came up with the Hegelian dialectic you all love it you know where there's the thesis antithesis synthesis that's the Hegelian dialectic and Bauer had been taught that and so Bauer applied it to the Bible and he said the Apostle Peter was the thesis then the Apostle Paul came along and the antithesis he was the Jewish Jesus he was the Gentile Jesus and the synthesis was the book of Acts and then the full synthesis was the Gospel of John and so based on this theory he said the Gospel of John could not have been written earlier than ad 160 so Jesus lived around 80 30 he says the Gospel of John could not have been written until about a hundred thirty years later it's not an eyewitness account it's an adaptation over time and that view was predominant in academic circles for 90 years until a grad student was rummaging around among the ancient manuscripts found in the john rylands library and Manchester and he found a little slip of papyrus about the size of a credit card and if he translated it he said this looks like the Gospel of John on both sides and so he sent it to three of the leading papper ologists at the time to study the paper how old is this and they all independently wrote back to him and said this should not be dated any later than AD 150 possibly as early as AD 100 or Diceman said even as early as 1890 so if I've lost you let's be clear Bauer said the original Gospel of John could not have been written before ad 160 this young man found a copy that the leading paper ologists of the day said this copy should be dated at ad 100 so did the original come in 160 we just found a copy from 100 now I'm no copy ologist but what my brain tells me is shouldn't a copy come after the original and so what happened 90 years of German scholarship just went up in flames right why because this copy was from around 1890 he say what was happening back then well no guys like John were running around we're getting real close the King James version of your Bible was translated into English in 1611 it was based upon seven Greek manuscripts the earliest of which was from the 12th century seven Greek manuscripts for the foundation of the King James Bible that was translated in 1611 and the oldest was from the 12th century your modern English translation that your holdings now is built upon over 1,000 times more ancient Greek manuscripts and the oldest one is from the second century so King James you had 7 from the 12th century now you have 25,000 dating as far back as the 2nd century so you tell me are we telephoning game further away from the original or are we getting closer to it we're right there we're right there so you go okay Ben what about the quality of variants because some of you're still shaken up by the fact that you said there are variants in these ancient texts you go well then what quality of variants are we talking about here there's four kinds for groups of variants in these ancient manuscripts the first group is called spelling differences because with each variant is they're copied by hand you get too many scripts they're gonna be a little bit different and what happens is there's words like the name John in Greek the name John can be spelled with one N or two ends it's a preference thing like how English people spell color with the word u in it for letter U right it's a preference it's weird but it's a preference and it's fine right New Testament manuscripts have those not spelling errors even I'm talking about just differences like a second new at the end of John how many of our 400,000 variants are spelling differences 70% 70% they don't touch meaning let me say something Bart Airman never says that in an interview and he knows that but he doesn't say it why because it doesn't sell books he says we got more variance than we do words he doesn't say the vast majority are spelling differences that have no influence on meaning why because then you wouldn't run out and buy misquoting Jesus and I don't respect that because he knows better than that spelling defaces 70% group number two are alterations that can't even be translated into English why because Greek is a highly inflected language you go what does that mean well here's what it means in Greek word order is not that particular so you can say something like Jesus loves Paul in English that's typically how we do it subject verb complement Jesus loves Paul right you could say that same sentence in Greek but you can move the words around because you don't determine the subject by where it is in the sentence you determine it by the little endings they put on the word so you can say Jesus loves Paul in Greek any multitude of ways and you can also add in the definite article in different places in Greek and you can translate it or not it's a preference issue my Greek professor did his entire doctoral dissertation on the definite article the word the' nerds so if you wanted to say Jesus loves Paul and Greek you could write Jesus loves Paul Jesus loves the Paul D Jesus loves Paul the Jesus loves the Paul Paul Jesus loves the Paul Jesus loves Paul the Jesus loves the Paul the Jesus loves you could keep doing that there are over 500 ways you could write that sentence in Greek and when we translate it into English it will always mean Jesus loves Paul that's how inflected Greek is it's an extremely precise nuanced little language that that simple sentence can be written that many ways when you understand that about Greek 400,000 variants starts to sound pretty remarkably small and so your second group is little alterations that can't even be translated into other languages there that in significant group three-hour changes that are meaningful but not viable meaning they have a poor chance of being authentic you go what does that mean meaningful but not viable what does that mean well let me give you an example of a meaningful variant that's not viable first Thessalonians 2:7 1st Thessalonians 2:7 Paul says we were gentle among you if you're reading the NIV but the t NIV says we were like little children among you and that's a legitimate text critical problem that is actually one text critics debate because the word gentle or little children what did Paul say we were gentle among you or we were like little children among you what is it the difficulty is in Greek there's only a difference of one letter between those two words Apio and na pua right what's tricky is the word before it is a gonna thing right so is it a gonna say an avi or ganas an opioid you catch it it's tricky that's a real problem right there's a 14th century document that says a Ghana --then hippie OE we were like horses among you that's called a meaningful variant why is it called meaningful because the word hippo is a real word is the word horses but it's not viable why because none of the other thousands upon thousands of documents we have says hippie that's obviously ascribed that was missing it or something right so meaningful not viable meaning nobody thinks that's actually what it said those three camps spelling differences untranslatable alterations meaningful but not viable comprise 99% of your 400,000 variants 99% Bart airman never says that in an interview why didn't you say that well because after he stood with Jon Stewart and said there's more variance than there are words whoever knows Jon Stewart goes wow that is one hell of a book and held up his book which is the weird thing to say about a book about God we did and within 48 hours that book shot to number one on Amazon Barney Airman knows better he does he's been presented that by other people he even wrote much later in the appendices some things already do in a minute that he knows better so I think he's being purposely dishonest that's very clear and I don't respect that at all because that hurts people and I find that hateful group number four is the smallest group and that is meaningful and viable that's the one percent we we debate about now I won't have a chance to get into a lot of now we'll do them on the postscript thing in a minute but let me give you one example of meaningful and viable it's from revelation 13:18 revelation 13:18 says let the one who has insight calculate the beasts number four it is the number of a man and his number is 666 right we all know that even those of you that don't like coming to Bible if I said what's the number of the beast you'd be like 666 right because you've heard heavy metal music at some point that's the number of the beast from revelation 13:18 in 1834 our second most important manuscript on Revell the book of Revelation from the fifth century was discovered Konstantin Valentin Dorf yes that's his name and it's personally my favorite name of an textual critic right Konstantin von Tischendorf I love him cool guy found it worked with it helped clean it up because it had been damaged and then over the years it began to get translated in 1970 some men were able to discern some words that had been hidden on this little edge or whatever and it said in revelation 13:18 that the number of the beast was not 666 but six one six I remember Dan Wallace saying that and going now most scholars believe six six six is the number the Beast six one six is you know the neighbour of the beast and I thought that's so funny and I mean the first time I said it so when nobody laughed it was like I guess it's little seminary humor I just thought the neighbor the beast was like a funniest thing I've ever heard I don't know so he said nobody took it really seriously because it was this was one documents one little piece said six one six instead of six six six we all know six six six is the number the beast right until Oxford University about 20 years ago and thousands of papyri that they are still sifting and going through 17 new testament papyri were found one of them had nine chapters of the book of Revelation and there was this little scrap they found near it that had was about the size of a postage stamp and it had revelation 13:18 on it and Dan Wallace went to go investigate that they had put it under a plate of glass or the white sheet behind it and he said okay you can read the front have you read the back and they said no and he said well who's come here to evaluate this piece of papyri and they said counting you said yeah and they said one but this is what he does all day so he read it it is currently the oldest copy of revelation we have and it says six one six right oh no seven tons of popular Christian fiction just went up in flames right all these heavy metal metal album up art is ruined rather this has been number the beasts and some random number right what are we gonna do right truth is there's still some debate that's a serious textual issue is it six six six one six that matters right but here's the deal no church no seminary no Creed says I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and maker of Earth and in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son and the number of the beast a is six six okay so here's the answer to the third question what Orthodox Christian beliefs are dependent upon subjects texts with textual issues in Dan Brown's book his character said until that moment in history meaning the Council of Nicaea in 325 Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet a great and powerful man but a man nonetheless he says that nobody who knew Jesus thought he was God Constantine just changed it all of a sudden in the fourth century to consolidate power is that what happened are there passages where that happen let me show you peace 66 p66 papyrus 66 this is from the second century right and it's the Gospel of John I know you all know that but what you may not know is it's from about AD 150 so about a hundred and fifty years before the Council of Nicaea right and I'd like to read it together so read along with me or read along in your Bible if you want because that's John 1:1 at the top and so you look at your English version I'll read that version from AD 150 and you can see how much it's changed over time in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God he's just like yours why because it hadn't changed the people who knew him knew there's nobody like this guy and they wrote down this wasn't a normal man and this was the Word of God and he became flesh and he dwelt among us and we beheld his glory and even Bart airmen in his book misquoting Jesus they include an interview in the appendices how often do you read the appendices of a book and someone asked him in the appendices and he said and I'll quote essential Christian belief is not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament he titles his book misquoting Jesus and then when asked directly are any Christian doctrines affected by the textual variants you address and he said not one not one that's not the impression he gives in interviews because that wouldn't sell any books and I don't think I'm being cruel I think I'm pointing out a criticism I hope he'll take seriously because I I don't think what he's doing is good so you go Ben what about the Old Testament well you don't have a lot of time for that but let me tell you one story for a long time the oldest copies we had of the Old Testament were from about AD 1000 ad 1000 that was where a lot of more from around that time and in the 1940s the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls dated from about 180 first century AD first century BC so think about that the oldest copies we had for a long time were from a ad 1000 of the Old Testament and then all of a sudden a little boy herding goats discovers a copy from a thousand years earlier talk about a verification of the telephone game we get to run back in the line 1,000 years and see how much did it change over time let me read to you from our layered Harris the scholar who was comparing Isaiah 38 through 66 he says the text is extremely close to the Masoretic text a comparison of Isaiah 53 shows that only 17 letters differ 10 of them are merely differences of spelling like our honor or honor with a ewe and produce no change in the meaning at all four more are very minor differences such as the presence of a conjunction which is often a matter of style the other three are the Hebrew word for light which is added after they shall see in verse 11 out of a hundred and sixty-six words in this chapter only that one word is in question and it doesn't change the sense of the passage at all this is typical of the entire manuscript why does that matter because my hope is that you'll see that over the centuries God wanted to preserve the words of Isaiah who centuries before Jesus wrote he will be despised and rejected by men a man of sorrows acquainted with grief and as one whom men hide their faces surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows we esteemed him stricken smitten by God and afflicted he was wounded for our transgressions crushed for our iniquities upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and by His stripes we are healed all we like sheep have gone astray every one to his own way and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all that over centuries God preserved his word so that you could know I am sending my son to be perfect where you are not to be a sacrifice for sin that by His stripes we are healed and the more I study the transmission of the Bible through history the more I marvel at what I see as is supernatural care taking of this message why because God wants you to know you are beautiful in the image of God you are broken because of sin and God's solution is a savior the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us and was a perfect sacrifice on our behalf and God preserved this word so that when you sit down and read it you can hear the very heart of God that says I sent a hero for you in his name is Jesus that message was worth preserving and he's done it so that you and I sitting here today thousands of years later might know him and my hope this morning is that you would come to know him and as you look into his word you would do it with the confidence of knowing my God has spoken to me about the lover of my soul my hero the King Jesus let me pray for us lord I want to thank you that you have the power to communicate with us and you have enough love for us to want to and the Word of God became flesh Jesus Christ dwelt among us and we beheld his glory and then God yes you spoke to Peter he heard your voice on the mountain but he says then you gave us something more sure the prophetic word that we have the scripture cared for through the centuries meticulously copied by those willing to lay their lives down to transmit to us the message that we can know God through His Son Jesus Christ thank you God that you love us enough to preserve that message that we might know that no one here is beyond saving no one here is beyond the love of God that you came to bear our burden to take away the penalty for our sin to extend to us grace and forgiveness to all who would call out to the name of Jesus and I pray even today Lord there'd be people who stretch out their hand to him and say I trust you I'm going with you and Lord I pray as we sit down and read our Bibles may we marvel that we are reading the very mind and heart of our maker and may we be affected by it and the world see of people who have been changed because they treasure the words of their beloved King thank you God and we pray that in Jesus name welcome to postscript here we hope to answer your questions and help you dig deeper into the messages and sermons at Faith bridge by talking with the teacher of the day hey my name is Hannah Connor and thank you for watching PostScript I'm here with Ben Stewart he's just preached a message on has the Bible been corrupted we've got a ton of questions so let's go ahead and jump into them come on first one in light of what we've just heard the question got over and over is which version of the Bible is best which do you use like yeah well I would say Translation other than verse you know just to be precise about it just because we're translating the text it's not someone kind of coming up with their own version of it but the question becomes there's a scale of what they call on one end dynamic equivalence and on one end word-for-word so like word-for-word translations try to take every Greek word as much as you can and put that word in English but that can make it kind of wooden sometimes dynamic equivalent tries to grab thought for thought so they'll translate a passage and go what's that basically saying in English and bring it across neither are bad so on that spectrum like the message would be way over on dynamic equivalence they don't even call it a translation he calls it a paraphrase right I like reading like the message is great or the voice those are cool just kind of for reading what I'm doing real studying my preference would be the ESV English standard version or the new American Standard na s or the net version although the Nets pretty wouldn't so ESV na s but then I also like the the NIV stands probably right in the middle so the NIV is really good as well and so any of those would be great and I think you could grab all those so for me I read them all and because usually it's people trying to find different English words to help bring across the Greek or Hebrew word and that helps you understand it so those are all great that's good yeah that's such a big deal to so many of us how do we navigate the differences on it is that something like this is my the hill that I died on about a translation er no I mean I think it's you know again sometimes it's helpful to read something like like I remember for me trying to really study every word of the Bible I'm like I need a version that's really going for that so then the net the new English translation has a lot of textual notes and I need that but sometimes when you want to just sit and read poetry the the NIV will grab the poetry of Psalms better you know purpose yeah exactly that's a great way to say that Hann thank you yeah so so I don't know that you have to say well there's just it's this one in the rest of garbage you oh no no no there's a lot of them that different scholars got in the room and did them so NIV na s es B I think those are great new King James is good too so I don't know that there needs to be a war about those truthfully yeah we got a lot of questions from people who are clearly feeling like men I don't hearing this makes me feel like I need to know more I need to go deeper questions about can and a lot of things we might not be able to get into and this time can you give us some resources yeah well Daniel B Wallace is if you're more into like the language and how was the language translated he's written books about textual transmission kind of what I just did so you can go to Amazon type in his name you can go to Daniel B Wallace comm you can go to the Center for the Study of New Testament manuscripts I think it's C s and T M that are yeah and for more history questions like what why did these books make it into the Bible why these didn't that's not necessarily like a translation issue that's more like what happened in history so like a justo Gonzalez's book the story of Christianity would help you with that or even a systematic theology book could help you with that too like wayne grudem's book he'll have a section on bibley all of the Bible so I would try Wayne Grudem systematic or justo Gonzales a story of Christianity and just dive in man those will be great yeah let me just chew that up and spit it out back you four go for it yeah yeah tell us about some of the more meaningful and viable difference between these texts you loaded that in your sermon a bit yeah yeah well totally it's it's um there's a handful like I said one percent and the two biggest I mean biggest in terms of like size number of words would be what's often called the longer ending of mark and then that passage in John 7 about the woman caught in adultery and so a lot of English translations like if you looked now in your Bible it would say the earliest and most reliable transcripts do not include Papapa you know and so scholars for honestly over well over a century from conservative to liberal scholars have looked at those and looked at there's a 1st John 5 we don't even put in English Bibles because those three people look and say these were not a part of the original Gospels they weren't the the longer ending of mark is you can tell when you read it kind of a pulling of other Gospels and so none of our earliest most reliable age groups have that one I think that really was people trying to because if you think about when the early books of the Bible were passed around you weren't necessarily given them all and so if you were just handed mark mark ends with a big cliffhanger and so you would have him in ancient documents even like spaced out towards the bottom someone would write a brief ending the women did go tell everybody and it worked out great but they weren't necessarily saying I'm gonna sneak in this inspired portion and so that's where I think biblical scholars are saying now that part's not Mark didn't write that the woman caught in adultery that one has a lot longer history like that document that story is very old but historically it was not stuck where it is in John and so that really occupies its own space of people wanting to hold on to that story or that moment but go but it it's not in the for and so even some old copyists of the Bible would put it like in the margin of going like we don't want to we want you to know this story but we don't know where to put like it doesn't go here so let's write it over here and then people like I so great let's stick it in but scholars from the from very early on if said this was not originally where you see it in John so my personal view those should be pulled out because I think it confuses people so I don't teach the longer ending of mark because I'm with the vast majority of New Testament scholars mark didn't write it now there's other little bitty ones but they're really small but it's interesting like BART airmen in his book well he co-wrote with his mentor I pulled it out if you really have trouble sleeping at night you can read the text of the New Testament by Metzger and airman it is painstaking detail Metzger Airman's mentor you can read his testimony in case for Christ by Lee Strobel it was interesting when Bart Airmen's book came out a writer in the Washington Post said this guy peered so deeply into the ancient copies of the New Testament until he saw that they were false so the assumption there is if you really study this seriously you'll realize it's not true but that was like some journalists saying that in Washington Metzger was interviewed by Strobel and he said you've been peering into the depths of this has this week into your faith and he says no it's strengthened it he said it's remarkable what you run into when you start really running into this so Airman's doubts I don't think are really at the root of them and I'm not his counselor but rooted in textual issues they're rooted in I think some deeper difficulties in his life but in his book he'll mention some of these as real bombshells but they're really not so like in mark 1 there's debate on does it say Jesus became angry as the word angry in there and airman his book will say that changes your whole view of Jesus it was Jesus and angry man that's we wrote in this book and you're like well multiple times in Mark 3 mark 10 Jesus is called angry so Jesus gets angry all through mark so whether the word angry is in mark 1 or not doesn't affect our view of Jesus at all or one of the big ones he'll camp in on it's Matthew 24 where Jesus says no one not the angel no the son of man knows when the end will come several translations of Matthew stick in nor the Son of Man but it's it's not in the most reliable ones of Matthew and airman mentions that half a dozen times in his book of saying oh my gosh so does he or does he not know when the end will come this completely changes our picture of Jesus near Ike well if you read mark there's no textual debate over the fact that Jesus absolutely says the son of man doesn't know when the end will come but Airmen never mentions that mark passage which that's basic Bible study why cuz it doesn't support his thesis so that's why like I pray for him I want good for him in life but I get frustrated because he's been called on that it's not it's not it's not good scholarship to do that right and so it's frustrating to me but I agree with his mentor and Metzger's other protegees like Dan Wallace that the more you study this the more you see it's absolutely remarkable how well this has been preserved so those are some of your biggest ones with a bunch of me just rambling in it but there you go that's good that's really horrible yeah and I think what would also be helpful is if you can give us some guidance on like how do we enter into conversations like this productively like what should our goal be when we're talking to a brother or sister in Christ about this kind of minutiae of the faith or an unbeliever yeah I think it's hard to hold all this in your mind so some people do that they're like oh my gosh I got to have all this loaded up so the next time my friend goes well how do you even know that's Jesus not gonna Tischendorf and fourth say no no or like it's very hard to hold all that in your mind so I don't think you have to I think if someone says to you well how do you even know you have what was written back then what I would do is just not get angry you would just say you know what man there's some people who've you would be amazed if you scratch the surface how deep the scholarship goes Darrell Bock and Daniel Wallace wrote a book dethroning Jesus which talks a lot about these modern questions people are asking I would say hey you need to check out daniel woloson but dethroning Jesus cuz it's gonna answer your questions but then I would spin it back to them of going I want to challenge you like no one changed history more than Jesus Christ he claimed he was God a third of the planet says they agree with that you got a deal with that man and if you're wondering what does this an accurate presentation of them or not do you think that's worth reading a book about like this guy changed history everyone will say more than a native human being I really want to challenge you man you need to go on a journey to figure out who this guy is like don't miss that opportunity and so that's where I would put it on them because what happened with a lot of people as they say no I don't want to and you okay the issue isn't textual reliability the issue is I don't want anyone telling me what to do but see now you've made it about the heart issue rather than being on the defensive about 11th century documents there's great books they can read about that if they want to but I would keep trying to steer the conversation back to the person of Jesus he's the center point in history and he's all that matters at the end of the day is what are you doing with this man and so when someone tells me well I don't know if we have an accurate presentation of him to me that's just that's translation for I don't know what I'm talking about you know and you're like okay so I'm not mad at you the July came in I would challenge you to go on a journey because I think you'll be surprised what you found and a lot of people when they go on that journey they find far more than they expected and like CS Lewis they're surprised by joy so that's that's where I would go that's great yeah bring it back to Jesus every time go mole thanks well thanks for sticking around Ben thanks for watching and I will see you next week thanks for joining us for PostScript help us keep the podcast interactive by submitting your questions during the morning services learn more at faith bridged org slash PostScript
