Is What We Have Now What They Wrote Then? // Dr. Daniel Wallace

foreign [Music] thank you uh for that introduction jimmy i'm here because he insisted that i come this year to speak to you i have cut out speaking engagements for from 21 to 23 because of a book i'm writing on the text of the new testament and it may extend into 2024. i started it in 1979 so my wife says i'm not a procrastinator i just do side projects i hadn't heard the one about me being indiana jones before but i can tell you this i am not at all like indiana jones he was an american imperialist thief all that i take are pictures nothing else and that actually is a very important thing to remember because these monasteries want to keep their manuscripts and we want to show them how much we value them csntm you can remember it this way if you know who that's the initials of the organization and it would be great if you could visit the website to see what we've done you know who c.s lewis is that's the first two letters and you've all watched wizard of oz and you know who anti-m is cs and tm csntm it doesn't take too much imagination some of you from oklahoma still aren't getting it i guess okay but csntm.org that's our website you can see uh we've got blogs on the places we've been over four dozen places i've been in 35 different countries and we're the world's leading institute for digitizing and discovering greek new testament manuscripts to help us get back to the original wording of the new testament it's a very very exciting project but jimmy i wanted to make one correction about what you had to say and that was the names of my children you at least got biblical names that's that's important because my wife and i are very godly couple and we have our children named after people in the bible because if you don't you're a sinner and so uh and we have four boys but we ne we didn't i don't know where you came up with noah benjamin andrew zachary um our boys are named after men in just one chapter in the bible revelation chapter 6 death pestilence famine and disease and sometimes when i speak on occasion sadly death follows me but as you can see by looking at me famine and i have always been estranged so is what we have now what they wrote then here's a picture of one of the earliest manuscripts of paul's letters there's 86 leaves of it and this is the end of ephesians and the beginning of galatians it's uh written about ad250 maybe as early as 200. we photographed all the leaves several years ago and just amazing to see these ancient manuscripts ephesians comes before galatians in this one just the opposite of all modern books my bibles and you might say that scribe got it wrong well this is the first copy we have of paul's letters maybe the rest of us got it wrong i don't know why we switched but that's that's for another day okay my topic is is what we have now what they wrote then and i want to start with a skeptical view about that i'm starting with a quote from that great scholar dan brown in his da vinci code he says the bible has evolved through countless translations editions and revisions history has never had a definitive version of the book well he's a novelist but he believes this to be the case so let me get somebody that we might want to take a little more seriously kurt eichenwald who's a saint mark's graduate from dallas and he is a journalist writing for newsweek which used to be an accurate telling of the news he wrote an article the bible so misunderstood it's a sin and this came out two days before christmas uh seven years ago you can see that when you get these onslaughts of christianity in newspapers magazines radio podcasts television shows they always happen around christmas or easter and the the reason is to say you christians are going to be especially interested in jesus around christ christmas and easter and we want to show you how stupid you are for believing in him it's a very skeptical view here's what he says in this accurate news magazine playing telephone with the word of god that's his section no television preacher has ever read the bible neither has any evangelical politician neither has the pope and neither have i so far i would agree with everything he's written and then he says and neither have you at best we've all read a bad translation a translation of translations of translations of hand copied copies of copies of copies of copies and on and on hundreds of times so you're playing the telephone game it goes down hundreds of times through copies bad translations we can't possibly tell what the original new testament said presented as historically accurate that is his statement about the inaccuracy of the bible atheists also are saying this cj whirlman wrote a book his first book was called god lie uh hates you hate him back and so uh he's an atheist think about that title for a moment i think a more honest title from an atheist would be nothing hates you hate nothing back if there is no god so you know why say god hates you his second book he likes provocative titles jesus lied he was only human tied up to a lie detector and here's what he has to say we do not have any of the original manuscripts of the bible the originals are lost we don't know when and we don't know by whom i agree with what he's saying so far we have what we have are copies of copies in some instances the copies we have are 20th generation copies no idea where he got that last line from but then there's others that might be taken even more seriously in the most popular british muslim apologist who attacks christianity uh is m.m al osomy i was in england in september for a couple of weeks in oxford and cambridge and birmingham and london examining manuscripts and we'll be we'll be going back here one of these days to photograph some of the manuscripts that we looked at and here's what he has to say the orthodox church being the sect which eventually established supremacy over all the others stood in fervent opposition to various ideas also known as heresies which were in circulation these included adoptionism the notion that jesus was not god but a man remember he's saying this is what was in circulation this author of uh one of the books the new testament might hold to adoptionism another hold of dostatis another to separationism he goes on he says dostatism the opposite view that he was god and not man and separationism that the divine and human elements of jesus christ were two separate beings in each case this sect the one that would rise to become the orthodox church deliberately corrupted the scripture so as to reflect its own theological visions of christ while demolishing that of all rival sects what is he saying essentially he's saying and this is what many many muslims and many skeptics believe that in 83 25 when emperor constantine the first christian emperor and the first one to legalize christianity uh convened the council of nicaea and at that council there were two things that skeptics say happened constantine said here's the books of the new testament i'm telling you what goes in and what goes out so that would be one way in which this is demolishing that of all rival sects the other thing that constantine allegedly did is he invented the deity of christ and that's what mml ozomy is promoting if that's true we can't possibly tell what the original new testament said what we have in our hands is copies of copies of copies of handwritten copies of bad translations of bad who knows maybe it's a a fairy tale like the gilgamesh epic or something we don't know if that's what the skeptics are saying is true but do they get this kind of information from any kind of a better source than these popular statements well actually they do from a man by the name of bart ehrman he is a graduate of moody bible institute very christian school in chicago and wheaton college evangelical he was an evangelical at the time he went on to princeton seminary to get his master of divinity and he studied under the great bruce metzger one of the best new testament scholars of the 20th century and a fine evangelical scholar then he got his phd under bruce metzger also at princeton seminary and uh bart ehrman has been one of the best new testament textual critics that's somebody who's trying to examine the manuscripts to determine the exact wording of the original uh that we he's one of the best that we have today his first popular book was misquoting jesus and he's written several since then but in this book he makes some statements that skeptics are just running with he's a name you need to know because bart ehrman has become the number one apologist for skepticism about christianity in the country the number one apologist against the christian faith he abandoned the faith sometime after his doctoral program he now calls himself either an agnostic or an atheist or an agnostic atheist or atheistic agnostic it kind of depends on what day it is i guess but here's what he had to say this is a man we need to listen to not only do we not have the originals we don't have the first copies of the originals we don't even have copies of the copies of the originals or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals 20th generation that's what that other guy said this is as far as irma goes but that's a pretty astounding statement and then toward the end of his book he says the more i studied the manuscript tradition of the new testament the more i realized just how radically the texts had been altered over the years at the hands of the scribes it would be it would be wrong to say as people sometimes do that the changes in our text have no real bearing on what the texts mean or on the theological conclusions that one draws from them you start thinking about this and these are pretty serious attacks on the reliability of the bible i think this is good enough let's close the prayer shall we good good news right well you older generation know who paul harvey is and so now i'm going to tell you the rest of the story i want to start with two attitudes that we need to avoid the first is what i've just read from various people radical skepticism i could reproduce that 100 fold from all sorts of people who say we can't possibly get back to the original and if we could it would certainly look different from what we have today radical skepticism i don't think too many of you are going to go in that direction but maybe there's some skeptics here and that's great but the other attitude we need to avoid is absolute certainty some years ago i was giving a lecture on the reliability of the bible and i talked about translations and what the better translations were and a man came up to me and he had a king james bible a very well-worn king james bible and he said look i disagree with everything you had to say if the king james bible was good enough for saint paul is good enough for me and he was serious so i immediately changed the conversation how about dumb cowboys that's all he could really handle of an intellectual pursuit i guess but but you all might fall into the same trap if you have an esv one of the most popular translations out there they've done some minor tweaks but they're ready to do some major revisions if you use the niv the most popular bible in the history of the world over a billion copies sold it is the number one book sold all ever know of course the bible is the most popular book and the niv is the most popular translation i've been on four different translation committees still on two and the niv is one of them and i even worked on the new king james bible a little bit but uh if you use um one of these modern translations they tweak it if you have the niv is it the 1984 version is it the 2000 and i think it's 11 version we're working on a revision that'll come out in another 10 years or so which version do you use the text changes because we're doing more and more research literally millions of man and woman hours have been devoted to trying to determine the exact wording of the original text and then faithfully translating that but our text changed because of our integrity and so if you say i have in my hands every single word in here is the very word of god i have the words of god completely totally without any error in it in my bible then i'd say you've overstated your case what you do have is the very word of god but not always the very words of god you see the difference but what are the differences well do we really have errors in our modern translations what are the kinds of differences that we're dealing with we'll look at that as we get into this so i have i have a long introduction and then about five minutes for the actual substance of my lectures but here's four questions to answer we haven't gone to the introduction yet this is the preface to the introduction but four questions that we want to answer and we'll spend the vast majority of our time on the first one then we'll go through the other three pretty quickly how many textual variants are there that is how many differences among the manuscripts do we have all these manuscripts how many are there and how many texture variants are there what kinds of textual variations are there what kinds of differences do we see are they just little things are they big issues what theological beliefs depend on textually suspect passages that's this and the last question of the real money questions does the virgin birth depend on on this greek manuscript and all the others say jesus was not born of a virgin does the deity of christ depend on hang on maybe a couple of manuscripts and they might be wrong and others say jesus was not god and obviously the big issues has the essence of the christian faith been corrupted by the scribes those are what we're going to try to answer today but i have another preliminary question don't we have the original new testament anymore well the answer to that is no all 27 books of the new testament were sent out as documents to others usually letters and once they were dispatched that's the original once it gets there they start making copies and they would make copies of copies but they would also make people would come maybe 100 years later and say do you still have the original paul's letter to the romans yes we have most of it but most of it's fallen apart or some of it's fallen apart so you can write that out and we have a good copy that has all the words which may have mistakes in it and so people copied the text so frequently because they valued the words of paul and matthew mark luke and john that they uh they wore out these papyrus manuscripts we don't have the originals anymore they all disappeared within a century of the right of their writing but what about the copies if the copies all agree with each other then we don't need to do what's called textual criticism trying to get back to the original we just say that must be it because they all agree no even through the first 800 years of christian air of the christian era our two closest manuscripts in terms of agreement disagree 6 to 10 times per chapter so if you were to extrapolate that out for the holy testament that's about 2 000 differences so even our copies disagree so because the originals have disappeared the copies disagree we have to do textual research so i've got another preliminary question i think this is yeah this is the last preliminary question what is a textual variant it's any place among the manuscripts in which there is a variation it could be wording including word order omission addition of words even spelling differences count as textual variants what doesn't count is punctuation and capitalization because in our original manuscripts all the words were capitalized that's all they used was just capital letters and they didn't have any breaks in the words and they used no punctuation it's actually much easier to read greek that way than you would realize it would be much more difficult to read english like that but this is the way in which we count a variant all right so how many variants do we actually have among these manuscripts in this greek new testament there are approximately 138 162 words now it's got some of you in the front row can see this the others take it by faith you've got text up here and in here you've got footnotes these footnotes in smaller print are telling you the variations from this text and which manuscripts have these differences some pages the text gets bigger some page that apparatus gets to three-fourths high how many variants do we have among all the manuscripts we have approximately 1.5 million variants such an astounding number more than 10 times the number of variants as there are words in the original greek new testament how in the world did we get that many and should that scare us i mentioned c.s lewis earlier here's a good quote from him the moment the miracle enters nature's realm it obeys all her laws miraculous wine will intoxicate miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption miraculous bread will be digested so when you start getting copies of the original there will be mistakes but here's the reason we have so many and there's nothing in the ancient world that has nearly as many textual variations as the new testament the reason we have a lot of textual variants is because we have a lot of manuscripts in fact scholars have called it an embarrassment of riches the greek manuscripts alone the original language of the new testament handwritten documents all of them unique today the count is well over 5 500. there's it could be as high as 6 000 but there's some that were found later to be this manuscript is a part of this manuscript so they count that as one instead but but these are fragmentary or complete new testaments or complete sections the gospels especially were very very popular but the new testament did not just sit in greek if you have a quran the only inspired quran is the arabic quran all translation they regard as interpretation but it's not what the quran says not so with the new testament we regard all of this as the word of god what you have in your hands in english is the word of god and the new testament got to be translated very early on as early as the late second century into latin we yet don't do not yet know how many latin manuscripts of the new testament we have about 10 000 is the best guess latin swept across europe and it became the lingua franca more than greek did after a while so we have almost twice as many latin manuscripts as we do greek but it also got translated into coptic and syriac and armenian in hebrew and arabic and old church slavonic and georgian and gotham gothic our best guess is that these other ancient versions or translations there's somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand manuscripts and i've seen quite a few of them very very impressive often to be slavishly faithful to the greek manuscript that they copied from that we no longer have that's 20 to 25 000 manuscripts that's a lot now if you had a magic wand and could wipe all of these down out in one fell swoop we still would not be left without a witness and that's because we also have the writings of the church fathers patristic writings starting in the late 1st century we get writings by the fir by the church fathers all the way up through the 12th or 13th century and they commented on every single book of the new testament sometimes many times sometimes there were many church fathers that commented on several books of the new testament you had a magic wand you wipe all these out all these manuscripts out we still could reconstruct virtually the entire new testament many times over from the writings of the church fathers that's impressive we have well over a million quotations from the new testament by these church fathers okay this sounds interesting but how does it compare to other greco-roman literature let's take a look i'm going to compare it to the average classical greek writer and then i i wish i had time to develop this more and i was going to have four or five different greek authors i'd compare to that are far beyond uh average they're well-known historians but the copies they have are just minimal i'll just do one the average classical greek writer has fewer than 15 copies of his work still in existence you compare that to the new testament well you stack up these greek authors manuscripts they'd stack up to about four feet high about the size of this table how about the new testament so i would have if i had spoken from a podium the way i properly should do in a church it'd be about the same height what would we use for the new testament to show how high the stack is it's good to get a visual representation of this i think the empire state building in new york city is a great illustration of this and i said it's in new york city for those of you who are from oklahoma you've heard of it but now you know where it is okay this is to scale this is what this is going to look like to scale you see that little dot i think you can see that dot up there that's that's four feet high that's the empire state building so you do the comparison and 1454 feet tall including the the radar i mean the radio antennas on top but i've got more room on this this would be the numbers of manuscripts new testament groups stacks of copies going up and up and up oh it's three oh it's four is four and a half empire state buildings we have over six thousand six hundred feet tall stacks of new testament manuscripts not counting the writings of the church fathers i have no idea how to count those a mile and a quarter plus four feet tall new testament scholars have such an embarrassment of riches that we want help from others to help us decipher this and get into the text and see what it is if i were to do for an average classical author what i'm doing for the new testament of digitizing all copies of their manuscripts i would get done in just a few weeks the center for the study of new testament manuscript has already it's already into its 20th year and we're about 20 percent done so i want to compare this to one well-known historian xenophon he's a great military genius philosopher historian he gave some of the most detailed uh descriptions of battles that we've ever seen that's how we learn how great of a military his genius he was and in his hellenica very significant work our first substantial manuscripts more than just a scrap of papyrus here there don't come for 1700 years until after his death over 1700 years later after he died now we get our first substantial copies of hellenica and what what if the new testament we're like that what if our oldest copies of the new testament were this late well you know you get these people i've already quoted from them saying well we have copies of copies of copies how can we possibly trust that that goes back to it xenophon scholars don't doubt that the substantial text that they have in the manuscripts represents exactly what xenophon said well if our copies of the new testament were this late it would be like saying the new testament the oldest manuscripts we have in the new testament were written at about the time the united states became the united states that's when the skeptics would have a field day wouldn't they they think they do but they're not comparing it to anything else so what about the dates of these manuscripts though that i mean we're getting uh we looked at the dates of herodotus and some of the others a little bit some general statements let me tell you briefly about the oldest new testament manuscript at least it was the oldest one dated almost uh 100 years ago this is discovery of p52 in 1934 it's about the size of a credit card and on one side it's got part of john 18 on the back side it's got another part of john 18. we know that this manuscript was written on a codex now we know that the new testament manuscripts were all originally written on a scroll which was the ancient book form a codex is this book form it's got two covers and three cut sides and you can flip pages with a scroll you have to roll it to get to the place so when jesus is reading out of the scroll of isaiah in luke's gospel where he's back home in nazareth he has to scroll all these chapters until he gets to chapter 61 to find where he's reading you could just flip in this now if you are a millennial you might never have seen one of these things it's called a book when you read you typically read on your i can't even say computer that's almost passing now your ipad your iphone whatever you're going to use and you've gone retro on us you're using a scroll to read in the first century the codex form was actually invented we don't know who did it but we do know that all of our new testament manuscripts that we have copies of are written on a codex and we also know that the christians use the codex more than anybody else 94 of all christian manuscripts for the first 500 years of the christian era were written on a codex only 15 of all non-christian manuscripts were written on a codex during those 500 years it was the first and only time in the history of the church where we were ahead of the technological curve p-52 this little fragment was discovered when european scholarship was saying that john's gospel was written in the second half of the second century most said about ad170 well if it's written that late they also said it doesn't have anything that's even resembles historical accuracy is written so late not written by a disciple not written by anybody who knew jesus it was handed down through generations that was the predominant view in europe until 1934 when this manuscript was discovered in a shoe box it had been brought out of egypt and it was dated by three different experts between 100 and 150. now i don't know what you were taught in school i grew up in california and you can save your booze for later but i was taught that generally speaking an original of a document is written before the copy of the document is made that's generally true is it not this sent two tons of german scholarship to the flames nope you dated it that late you guys just read dead wrong it reminds me of a little saying that a professor taught me an ounce of evidence is worth a pound of presumption there was all this philosophical construct hundreds thousands of pages written on the assumption that john's gospel must be written about 170. toss it all to the flames because we have an ounce of evidence literally announce a small fragment from john's gospel that shows nope the original was written before you think it was and consequently so are the copies the original manuscript goes back to john pretty faithfully okay well let me just give you a a broad sense and i wish i had time to go over this but you go this century by century and we have as many as a dozen manuscripts from the second century this is actually dated from last year this slide and i should update it there may be as many as 15 or 16 now there's more and more papyri that are coming out that are dated very very early second century 100 to by the time we get to ad1000 we have at least 967 manuscripts in greek hand-written manuscripts of the new testament i'm just looking at greek manuscripts here well if you look at the average greco-roman author we have more copies of the new testament in the first two centuries than the average greco-roman author has in 2000 years and with within 900 years of the new testament's completion we've got almost a thousand manuscripts in greek alone within 900 years of the average classical authors writings zero manuscripts zero new testament good grief we have a thousand xenophon oh we're still waiting another 800 years before we see anything that's substantial at all that's pretty darn impressive there's another way to put this has the bible been translated and re-translated so many times that we don't know what it originally said well you can look at this from just the perspective of something that we all can sink our teeth into the king james bible something you know about something you can read this was published in 1611 and it was essentially based on eight greek manuscripts the earliest of which went back to the 11th century and we're talking about the new testament itself now in the year 2022 we have more than 5 500 manuscripts thousands of times more almost 800 manuscripts per single manuscript that the king james authors used and our oldest manuscripts go back almost a thousand years earlier than theirs you know what's really amazing is the heidelberg confession that you guys were reading from earlier it's written even before the king james translation was done and yet what they said that then based on the copies of the bible that they had then we can say today it hasn't changed but i'll get to that point later sorry i'm getting ahead of myself so the bottom line as time goes on we are getting closer and closer to the original text not farther away we still have those eight manuscripts that they used manuscripts don't get uh copied and then they throw that manuscript away manuscripts get copied and then they store it and then we get to see it now the earliest ones were missing the first generation of copies but even somebody coming along 100 years later might be a direct copyist of the original manuscript it's amazing as time goes on though whatever else we want to say we're getting closer and closer to the original text so i can say without any doubt without any exaggeration with what uh i um oh the the fell who wrote news newsweek uh ike i qualt kurt iqwa what he said is absolute rubbish he has no idea what he's talking about when he says we're reading a bad translation of that no translations are not based on other translations they go back to the oldest manuscripts we have and constantly they're improving as time goes on we're finding more manuscripts okay that was question one told you that would take all our time i hope that's helpful to you i know it's it's like drink it from a fire hose way too much information but what you need to get is this we have so much data and it's so early that nothing in the ancient world even comes close to comparing to this so we have a lot of variants because we have a lot of manuscripts but the real money question is what kind of textual variants are there and over 99 percent make virtually no difference at all it's actually over 99.9 percent they make virtually no difference at all for example differences in spelling if you're from oklahoma you didn't catch the joke there was no dictionary back then and so people could spell words the way they wanted to my brother once wrote a check out to me and he misspelled actually his own name last service i said he misspelled my name he actually misspelled his own name and accidentally but it was hard to cash that check he really owed me some money but he did it accidentally john the author of the fourth gospel was a creative speller within the space of eight verses he writes the exact same greek word three different ways for those of you who know enough greek to be dangerous it's the verb anoigo third-person singular first-airest active indicative of anoigo he writes writes it three different ways but we won't uh go into that more but he was a creative speller it didn't affect anything changed exactly the same okay so here's a question for the greek geeks in the audience how many ways are there to say john loves mary in greek and we're talking about the numbers of variants that are totally insignificant this is a good illustration of the kinds of things we see in the new testament 99.9 percent fit into this general category so items to consider is how many ways are they say john loves mary well the word can order it can be mary loves john loves john mary any or or you want because it's the endings that tell you what the subject is and what the object is and also the greek article with proper names we are not exactly sure why it's used it might say that john loves the mary or john loves the mirror there was no indefinite article it doesn't say a john loves the mary but i wrote my master's thesis on when the article does not occur and i spent 1200 hours on that master's thesis went through the whole new testament before the age of computers it's how old i am and then i did my doctoral dissertation on when the does occur these two works would cure the most hopeless insomniac and i still don't understand why the is used with proper names it has not affected a single doctrine and it's just never translated so differences and spellings as well like the way you can say john and greek you ice or ioannis the different ways to spell mary so here's the eight ways you can say john loves mere and greek you should write this down because it will show up on the test so write all the greek down yeah right 96 ways to say john loves mary and greek at least that was my first stab at it but you can also use conjunctions that are often untranslated in greek and they might put a slight emphasis some of which we don't really fully grasp so if you did that oh there's yeah that's right 384 ways to say john loves mary and greek i hope you appreciate this it took me eight hours to make those slides and we zipped through you know 60 slides in just a couple minutes so and i realized when i got all done no there's some i missed so these are not all the ways you could say john loves mary and greek there's other legitimate word orders that i missed at the time i figured i think i've proved my point though then there's a paraphrastic construction for loves that doubles all of this to now over a thousand i'm still using the verbal form of agape each time we know john john never becomes peter or james mary is always mary it's always agape but what if i use a different verb like fellow a little bit more intimate love that mushrooms the numbers to over 2 000 ways to say john loves mary and greek without any substantial difference that's impressive isn't it it's impressive when you put that piece of data up against what bart ehrman says in his book we could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the new testament came to be changed either accidentally or intentionally the examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands i'd say they're in the hundreds of thousands and these are not the issues that textual critics talk about because it would bore them to death we are talking about that less than one tenth of one percent those are the textual variants that are most interesting if we can say john loves mary over a thousand times in greek without changing the meaning the number of textual variants the estimate is meaningless i don't care if it's one and a half million i don't care if it's a hundred million what counts is the nature of the variance that's where we ask the real question how does this affect the text less than one tenth of one percent of all textual variants are both meaningful and viable that is they affect the mean somehow and they're viable they have a good chance of actually reflecting the original wording less than one tenth of one percent this is not to scale that dot should be a lot smaller than that so i'm going to give you a couple of illustrations illustrations of meaningful and viable variants just two because of time this is one of my favorites in mark 9 29 we find as far as i'm aware the only verse where a textual variant may impact orthopraxy orthodoxy is right belief orthopraxy is right behavior right actions it has to do with exorcisms this is the only verse in the new testament that essentially says you must fast if you're going to exercise some really pesky demons and so mark 9 29 the disciples failed came to jesus and he said this kind can only be cast out by prayer period in a lot of the manuscripts and quite a few are very early very difficult to tell what's original but a lot of other ones including early ones say and fasting so did jesus say you can cast out these pesky demons just by prayer or is it prayer and fasting i've been involved in a couple of exorcisms and i've hedged my bed i pray and i fast just to make sure i'm serious i mean that's that's i know it's funny but it's i just was i wasn't sure okay here's one that's really well known revelation 13 18. doesn't affect orthodoxy doesn't affect orthopraxy let the one who has insight calculate the beast number for it is the number of a man and his number six six six really are we sure of that in the 1840s a german scholar very young in his career was visiting paris and he examined a manuscript that was written in about a.d 400 and it had the book of revelation in it as well as parts of the rest of the new testament and old testament one of the oldest manuscripts we have that has so much material but it was a palum cest that's just a fancy word to say that the text he was trying to read had been erased or literally scraped off of this parchment animal skin so that somebody could write somebody's sermons there on top of it it's ironic my sermons are more important than scripture but you know let's get rid of scripture i i like what i have to say there's some churches like down in houston that would do that i guess anyway um so what he discovered and it took him two years to trace out those letters underneath that the ones written on top you can still barely see them two years of labor 150 leaves to do this five 300 pages and he was able to detect over 99 percent of this manuscript and he discovered in revelation 13 and it says the number of the beast is 6 1 6 not 6 6 6. well that's interesting and there's reasons why that might be original and what it would mean but that was the only manuscript we had now it was talked about in the second century by irenaeus he said there are manuscripts that have the beast number 616 but i don't think they're they go back to john what he wrote irenaeus said i think 666 is the original he gave some reasons he may be right but this variant was known in the 2nd century in the 100s but it wasn't until 20 years ago where now it's i guess 22 years ago 23 that another manuscript popped up it was a papyrus fragment covering nine chapters in revelation there were 26 little fragments and one of those fragments about the size of a postage stamp had revelation 13 18 in it and it was published as i said about 23 years ago it's an oxarencus papyrus very old ancient uh papyrus and it's um much older it's the oldest manuscript we have for this portion of revelation for many portions of revelation and it also says the number of the beast is 616. so now we have early patristic evidence and we have one of the two most important manuscripts and the earliest manuscript for revelation that say the number of the beast is 616. well is it i i am the senior new testament editor for the net bible and i'm the one who also makes the primary textual decisions if i were just thinking to play a joke i might say i insist that 616 is the right reading give all the reasons for it and that could get published in the next iteration which would then send about seven tons of popular christian literature to the flames 666 we all know that but what's really at stake here frankly i don't know if 616 or 666 is the right reading but i don't know of a single church a single bible institute a seminary bible college any other christian organization that has in its doctrinal statement it says we believe in the resurrection of christ we believe in the deity of christ we believe in his as crucified work as atoning for our sins we believe in the verge of birth and we believe that the number of the beast is 666. it's important but it's not that important now frankly most scholars would say no 616 that's not the number of the beast that's the neighbor of the beast he just lives a couple doors down you know some days i wake up ah first thing in my mind 666 i think that's original other days it's 616. i'm not sure but what does it affect you don't lose sleep over this probably i have to or else i'll be out of a job you know okay question three what theological beliefs depend on textually suspect passages well we come back to that great scholar dan brown and he has sir lee tibing tell sophie in france about the council of nicaea in a.d 325 when constantine allegedly um declared that jesus is god and this is the first time it came about my dear he declared until that moment in history jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet a great and powerful man but a man nonetheless immortal well he's saying that constantine invented the deity of christ and i have seen plenty of skeptical apologist books that make this very same claim like that muslim an ounce of evidence is worth a pound of presumption this is much more than an ounce of evidence it's papyrus number 66. it's about 125 years older than that council of nicaea and that council of nicaea constantine did not make up the deity of christ they were simply trying to define what they already believed in words that could be put into a confession this manuscript has almost all of john in and this is the very first page 125 years before the council of nicaea and so what it says in john 1 1 is certainly going to be quite different from what we have later because constantine invented the deity of christ so read along with me if you would in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god you don't have that in your bibles do you of course you do every bible says that it might say it in slightly different words like what god was the word was i love that translation but every single manuscript of john's gospel no matter the date no matter the language says virtually the same thing in john 1 1 jesus is unequivocally called god and the same could be said about the major passages that affirm his deity virgin birth sinlessness death on a cross his bodily resurrection second coming and on and on and not a single variant contradicts this that's powerful the confessions that were made in the 16th century are based on different variants as well no they're representing bibles that had different variants about 5 000 variants from what we have today but none of them rises to the significance of affecting any doctrine isn't that amazing we do have such a you'd almost think maybe somebody's behind the scenes preserving the word somehow even with all these mistakes question four the has the essence of the christian faith been corrupted by the scribes well i'll conclude with this eighty years ago sir frederick kenyon who is a paleographer extraordinaire and the principal librarian of the british museum was studying he's the one who discovered that first manuscript or first published about it that i put on the very first screen he said the general result of all these discoveries and all the study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the scriptures and our conviction that we have in our hands in substantial integrity the veritable word of god 80 years ago this is what sir frederick kenyon said today i'm saying the same thing we have in our hands in substantial integrity the veritable word of god sure there's some places we don't know what the original is like 616 or 666 but you're not going to change your life because of that don't trust just sir frederick kenyon you can trust bart irman on this in the paperback version to his um misquoting jesus which was added after a few months they wanted to keep the cells going on well over a million copies were sold within about a year i think but they they wanted to bump the sales up they had a hardback version they created a paperback and they had an appendix in there where the editors of the of misconduct were asking him some questions based on their understanding of what he had written and so they came right to the point why do you believe these core tenets of christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts when that very direct question was posed to ehrman he had this to say page 252 of the paperback version you can get it at half-price books and you should and xerox that page i'm sorry photocopy it take a picture on your iphone whatever you do nowadays and show it to your skeptical friends essential christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the new testament what i thought that's what your book was saying all along he speaks in generalities where chicken littles are going to declare that the sky is falling but when you start to look at the details you say oh the situation is completely different from how it was shaped how my understanding was shaped two-thirds of christian kids or those who come from a christian home leave the church after college two-thirds of them because of skeptics like bart ehrman that their professors are quoting they may read his books but he's not the only one there's plenty of them out there but we need to dig deeper not put our head in the sand the truth is always on the side of the faith i will conclude with a very unnatural segue a polar bear attacks a man in canada and bystanders do nothing the media didn't even report this into that's because they're so uh liberal i'm sure i'm sure that has something to do with anyway okay so polar bear some of the meanest bears on the planet attacks a man in canada now i want you to close your eyes and get a picture of this some of you may have eaten and if you have small children with you under the age of 17 you might want to cover their eyes this is r-rated stuff you got a picture an image okay what i just said is true a polar bear attacked a man in canada isn't that cute the polar bear is the textual variance that we have the man is the scripture has it been corrupted has it been destroyed it maybe that polar bear was able to chomp a little bit off of one of one of the threads of his 501 blues that's about it we have in our hands the veritable word of god and this we can take to the bank and base our life on thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Stonegate Church

Views: 20,947

Keywords: stonegate, stonegatechurch, churches near me, baptist church, Rodney hobbs, church online, Jesus, god, christ, faith, generosity, christmas at stonegate, christmas, acts 29, reformed theology, formed, habits, danwallace, dan, wallace, apologetics, dts, dallas, dallastheologicalseminary, newtestament, newtestamentmanuscripts, manuscripts, reliability, variations, apocrypha, textualcriticism, biblical, bible

Id: OVW6kduRXA4

Length: 55min 54sec (3354 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 23 2022