Well we're now going to enter Hour 14
of our Learn the Bible in Twenty-Four Hours as we begin our study of the New Testament. As we do that we have a whole 'nother perspective
to gain here. The New Testament has architectural features
that are very similar to the Old. The Old Testament opened with the five books
of Moses, and the New Testament opens with five historical books: the Gospels and the
Book of Acts. Now you can look at the Book of Acts as volume
two of Luke, if you will. See, Luke wrote two books; Luke volume one,
Luke volume two if you will. So I always treat the four Gospels and the
Book of Acts as a group. They are followed then by twenty-one interpretive
letters. Just as the Book of Deuteronomy is Moses'
interpretation of the Law, they're really three sermons by Moses, in the New Testament we
have twenty-one letters that were gathered and circulated by the early church as precious
items because they were apostolic interpretations of what went on. So the Gospels tell you what happened and
the letters tell you why it happened and what the significance of it is. Of those twenty-one, fourteen we believe were
written by Paul. I say we believe because there is one that
is deliberately unsigned, and there's a strategy behind doing that. And we'll talk about it when we get to the
Book of Hebrews. We're among of those, and some scholars have
different perspectives, but we think it's we have a good defendable position by arguing
that the Book of Hebrews was written by Paul by deliberately unsigned so it would be read. So it wouldn't raise ire and so forth. In any case we have seven by Paul, I mean
fourteen by Paul and then seven by some of the others. Peter, James, we call them the Hebrew
Christian epistles. So there's twenty-one epistles. So we have five historical books, twenty-one
letters that are sort of like the op-ed pieces if you will, and then we have, in lieu
of the prophets in the Old Testament, we have the Book of Revelation by the Apostle
John. So we have thirty-nine books in the Old Testament,
twenty-seven in the New. That's sixty-six books. People say, "isn't that sort of strange." Everybody expects seventy books. Why sixty-six? Well, technically the Book of Psalms is five
books, by the way. So if you put that in it's really seventy,
but let's not confuse people. Everybody knows it as sixty-six books. Okay, so the Old Testament was compiled over
several thousand years. That shocks many people, because there are
books in the Old Testament that are older than the books of Moses. The main example being Job. Because was Job was an old book even before
Moses. So, they span a period of at least fifteen
hundred, almost probably two thousand years in compiling the Old Testament. Pulled together as we know it today in the
days of Ezra. We're not going to spend a lot of time on
the documentation there because Jesus Christ authenticated it for us. He quotes from it, quotes from each of the
books, and so we don't have a problem because He felt comfortable enough to quote from it
as God's word, that should be enough for us too. So we're not going to spend a lot of time
on that. But the New Testament's a little different
kind of a creature. It was put together within one lifetime. Whole different circumstance. We have have four Gospels, and I say Luke
in two volumes ... And I'm treating here the Book of Acts as Luke volume two so to
speak ... the Paulian corpus of letters and other epistles, and these were all circulated
along with the septuagint Old Testament. Now get the picture here, the Old Testament
which was written originally in Hebrew, was translated into Greek three centuries before
the Gospel period because most of the people in the world, commercial world, spoke Greek. As the Christian Church begins to emerge in
that first century, their Old Testament was a copy of the septuagint, the Greek translation
of the Old Testament. The LXX abbreviation is the Greek
version of the Old Testament. Most of the quotes in the New Testament of
the Old ... in the New Testament when they quote the Old Testament,
they quote most of the time from the septuagint. The Greek. And so the Gospels, these letters, and the
septuagint, was a package that was used for instruction and for worship within the early
church. Something that most people don't factor into
their thinking well enough is both Luke and Paul rely on the fact that the readers were
contemporary with these events. When Paul writes to the Corinthians, many
of them in the congregation were up in Galilee and saw the resurrected Lord. They were eyewitnesses of the Resurrection. That's one reason they don't have to argue
hard for it, because they were, they experienced it. Paul and Luke both rely on contemporary testimony. There's something else that's always instructive
as a student to pay attention to what's missing, not only what's there. There are some very conspicuous events in
history that are not mentioned in the New Testament. For one, Nero's persecutions after 64 AD. Nero ... See, up until then, most of the persecutions
of the Christians came from the Jewish community by zealous Jews. In fact, one of the things, one of the points
that Luke makes not only in his Gospel but also in his, the Book of Acts ... That's why
we believe, many of us suspect, that Luke, volume one and volume two were the necessary
documentation for an appeal to Caesar. We know from the Roman laws that if you appeal
to Caesar, that the facts surrounding your background had to precede you to Rome. In those days that was an expensive project
because they didn't have printing and copying and it was, putting a document together was
an expensive process. But you notice if you read Luke carefully,
the centurions are always good guys. And he goes out to some lengths to point out
that the, the uprisings that occurred wherever Paul went were by the Jewish community, not persecuted by Rome. That was a development that came with Nero
and following, the persecution by Rome. What's interesting, that started in 64 AD. No mention of that. The execution of the leader of the Jerusalem
church, James, who l-led the council in Acts 15, he gets executed in 62 AD. That's well documented. It's interesting that's not alluded to in
any of the New Testament documents. What does this tell you? That the New Testament documents were completed
before these things happened. This is a way of putting an early dating on
the document. Especially when some of these things would
have been incorporated in their arguments. The Jewish revolt against the Romans in 66
AD, no mention. The destruction of the Temple is the most
telling one of all, in 70 AD, the fact that that's not mentioned. So this is strong documentation demonstrating
that the documents that make up the New Testament were drafted and in circulation prior to any
of these events. In other words, they were circulated prior
to 62 AD. We'll get to more of that. Now there is a parchment ... I'm not going
to spend a lot of time on the Dead Sea stuff and all that, but there is a parchment. It was published for awhile under the label
of the Jesus papyri, that's just a secular, label for a book that was written about
it ... But there was some scraps, a little segment of text of Matthews' Gospel. It had been found in Egypt and it was at the
Magdelan School of Oxford. There are three fragments. They're written on both sides, which tells
you that this was a codex. The ancient Old Testament was written
on scrolls; that's why I always use the little idiom of scrolls when I talk Old Testament,
I use a little scrap of parchment. As we go through these slides I use a different
background so you, to make you conscious of what came from the Old and New T-, uh, New
Testament. A codex started to emerge when they discovered
it was useful to write on parchment on both sides and make pages like in a book. A codex is what you and I think of as a book
in contrast to a scroll, which has 2 rolls. A scroll is a scroll, okay. Codexes are handy because you got pages. You can quickly get at page two thirty-seven. You don't have to wind your way, you know,
through a scroll. So codexes became, started to emerge in this
period at about the time of the first church. And it's interest that this is already, the
fact that these scraps are written on both sides indicate they were a codex, not on a
scroll. There's three fragments, written on both sides. There are about a total of twenty-four lines. They appear to be a segment of Matthew, chapter
26 verses 23 on one side, 31 on the other. Something else that'll be important as we
get a little further, they also conform to what we understand from Textus Receptus, and
I'll come to that later. In a minute here. But some advanced technology comes to our
rescue. Turns out that a scanning laser microscope
can differentiate between twenty millionths of a meter layers of the papyrus. They can measure the heigth and depth of the
ink as well the angle of the stylus. They can tell whether the writer was right
or left handed. See, the technology today is astonishing. Well using these advanced technologies, it
turns out that a Dr. Carsten Thiede, using a scanning laser microscope and comparing with
four other manuscripts ... And I won't go through the details of the other four manuscripts
... The more important thing, what he's done from his studies, he's concluded that the
Magdelan papyrus is either an original of Matthew's Gospel or an immediate copy. It was written while Matthew and the other
disciples and other eyewitnesses were still alive. The point I'm making is, you will find in
you Bible Helps many estimates of when certain books are dated, but you'll discover if you
do you homework that the current scholarship is substantiating the dates far earlier than
was previously believed. Many people are under the impression that the New Testament was put together in the second century AD and so forth. That's nonsense. We're discovering that many of these things
are contemporaneous. They were circulating before 60 AD, and some
of these are dated in the 50's. So it's ... this is within a decade or two
of the events. Now of the four Gospels, this isn't that important,
but there's obviously a lot of material that's in common to all of them. Matthew is larger than the others because
Matthew took shorthand. And I'll come to that in a minute. But Mark and Matthew are very similar. The common material is shown here. John has the largest non-common material. John speaks especially of
the Judean ministry rather than the Galilean ministry. And we'll talk about that when we get there. Now In terms of linguisitics, a common language,
Aramaic, but Jesus also spoke Greek. We occasions of both. He spoke initially Greek to Mary until He
addressed her in Aramaic, where she recognizes who He was. She thought He was the gardener, He says "Mary,"
and she recognized ... Rabboni ... we'll talk about that when we get
to John 20. Pilate, he impresses me. Pilate personally could write in Hebrew, Greek,
and Latin. Pilate labeled the titlam on
the cross, and he played a word game against the Jews and we'll talk about that when we
get there. But part of it was in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin,
and he wrote it himself. As a top official he had skill in all three. Hebrew because he was ruling the Hebrew territory; spoke Greek because that was the common commercial language; and Latin was
the official language of the Roman Empire so. It gets more prevalent use later, of course. Now there are some syntactic peculiarities
in the New Testament. The sentence structure is really Hebrew more
than Aramaic. Mark quotes Luke in hundreds of places. That shatters many people's concept here. You think of Luke as a Johnny Come Lately
because so much of what he learned he learned by doing some research. Mark quotes Luke, which means Luke's document
was in place very early. Mark is basically the secretary for Peter. When Mark speaks he's really speaking
for Peter. He did the writing for Peter apparently. Mark quotes Acts in a hundred fifty places. It's astonishing to realize the Book of
Acts was that early. And it's also clear from Mark that he knew
Thessalonians, Corinthians, Romans, Colossians, and James, these letters of both Paul
and also James. There are six hundred evidences of an early
date for Luke. That shatters a lot ... I'm mentioning not
because they're that important per se, except they will contradict some of the traditional
myths that have surrounded the New Testament. There is a school of belief among scholars,
they call it the Jerusalem School for reasons I won't bother you here with, that
originally there were Hebrew drafts out of which about forty, forty-five came a rough
Greek version, and then probably from that some Greek and Aramaic versions, sometimes
called the Q documents. But in any case, out all this this, we have
a Greek adaptation by subject, which leads to Luke first, Mark next, and the probably
Matthew but Matthew drawing directly from the Hebrew, for lots of reasons, and then,
of course, John is a whole 'nother act on the thing. About, probably about, we're dealing here within just a few decades of the actual events. And so just to give you a perspective. Paul's letters, the first letter he probably
wrote were the Thessalonian letters. And we'll deal with those separately in a
special way, and not because they're first but because they have some topical issues
that we're going to deal with later. First Corinthian letter was about the spring
of 55. There are actually four letters to the Corinth,
we only have two of them remaining. And then the first letter of Timothy is about
fall of 55, second Corinthian is about 56. And you get a general feel that most of these
were anywhere between 50 and 58 as letters. Of the New Testament books they are roughly
in the same domain, in the 50's and 60's, and we won't quibble with the details here. Let's talk a little bit about the history
of the English Bible. This is very important to understand. The Old Testament originals were sometimes
referred as the Vorlage. For us the important event was the translation
of the Vorlage into Greek three centuries before the Gospel period. And we don't spend a lot of time on the background
of that because Jesus authenticated the New Testament for us. I mean the Old Testament for us by
His quotes and so forth. But I want you to be conscious of the fact
that that was several centuries before the Gospel period. Okay. Now, the Hebrews, the Jewish leadership, got really upset in the first century because they discovered the septuagint,
the Greek translation, had been adopted by the Christians as their Bible. So they had the Council of Jamnia where they
had a real problem to solve, because Judaism relies on sacrifices. There is no remission of sin without sacrifices. They have no place to sacrifice, the Temple's
been destroyed. So what they in effect are faced with doing
is redefining Judaism. That comes out of the Council of Jamnia. But they also, out of that council, set the
groundwork for what later becomes the Masoretic Text. When you look at a Hebrew Old Testament you're
reading probably the Masoretic Text, and that's, derived from the Council of Jamnia. Now what also get ... starts to emerge here,
is a group of documents that are called Textus Receptus, and we're gonna talk a little bit
about that as we go on here. Textus Receptus. About the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of
Antioch compiled the Greek text to become the primary standard throughout the Byzantine
world. Now something you need to understand is that
the center of the world was not Rome anymore. It had been moved, Constantine moved it to
Byzantium. All these councils, church councils you read
about and so forth are not in Latin, they're in Greek and they're in the east. Byzantium was the capital of the world. The Greek text that was circulated widely
throughout the Byzantine world is a text that is referred to as Textus Receptus. The Received Text is what it's intended to
connote. And by the 6th, from the 6th through the 14th
century, the majority of New Testament texts are produced in Byzantium in Greek. So it was the primary publication center of
the Christian world. In 1525 … now we’re moving way ahead to,
in the 16th century … Erasmus, using five or six of the Byzantine manuscripts, compiled
the first Greek text produced on a printing press thanks to Gutenberg. This was the big event that really led
to the Reformation, was to make Bibles available. And his writings are the basis for what are
formerly called Textus Receptus. That gives you a feeling for the timing here. And out of this we have the old Latin
and then the Vulgate … Jerome does the, Latin translation. Which Tindale and others translate to make
the English Bible. And that’s really the one we’re
dealing with. I won’t take you through the evolution,
from Wycliff and all the rest, from 1382 down through 1611, the King James version, except
to make a couple of points here. As we go through these, Erasmus and the Tindale
Bible, Luther’s Bible, Coverdale’s and so forth, and the Geneva Bible and the rest,
you need to understand that the people that did these translations did it under penalty
of death. It was a capital crime to be trafficking in
Bibles, by the Medieval Church. So these heroes became martyrs. Did all of this out of their commitment to
get the word of God out to the people so that they could understand it. Rather than have it filtered by a
Church with its own agenda. But you finally get down to the King James
version from which all of us are indebted. King James the VI of Scotland became King
of England, and he called himself James I. And in 1607, with more than fifty scholars,
they met in continual prayer and committees. The one thing that really distinguishes them,
they were committed believers. They were believers
first and scholars second in that sense of speaking. Something else you should understand, when
they did the King James Version they had available to them five thousand five hundred fifty-six
manuscripts. So they had plenty of ammunition. The primary reliance of the translation committee
was on Textus Receptus. That was their yardstick. And what they produced is the King James Version
of the Bible. It has been heralded even by the secular world
as one of the most noblest monument in English prose. The majesty of the King James has never been
really equaled. And some of us have trouble with the old English,
but that it turns out with less than a dozen words that bother you, and you learn
those pretty quickly, as you get comfortable with it, many of us find
the King James the most comfortable version because of its majesty, frankly. Every translation has its problems. The advantage of the King James, the problems
are well known and well-documented. And most Bible helps key to that anyway. Some of the new translations have problems, too, but
they’re less known, less well-known. So, okay, there’s something else. As you realize the King James Version
leans on Tyndale and the forbearers but it leans most heavily on Textus Receptus as they
translated into English. But I want to talk about another set of codexes
or codices. The Alexandrian. There’s a codex Alexandrianus that was discovered
about 1630. It was brought to England. It’s a 5th century manuscript containing
the ... almost the entire New Testament. There was also Codex Sinaiticus. About two hundred years later a German scholar
named Constantin von Tischendorf discovered Codex Sinaiticus at St. Catherine’s Monastery
at the traditional Mount Sinai. This manuscript is apparently dated about
350 AD. So it’s one of the two oldest manuscripts
of the Greek New Testament. Okay. And there’s also Codex Vaticanus. It had been in the Vatican library since at
least 1481 but was not made available to scholars until the middle of the 19th century. It was dated slightly earlier, like about
325 AD than Codex Sinaiticus and is regarded by many as one of the most reliable copies
of the Greek New Testament. Now what’s going to happen here, to look ahead
a little bit, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus had been overly revered by scholars to our
detriment. I'll explain what happened here. Because they are very old manuscripts, they
tended to the modern ... in the minds of some of the modern translators they have extra
weight because they’re older. That turns out to be a trap, and I’ll come
into that. These ... Alexandrian codices
have become very controversial in recent years for a number of reasons. So these occur in about the 3rd or 4th century,
and they become the primary reliance of the newest, most modern translations. The NIV and many of the other new translations
tend to lean very heavily on these Alexandrian codices. The primacy of Textus Receptus has been dethroned. In about the 1730s, a guy by the name of Bengel produced a text that deviated from Textus Receptus, and he relied on some of
these earlier manuscripts. And Carl Lachman who did a similar
kind of thing, and another guy did. Not that critical. The real important guys are two characters
known as Westcott and Hort. Brook Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony
Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for Textus Receptus. And they leaned especially heavy on these
Alexandrian codices. They began a work in 1853 that resulted after
twenty-eight years with a Greek New Testament based on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. The problem is, we’ve now discovered that
those texts, even though they’re older, are corrupted. And these people have really promoted it and, we should talk a little bit about them. Both of these guys were very influenced by
Origen and others who denied the deity of Jesus Christ. And they embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies
of the period from the headquarters of the Gnostics, which is Alexandria. The codexes we’re talking about came from
Alexandria. Alexandria was the fountainhead of the Gnostics,
which were anti-, really in effect, anti-Christian groups. Much of the New Testament letters are written
in repudiation of the Gnostic beliefs. So we discover upon more careful examination
that these codices that they’re relying on, while they’re excellent Greek scholars,
are corrupted texts. And so this is one of the reasons you’ll
notice if you’ve been following Bible things in the last few decades, there’s been a
reaction against the modern translations by some who begin to realize that they’re victims,
in a sense, of corrupted foundations here. There are over three thousand contradictions
in the four Gospels alone between the manuscripts. They change the traditional Greek text in
over eight thousand places. Now by the way, Westcott and Hort, although
they’re very, very obviously outstanding Greek scholars, you wouldn’t trust them
to teach your Sunday school class. They did not believe in the deity of Jesus
Christ. So you've got to be on alert. Just because a guy has a lot of degrees and
a lot of prominence in the scholastic community does not make him a bonafide expert before the Lord. In any case, we now have a question mark on
Alexandrian codices, which means that puts a cloud on some of the modern translations. They’re useful because they’re readable,
but be careful if you’re doing careful- ... detailed study because they’ve been
corrupted. Now what were the Gnostic heresies? Okay. I think it’s Satan’s strategy, the same
one he had in Genesis three. What did he do? He put doubt and then additions and amendments. Did God really say that? Well this is maybe what He really meant. That’s the kind, that’s where you
start going one of these alleyways that get you into trouble. In about 55 AD, the twisting of the scripture
begins. That’s what Second Peter chapter two deals
with. That’s First John one deals with. They’re dealing with the Gnostic heresies. So the Gnostics disparage the existing
writings. They mixed in Greek philosophy and concepts
along with the revelation of God. In other words, if you ... the Gnostics add
to it some Pantheism and all these other things. If you’re really in the know you don’t
take those things seriously. Let us let you know how it,
what it’s really like, it's that kind of deception that’s going on. So what the Gnostics did is they expurgated
the scriptures. The Gnostics were known for mutilating the
scriptures. They would throw out the verses that weren’t
comfortable. In 156, Irenaeus said of the Gnostics,
"Wherefore they and their followers have betaken themselves to mutilating the scriptures which
they themselves have shortened." So we have evidence that that was one of the
things, one of the tactics they used. The headquarter for the Gnostics of course
was Alexandria, which was the primary library center of the world at the time. Now let me, we could spend a lot of time wading
through scholastic arguments about the texts. I want to give you, I’m going to show you
a shortcut. I’m going to show you a shortcut. There are, in the scripture, there are authentication
codes. There’s an automatic security monitor watching
over every single letter of the text that doesn’t rust or wear out, and it’s been
running continually for several thousand years, and most people don’t know about it. There’s a fingerprint, what I call a fingerprint
signature, of the author in the scripture. And we’ll show you that. And furthermore, this authentication code
is of a non-compromisable design. Now if you’re an engineer your mouth is
watering. Boy, where is this thing? I want to see this thing. Let me back up a little bit now and give you
some background. How many of you have noticed there are sevens
in the Bible? Anybody without their hand up hasn’t read
their Bible, right, you know? Over six hundred passages have it very explicitly
so. Some of these are very overt. It’s very obvious. Seven of this and seven of that or whatever. Some of them are structural; someone will
list a few things, you’ll always notice there’s always seven of them. You find those, they’re subtle. Some are not only subtle, some are actually
hidden. And yet you can find them if you know how
to look. I’m going to suggest to you the possibility
that these heptatic structures are a signature of the Creator Himself. And let’s take a look at some examples. I want you to imagine, you don’t have to
actually do this, but I want you to imagine yourself seriously taking this on as an assignment. Imagine yourself taking on a scratchpad, blank
piece of paper, and I want you to design a family tree, a genealogy. And by the way, for this assignment, you can
do this from fiction. You can make it up as you go. How many could do that? Obviously you could. Okay, that's, that's no, that’s no problem. You know, fathers and sons, making up a family
tree, okay. Except I got a couple of rules I want you
to follow. When you've finished your assignment and you
turn it in, I want the number of words that you used to be an exact multiple of seven. In other words if I take the total number
of words that is in your work product, if I divide it by seven I don’t have any
remainder. So it’s either seven words, fourteen, twenty-one,
twenty-eight. In other words whatever number of words you
use, it’s an exact multiple of seven. How many could do that? You could fudge it around and get a multiple
of seven, right? Good, yeah, I'm sure you could. Of course you could. I've got another rule I want to add. I want the number of letters that you use
to also be an exact multiple of seven. I can sense that some of you dropped out. You say that, that you begin to realize that’s
a little tricky. And incidentally, I’m talking about in English
here, aren’t I? English you can fudge around sometimes. You know, poets always do that. You know, throw in an asterisk in there or
something. Okay. I want the number of vowels and the number of consonants to be divisible by seven exactly. If I go through all your words, I count the
vowels, it’s an exact multiple of seven. You got a problem with that? Of course you do. You realize that to make it a multiple of
seven, if it’s a random result you’ve got six chances of losing and only one of
winning, have it come out right. You with me? Every time I add a rule it makes it tougher. I’m going to say I want the number of words
that begin with a vowel to be divisible by seven. Well that’s kind of chicken. And obviously if thats in there, the number of words
that begin with a consonant must be divisible by seven. The number of words that occur more than once
to be divisible by seven. Anybody still playing? You get the feeling that this would be hard
to do, right? Those that occur in more than one form, divisible
by seven. Those that occur in only one form, to be divisible
by seven. The number of nouns shall be divisible by
seven. Only seven words shall not be
nouns. That’s easy, probably. Maybe not. The number of names shall be divisible by
seven. Only seven other kinds of nouns shall be permitted
beside names. The number of male names shall be divisible
by seven, and the number of generations shall be divisible by seven. You probably guessed where I’m headed here. Because this is a description of the genealogy
of Jesus Christ in the first eighteen verses of the Book of Matthew. And incidentally, we’re talking
about the Greek, not the Hebrew or English. In English it’s soft. You can fudge around. Greek is incredibly precise. Every verb has to be five conditions and so
forth. It’s a tight, precise language. What I’m sharing with you here of course
is the discoveries of Dr. Ivan Panin. He’s a very interesting guy. Born in Russia in 1855. He was exiled at an early age; he got tangled
up in a plot against the Czar. He eventually emigrated to Germany and then
finally to the United States. He graduated from Harvard in 1882 with a PhD
in mathematics. But then he discovered Jesus Christ. Now by the way, every one of us in this room
that have ... has discovered Jesus Christ, whether you know it or not, is the result
of a miracle wrought by someone’s prayer. For some of you the stories are really quite
dramatic. For many of us it’s quite routine. But every one of us that accept Christ are
the result of a miracle. But if you’re a PhD from Harvard, that’s
a miracle indeed. Okay, so ... But shortly after becoming a Christian, he
discovered these heptatic structures, these seven fold structures that underlie the Biblical
text. He discovered that about 1890. He committed the rest of his life, more than
fifty years, generating over forty-three thousand pages, writing incidentally in very small
letters ... he’s got a very tight hand ... of discoveries. He went to his Lord in October 30th of 1942
and left behind all kinds of discoveries. Candidly, it’s very tedious to go through
because it’s laborious stuff, and yet, what comes out of this are some treasures. And I’ll show you a few highlights. That was the one that you showed you, the,
the genealogy of Jesus Christ fits all those conditions. And even if you try to simulate that you’ll
discover it’s almost impossible to get something to fit all those conditions. But let’s talk about a specific practical
example. If you look at your Bible at the last twelve
verses of the Gospel of Mark, you will probably find a footnote in it. Something to the effect that these verses
are in dispute and were probably added later by some copyist. That’s a typical kind of remark you see
annotating the last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark. The question is, were they added later? Westcott and Hort regard the last part of
Mark, that’s verses nine through twenty of chapter sixteen, as a later addition. That this wasn’t in the original, it was
added by some well-intended copyist down the road a bit. Well that’s easily shredded because Irenaeus
in 150 AD quotes it in his commentary. Alexandrian codices were 4th century. But in the 1st and 2nd century, we have quotes
from these so-called verses that were added later. No, they weren’t added later. They were expurgated from the Alexandrian
codices, is my contention. So Irenaeus either had a copy of the original,
or he must have been clairvoyant. I don’t think he was clairvoyant. Hypolatus in the 2nd, also in the
2nd century, quotes from these twelve verses. And these are several hundred years before
the Alexandrian codices. So if these verses are not in the Alexandrian
codices, they were expurgated. So you can attack this scholarship from the
point of view of historical records, but I’m going to show you something even more surprising. If we studied the last twelve verses of Mark
we discover that verses nine to eleven are an appearance to Mary, and it
discusses the disciple’s initial disbelief. From verse eleven to eighteen are subsequent
appearances, and then the conclusion of the chapter is verses nineteen through twenty. So from to nine from twenty is what we’re
talking about. Another way to organize those twelve
verses is from verses nine to fourteen a simple narrative, verses fifteen to eighteen is a
discourse by Jesus Christ, and the last two verses are a conclusion of the whole gospel. By the way, if you take these twelve verses
away you’ll leave the gospels with the people confused and in disarray and in disbelief. You have no Resurrection. So you can see why the Gnostics would love
to drop those verses off. But anyway, these are the verses that are
there. Let me share some things with you that Panin
discovered about these verses. The number of words in these twelve verses
are a hundred seventy-five. That's a multiple of seven exactly. Oh, really? The vocabulary involved is ninety-eight different
words. That's a multiple of seven exactly. The number of letters in the twelve verses
are five hundred fifty three. That's a multiple of seven exactly. The vowels are a multiple of seven exactly. The consonants obviously would be a multiple
of seven exactly. The total vocabulary I said was ninety-eight
words. Eighty-four of those are found earlier in
the Book of Mark. That's a multiple of seven exactly. Fourteen of these words are found only here. It's a multiple of seven exactly. Forty-two of those words are used in the Lord's
address. Fifty-six are not part of His were not
part of His vocabulary that are in this, in these twelve verses. All multiples of seven exactly. Now I, if I take just two rules ... If I have
one rule you've got six chances of losing, one of winning, right? To meet two rules it's seven squared. In other words, I have forty-eight chances
of losing and only one of having both rules of seven. You follow me? It goes by the square, right? Two rules, it's the square. For three rules it's the cube of that. Three hundred forty, I'd have three hundred
forty-three chances of losing for every one of winning. And so it goes. For four rules it's 2401. I've given you so far nine rules. You have one chance ... if this
is a random process, you have one chance in forty million of coming out okay. The more rules you add the more restrictive
it becomes. Would you like to try this, by the way? Now, assume you worked eight hours a day,
forty hours a week for fifty weeks a year. That means you've got about two thousand
productive hours per year. And put those in minutes, that's a hundred
twenty thousand minutes per year. You've got seven to nine chances to try this
randomly, forty million attempts. Let's assume it takes you ten minutes to do
a draft. And if it doesn't work it takes another ten
minutes to try another draft. Well then, in that case, it would take you about
three thousand, three hundred sixty-two years to come up with that design. But by the way, it gets worse. I said there were a hundred seventy-five words. Fifty-six in the address to the Lord,
a hundred nineteen in the rest of the passage. In the introductory verses it was thirty-five. Each one of these a multiple of seven exactly. In other words, in the various groupings of
the natural divisions of the passage, you'll find it's always a multiple of seven
exactly. And it goes on and on. I won't badger this more than you need to
hear. There's something else you need to know about
both Hebrew and Greek, they're distinctive in that each letter has a numerical value. And it's relevant that way. And here's a list of the Greek words. Alpha is worth one, the beta, two, gamma,
three, and so forth. Right on through to the end. And this ... the use of numerical
values of letters is called gematria. Is a geometrial value. Every word thus has a numerical value. The numerical, gemetrical value of this, the
total gemetrical value of the passage happens to be one hundred six thousand, six hundred
sixty-three, which is a multiple of seven exactly. Try doing that by accident. And if you take each one of these natural
groupings you'll discover each one has a gemetrical value of a multiple of seven exactly. The first word, the middle word, the last
word, and so forth. And it goes on and on, as you can image
here. I said we had a vocabulary of ninety-eight
words? Fourteen not before in Mark, seven found later
in the New Testament. Thirty-five occurrences. The numerical value of them, again, is
a multiple of seven exactly. Verse twenty, the vocabulary is fourteen. It goes on and on in terms of words found
here previously, words not found, everything's a multiple of seven exactly. The total form is a hundred thirty-three. The value of those are eighty-nine six sixty-three,
which is a multiple of seven exactly. Those that occur more, once is a hundred twelve,
which is a multiple of seven. Occurring more than once is twenty-one, a
multiple of seven. Occurring sixty-three times, which itself
is a multiple of seven. And we could go on and on like this. There is a word here, it's an unusual word,
because it occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. It has a numerical value of five eighty-one,
which is a multiple of seven exactly. And it's preceded by forty-two vocabulary
words and ... in the passage by a hundred twenty-six. All these are multiples of seven exactly. Now I've gone, I've added a lot on here. We started out with just nine rules, I've
just given you thirty-four of them. What's the chance of these rules having happened
by just random chance? Well let's take a look at that. That's seven to the thirty-fourth power,
which is roughly five times ten to the twenty-eighth tries would be needed. Now you already had enough experience with
the large ... with powers of ten to realize these are big numbers. Let's assume you'd like to try to simulate
this, and I'll let you have a computer to help you. Okay? There are about three times ten to seventh
seconds per year. And I'm gonna give you a computer that can
do four hundred million tries per second. Okay? That's a pretty good, that's a pretty good machine. That means it would take about four times
ten to the eighth tries per second, it would take about four point three million, million computer years. Or putting another way, I would need one million
supercomputers working four point three million years to obtain this result
by randomness. By randomness. So this is again ... And by the way,
I've just used thirty-four conditions here. Panin identified seventy-five of them. So, you can say some of those are not independent of each other, that's true. Two or three of those actually derive one
from the other. Okay, throw those out. You've got seventy-five to pick from. The New Testament, let me show you some other
things that Panin discovered. The New Testament consists of twenty-seven
books, right? That means there's a opening and closing word
to each of the twenty-seven books. It begins and ends with a word, right? So two times twenty-seven, that means there's
fifty-four words, right? Among those fifty-four words there's a total
vocabulary of twenty-eight words that are a multiple of seven exactly. In the Gospels alone there's a multiple of
seven exactly. The total gemetrical value of those words
is also a multiple of seven exactly. The value of the shortest word, which is one
letter, is seventy and it's a multiple of seven obviously. The value of the longest word is a multiple
of seven and this one is particularly interesting. The longest word happens to be apocalypsis. And it happens to be seven times six times
six times six. That's kind
of interesting, I think. There's ... This is the one I love. I realize that we're hitting you with a lot of these things. It maybe a bit of overkill here. But I want to show you the one that blows
me away completely. We've discovered that the vocabulary in the Greek
that's unique to Matthew ... Now understand what I'm talking about. The vocabulary that's unique. These are words
that only Matthew uses. If you go through the whole Bible, take all
the words, there are forty-two ... there's a vocabulary that's unique to Matthew,
occurs only forty-two times, a multiple of 7 exactly, and those have a hundred twenty-six letters,
a multiple of seven exactly. Now what makes this particularly peculiar
is let's assume for discussion that Matthew tried to do this on purpose. How would you do that? If you were Matthew and you decided you would
like to have this characteristic in your Gospel, how would you go about making sure that the
words that you alone use is a multiple of seven exactly? Well you can only do it two
ways. You got to sit down with all the other writers
of the New Testament, figuring out, assuming you can figure out who they're gonna be, and
get them to agree not to use your little list of words. How many think that happened? Not very likely. Or you could argue that this feature is an
argument that Matthew wrote last. Because in theory at least he could lay down
everybody else's writings and make sure that it fit. So you could use this as an argument that
Matthew wrote his Gospel last. He either had prior agreement, that doesn't
make sense, or his Gospel was written last. Okay, the Gospel of Matthew has a vocabulary
unique to itself that's a multiple of seven exactly. But then, so does Mark. Well I thought Matthew wrote last. No, Mark wrote last because Mark also has
a vocabulary unique to him that a multiple of seven exactly. But so does Luke. And so does John. They each were written last. And obviously, I'm being facetious. And so did James, Peter, Jude, and Paul. Each one was written last. In other words, each one has a vocabulary
that nobody else uses that happens to be an exact multiple of seven. There's only one explanation for this that I can tolerate mathematically. And that is that the Holy Spirit was
an overseer of every word, every letter, in the New Testament. I think that's exciting. By the way, this even bridges the Old and
New Testaments. You know, I often joke that going to have a conference and have, and, at this conference we're going to tear out
the page of the Bible tonight that's unnecessary. That'll smoke out all the fundamentalists,
right? Then very ceremoniously open the Bible and
tear out the page between the Old and New Testament because it's unnecessary. There are words that have this heptatic feature
if and only if you put the Old and New Testament together. The word hallelujah occurs twenty-four times
in the Old Testament, four times in the New. Four plus twenty-four is twenty-eight, a multiple
of seven exactly. Hosanna, shepherd, Jehovah Sabaoth. And I could go through a list of these words that
are not multiples of seven in either Old or New Testament, but they are multiples of seven
when you put the Old and New Testament together. I think that's kind of fun. All this of course is detailed in our
briefing package called "How We Got Our Bible." But the main point is these specifications
that we talked about, have been fulfilled. The specifications in the Bible says that He would
be born of a virgin and He was. That He'd be born in Bethlehem, and He was. That He'd be taken into Egypt, and He was. That He would heal the sick and make people
whole, and He did. And each one of these is documented, you can
look up the verses. He would crucified, and He was. That He would die for our sins, and He did. That He would be raised from the dead, and
He was. Why do we accept the Bible? Because these little numbers from Panin? No, no, no, that's not the reason. We do this because it's the authentication
of Jesus Christ. The Septuagint has over three hundred detailed
specifications He's fulfilled in His lifetime. The seventy weeks prophecy that we studied in
Daniel, chapter nine, is undeniable. So have the authentication of who Christ is
first of all. The scripture authenticates who Christ was. Then we can lean on the authentication by
Christ of the Torah, of Daniel, in fact of the whole Old Testament. It's an integrated design, that's our apologetic. That's the one that's bullet-proof. That this, these sixty-six books penned by
over forty different guys over virtually two thousand years, is an integrated package. And that it transcends the dimensionality
of time itself. No other book on the planet earth does that. Sixty-six separate books penned by forty different
guys who didn't even know each other over several thousand years. Their design anticipates in detail, events
before they happen. So they obviously ... the source of this message
is from outside our physical universe, outside our time domain. There are all kinds of hidden authentication
codes in the scripture. We've talked about some of the microcodes,
these little numbers and so forth. There are also macrocodes. We went through Genesis chapter five and the
fact that we have the summary of the Christian gospel tucked away in the genealogy in the
Torah of all places. We have the macrocodes. We looked at those in Genesis five, Genesis
twenty-two, the Akeda, the Book of Ruth, the whole Book of Joshua, and of
course the transcendent numerical design that we touched on here. Just as we go along the way. But there is something else. How can you personally ... You say, Chuck,
I'm not a mathematician, I don't want to get into all that stuff. But how can I know? How can you know? And Jesus answers that for you in John seven
verse seventeen. "If any man will do his will, he shall know
of the doctrine whether be of God or whether I speak of myself." That Christ's challenge to you. Try it and see for yourself. One integrated design. The New Testament is in the Old Testament
concealed. The Old Testament is in the New Testament
revealed. And once you begin to discover that, once
you begin to discover the integrity of the package, it'll change your whole perspective
on everything that it says. When you know that you can rely on it. We're going to now enter, in the next session
we'll actually enter the New Testament. We'll talk about the ... obviously
we'll enter the historical books, the Gospels. Interpretative letters will come separately,
and Revelation. Along the way we'll do some summaries. We'll have a whole eschatological summary
or, of where end time prophecy is headed and so forth. Much of that'll be controversial. Different, good scholars have different views
on some of these things. But in the New Testament we have the five
historical books. And next time we'll focus on Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John, and we're going to take a little different approach. With the limited opportunity we have we're
not gonna go through each book individually. Well go ... we'll talk about its distinctives
first. But then we'll go through a integration of
all of them geographically: here's where He went, there's what He did, and we'll put
it all together for you geographically when we do that. One of the things that you'll learn that's
kind of fun, is that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all have a different agenda. Matthew's a Jew, he presents Jesus Christ
as the Lion of the tribe of Judah. The Messiah, the promised Messiah. He's Jewish, very Jewish. Mark is really writing for Peter, but his
emphasis is to present Jesus Christ as the suffering servant. To be obedient to the Father. Luke's a different kind of guy altogether. Luke's a doctor. He's interested in presenting Jesus Christ
as the son of man. The fact that God became man is what blew
him away. And John is the ... takes the flip side of
that. That He's the Son of God. Each one of these has a distinctive mission
as he writes his Gospel, and you'll discover something interesting. Everything in their respective Gospels supports
that particular emphasis. The genealogy. Matthew, being a Jew, starts his genealogy
from Abraham and takes it through the legal line through Joseph, the legal father of Jesus
Christ. Mark is a servant not interested in pedigree. He's the only one without
a genealogy. Luke, because he's interested in the son of man, he obviously starts with Adam. From Adam to Abraham ... when he gets to Abraham to David they're both the same. Matthew and Luke. But when you get to David, Luke takes a left
turn. He doesn't go through the first surviving
son of Bathsheba as Matthew does. He goes through the second surviving son down
through a line that ends up with Mary. So he has the bloodline, and there's a
whole thing we'll get into when we get there that's some fascinating mysteries
behind all that. And John has a genealogy, but most people wouldn't
recognize it. The first few verses is the genealogy of the
pre-existent one. And, you can take a look at that and see
what he says there. So Matthew emphasizes what Jesus said. Mark, what Jesus did. Luke, what Jesus felt; he's the humanist of
the bunch. And, John, who He was. That's his emphasis. So Matthew writes the Jew, Mark to the Roman,
Luke to the Greek, John to the Church. The first miracle. In Matthew the first one would be a leper
cleansed. That's a very Jewish emphasis. Because leprosy was a symbol of sin. Mark and Luke, both being gentile-oriented,
demons expelled. John's the mystic, water turned to wine is
his first miracle. In each one. Matthew ends with the Resurrection, as any
Jew would. Mark with the Ascension. Luke with a Promise of the Spirit setting
up his sequel, which is the Acts of the Holy Spirit. And then John, of course, the Promise of His
Return for the Church, of course. And John finishes that, sets himself
up for Revelation, if you will. It interesting, when we study the camps
in Numbers. The, east, west, south, and north,
had symbols. The ensign, for Judah, was the Lion, right? And, Lion of the tribe of Judah. Mark was the west. The next one was the Ephraim, the ox, if you will. And, Luke, the man, the Reuben
was a symbol it was a man and Dan the eagle. So we have the face of the lion, the ox, the
man, the eagle that those tribes-, those camps represented. The same as the face of the seraphim and the cherubim around the throne of God. Fits the four Gospels. And you begin to realize there is a mystical
overseer on how these things are designed. So that's kind of, I think kind of fun. And there's also different styles in terms
of groupings and snapshots and so forth. We'll talk about all that next time. So, that's what we're about. And let's stand for a closing word of prayer. Fun time coming. We'll be going through a overview of the life
of Christ where we'll put them all together up to the final week. We'll save a whole session for the final week,
because there's much there, there's an awful lot there that Mel Gibson didn't
tell you or couldn't tell you. We'll talk about that. I believe he did us a wonderful favor with
his marvelous piece of work, because it's given us the opportunity to open a conversation
with anybody. But there are some things that he wasn't in
a position to be able to communicate that we will extract from the text as we go forward. Let's bow our hearts. Father, we thank You for who You are. We pray, Father, that You would take these
seeds that are planted in our lives. We pray, Father, that You'd nurse them to fruition. We pray, Father, that You'd illuminate that
path before us that we each might know what You would of us as we go forward. As we just commit ourselves without any reservation
into Your hands, in the name of Yeshua. Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
