New Testament Reliability - Can you trust the Bible?

hello and welcome to a very special episode of blossom this is mayim bialik actually this is dr james white who is with us in studio with a group of a few of our friends to discuss something that is exceedingly important especially these days college campuses maybe your child goes off to school and gets told you can't trust the bible we see it on some tv shows certainly people like bill maher would be happy to tell us you can't trust the bible well we are here to tell you you can trust the bible actually i'm not here to do it this fellow is dr james white take it away dr james white thank you very much well that is uh that is the situation today and i'm very thankful to have the opportunity of addressing you and talking about this extremely vital topic and that is look you all have bibles in your hands you open them up you turn to paul's epistle to the romans for example how do you know that that's what paul wrote almost 2 000 years ago how are how can you have confidence that there wasn't a church council somewhere that came along and said you know uh we want to insert the doctrine of the deity of christ or this particular political group want to do this thing with the text and this this group over here won't do something how do you know that when you read paul said to the romans that that's what he sent to the romans or when you read the gospel of john that that's what the apostle john wrote these are the questions and unfortunately today there's a tremendous onslaught against us specifically coming from those people who are going to assert that we cannot know that what we have today is what was originally written as you know naturalistic materialism rules the day in academia if you cannot if you cannot put under a microscope if you cannot measure it if it does not a part of just the natural realm then you can't really discuss it you can't bring it into this into discussion of course we believe that the new testament is inspired that it really has its origins as far as its real substance outside of the natural realm but it enters into the natural realm and is communicated to us over a period of time it is transmitted over a period of time but we all know hopefully the bible did not float down out of heaven on a on a nice silk pillow with leather covers and thumb indexing uh certainly though i was raised in a christian family i sort of figured that's how it was that's always how i had seen the bible but there was a process and what we're being told is that process corrupted the text of scripture in fact in in the academy today if you go to the universities you can't even bring that kind of a discussion up you're not even allowed to discuss the idea that there is a supernatural element to things instead we have to presuppose the existence of naturalistic materialism and christian claims are simply relegated to the arena of myth you can have your mythology everybody else has their mythology your mythology can't be any better than anybody else's mythology and so as a result scholars spin the evidence particularly in media appearances believing scholars are not the first people that are called by cnn to discuss some new theory that's come along which have you ever noticed the theories tend to come along i don't know sometime around easter and christmas for some reason every notice that it's a very strange thing but remember a few years ago the tomb story came out they found the tomb of jesus and and every spring and then every winter we get the same thing someone retreads some type of theory that supposedly demonstrates that what we believe as christians just isn't true and uh so the people they go to are unbelievers for example uh people like john dominic crosston one of the co-founders of the jesus seminar you know dr crossan's a wonderful man in fact he's my favorite heretic i've told him that uh and he even signed an email to me once dom your favorite heretic so he's just one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet but he doesn't even believe in a personal god uh or an afterlife or anything like that they'll go to these these scholars that are extremely skeptical or they'll go to people like bart ehrman a barterman is the favorite go-to guy in the world today because he's an apostate and that's not an insult it's a description an apostate is a person who once made a profession of faith no longer makes that profession of faith and bart ehrman's graduating moody bible institute uh wheaton college and princeton theological seminary but he calls himself a happy agnostic now i've met bart we debated once and and i know he's an agnostic but the happy part i wasn't really all that certain about we'll talk a little bit more about him but his books and his materials are being used all across the the spectrum especially in secular universities as the given understanding of where the bible came from why we really can't trust it etc etc and so these scholars will come along and they will emphasize especially bart ehrman that all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of the new testament and the idea is well you know if you're making a handwritten copy if i passed out just the first two chapters the gospel of mark to the front row here and i had you make a handwritten copy and pass your copy not what you copied but your copy to the next row and then we did it all the way back when we got to the back there would be differences between what i handed out and what was copying that's just the first two chapters of mark if you go through all 16 chapters of mark then you're going to have more differences and the idea is well the first generation picks up differences the second generation picks up differences you get more and more and more errors as you go along this line of transmission and so since the first copies that we have come from depending on the book of the new testament we'll be looking at this 100 to 150 years after the time they were first written well what happened during that time frame that's the type of issue that bart ehrman is raising and that's the type of issue that unfortunately then his readers are presenting to our young people as they go to university now many of the people who are reading him many of the people teaching the local community college don't really know what bart ehrman knows in fact bart ehrman is frequently exaggerated by his followers as we will see but the reality is that that's the kind of information that's being thrown out and let's be honest with ourselves we haven't done a really good job within the church preparing our young people for this in fact we haven't done a really good job even in our seminaries preparing most of our ministers for this most ministers will admit that even if they took a fair amount of greek in their seminary training that they get a little nervous when someone comes up and starts asking questions about well my esv says this but my neighbor's new king james version says this or i've got have you all noticed those little notes at the bottom of your page that say some manuscripts say this now it's really hard to read them but there's a lot of folks that once they see them and they see those little notes it says some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that in your more honest moments in your honest moments will you admit that sort of bothers you that sort of causes you a little bit of of concern that one translation would have a verse and another translation does not have the verse and many ministers have gone through seminary and they don't feel overly confident responding to those particular questions either and because of that then we generally don't do a real good job in our preaching or in our teaching of preparing our young people to go out there and encounter this onslaught of people saying you can't trust what the bible says you know in my grandparents generation that wasn't all that big of an issue but folks things have changed and they've changed rapidly and we need to realize we are in a culture now in all western cultures where christianity is under attack there is no place we can hide we can't we can't insulate our people isolate our people we have to take these things straight on and that's what i want to try to prepare us to do uh this evening now got a question how many variants do you think exist in what's called the new testament manuscript tradition let me define that for you the new testament manuscript tradition are all the hand written copies of any new testament book that can be that can be matthew through revelation or that can be a little teeny tiny fragment of papyri from 150 years after the writing of the new testament and everything in between now we have about approximately 5 700 manuscripts of the new testament in greek either fragmentary or whole copies about 5700 ranging from about the earliest right now that we can really sort of prove is about 125 a.d to all the way past the time of the invention of printing because believe it or not just like there were people who thought the ipad was going to go nowhere there were people who thought printing was going to go nowhere too and so it took time for presses to be built people learned how to do you know the type setting and stuff like that and so handwriting was still the primary way of producing books even long after gutenberg came along and invented the printing press in western culture and so all those manuscripts you put them all together and we catalog them and things like that about 5700 handwritten manuscripts now there's about a hundred and thirty eight thousand two hundred words in the new testament in the original language of the new testament which is greek about 138 thousand two hundred words approximately now how many variants let me define a variant real quickly a variant is any difference between manuscripts so if a manuscript has the word and and you've got 10 manuscripts that have and and ten manuscripts that don't that's a variant uh if a scribe spells john with two ends rather than just one that's a variant if a verse is there and not there that's a variance so it can be down to the spelling of a word or whether a verse or even a block of text is there the two largest new testament manuscript variants the two biggest ones are the longer ending of mark mark 16 9 through 20 12 verses and the story of the woman taken adultery called the prickapay adultery john 7 53-811 those are the two biggest ones all the rest are either a verse or a line or a word or and or the or something along those lines so how many variants do you think there might be in the new testament manuscript tradition now sometimes when i get to this point i can tell that people are bothered by the answer i need to bother you first so i can unbother you by putting it in context see what happens is unbelievers present these facts without a context and that's their primary weapon bart ehrman loves to talk about the woman taking adultery dan wallace calls it his his favorite story that's not in the bible and people are troubled by that we need to know what the issues are and once we know it there could put them in a context then they're no longer a problem we recognize what the real issues are and we in essence are taking the weapons away from those who are seeking to damage our faith we need to be talking about these things in the context of faith and preparing our people to then take the answers out into the context of non-faith seeking to be used by the lord and leading people to christ so that's that's the issue so how many variants do you think exist well i normally ask folks and because of our context here i'm not going to ask you to put up a hand and ask a question and answer give an answer but some people i've had say 10 12 100 i say i i would say a safe estimate would be at the high end about four hundred thousand four hundred thousand variants in the new testament manuscript tradition now that's a big number and in fact when you think about in the national and 27th edition of the greek new testament there's 138 thousand 162 words in the new uh and that's all on 28th there's there's a few more than that if you think about that that is about and in fact many people put it this way that's about three variants per word now i have seen people atheists some of my my muslim apologist friends who will just present that and they'll leave it hanging in the air that we basically have three options for every word and new testament that's not what it means that's not even close to what it means but that's the way they present it saying see there's this many variants that means we really can't have any confidence whatsoever in fact if we look at it graphically there's a number of words and then the number of variants that looks like the number of variants greatly dwarfs the number of words of the new testament and there will be many people who just present that and leave it there and let's be honest with us how many of us as believers would be able to give a response that presentation you say well that's just for scholars to do not anymore that's what i'm saying not anymore in my grandparents age sure not anymore because of the internet because of the way we communicate we all need to know the answers to these kinds of things we need to know these facts and know how in reality what we're looking at here is part of the evidence for the reliability of this text but until you hear the whole story it can be hard to understand so let's look at what they don't tell you what they don't tell you 99 of all variants i could not even explain to you in the english language because they do not impact the meaning or translation of the text they have to do for example with word order and the greek language word order is very different than it is in english it has been well said that there are about 16 different ways that you could write something like paul loves the church or jesus loves his people in the greek language as far as word order and utilization of different cases and tenses and all sorts of things like that and so when you have variations along those lines that cannot be translated into other languages then they're not impacting the actual meaning of the text itself but what's more is there's all sorts of spelling issues for example i remember when i took first year greek one of the students in a in the greek class we had really struggled with the concept of the movable new the movable new is just basically the same thing as we have in english you're not supposed to say a apple you're supposed to say an apple you're supposed to put that extra n in there when you have a word starting with a vowel afterwards right well some people don't quite get that and some scribes didn't quite get that and the same thing is true in greek as well and that is that there are those words you're supposed to have the movable news sometimes it's there sometimes it's not that accounts for literally thousands of variants of that 400 000 and so 99 of them are simply inconsequential they do not in any way impact the meaning of the text so one percent of four hundred thousand is about four thousand meaningful textual variants out of a hundred thirty eight thousand one hundred and sixty two words about two point nine percent or one meaningful variant every three pages but only about half of these are viable what does viable mean well if you had a scribe who got up one morning and um he didn't have his coffee and he stepped on his cat on the way out to the scriptorium and um uh he forgot his glasses well okay let's not use glasses that's a little bit anachronistic but he's having a bad day and so he's not paying attention to what he's copying and so in the process of copying a manuscript his mind wanders and he he comes up with a reading that no one's ever seen before and this is in the 14th century if you find one manuscript in the 14th century it has a reading that no one's ever seen before it's not viable that means it doesn't go back to the early period it could not be the original reading in fact we have one manuscript where one one scribe had a really bad day because the text he was copying was written in two columns but he forgot it was written in two columns and so he just copied straight across and it was in the genealogy of jesus and it really becomes weird because then god ends up with a father named ferrez and it's really really strange and this guy somehow didn't even notice this i don't know how that happened but we still have the manuscript we still have the evidence that there were scribes who sometimes just were not really aware of what in the world was going on and so that could happen so only about half or a little less than half of these are viable they actually go back far enough they have enough manuscript evidence behind them that they could possibly represent the original so that comes up with about fifteen hundred to two thousand viable new testament textual variants that is a very very different picture than what we were given before when you talk about four hundred thousand variants and more variants than there are words and all the rest of that kind of stuff we're talking about 1500 to 2000 instead now we still need to understand that simple fact the more manuscripts you have for a work of antiquity the more variance you're going to have think about it if you only have one manuscript how many variants do you have none now a lot of us would sort of like if that's the way it was no manuscripts at all just we just we have the one master manuscript what's the real problem with that you have to trust that whoever made that one manuscript got it absolutely right and if you don't have anything else if you don't have anything to check that by you've got no way to get back to the original you have no way of testing whether that one scribe was having a bad day or not so having just one manuscript bad thing for any work of antiquity the more manuscripts you have that you can compare the better off you are and the better certainty you have of the of still possessing the original readings but the downside to that is the more manuscripts you have the more variance you have so while we have a large number of variants it's just because the new testament has more manuscripts than any other work of antiquity at all so it's just a logical thing i really struggle i try to explain this to my muslim friends because they think well i've got the quran and there's no variance well there actually are they're just not aware of them and you know we've all got one arabic text and we can all look at one arabic text and that's superior to what you have but the reality is it isn't that's not superior it's actually an inferior transmission methodology to what we have in the new testament and so think about it if there are more than 5 700 catalog manuscripts of the new testament the average length of which is at least on the low end 200 pages it could be as much as 400 pages depending on how you count pages that's at least at the very very low end 1.3 million pages of text and some would say upwards to 3 million pages of hand written text that's a lot of pages of text now when you think about it fifteen hundred to two thousand meaningful and viable variants over minimally 1.3 million pages of hand copy text spanning approximately 1500 years prior the invention of printing is an amazingly small percentage of the text reflecting an amazingly accurate transmission attacks in fact one might almost call it downright miraculous now a number of years ago i asked my my computer to do something for me and what i asked it to do was to compare the the two extreme ends of the manuscript tradition now what scholars have done is they've identified streams within the manuscript tradition uh you have what's called the alexandrian text which most scholars believe is the most primitive and earliest you have the western text like in the latin vulgate and things like that they have what's called the byzantine text which is the majority of manuscripts that come from around byzantium modern-day istanbul or ancient constantinople and if you compare the printed texts that represent these two most extreme edges that's what i had my computer do well how many differences are there well here's ephesians 1 1-14 and the little bit of green that you see there is where those printed additions differ from one another now you can see there's very little difference there and there is now some of them are very important you can barely see it right down the bottom left-hand corner there's a little bit of green that's the difference between haas and ha at ephesians 1 14 where the spirit uh the pronoun that's used there is either a a masculine or a neuter i mean that's an important textual variant and we study it and it's it's a part of looking at the text but what you see is the vast majority of the text there's absolutely no difference whatsoever and most of the other differences or pronouns and things like that that if you know greek you realize very frequently are are not going to make a big difference one book that is has a very interesting transmission history is the book of hebrews and notice here's hebrews 6 8-20 there are only three places where you have a variation here the vast majority of the text every manuscript says the same thing now that's not what was in most of your minds when i first gave you the 400 000 number but this is the reality this is when you let the computer do the work and actually compare these things you're actually able to see the state but we need we need to explain well all right but where did the 1500 to 2000 come from that number needs to be understood now up until the last two decades the vast majority of scholarship would have said that the vast majority of variants were simply scribal errors especially with the advent of bart ehrman and others they have developed more of a theory of scribes being more active in specifically seeking to make changes one of my great concerns about this is that many of them have no longer they're no longer looking for the original readings they're they're now exegeting the variants as if they can somehow climb into the minds of the scribes and see well why did they put it this way and things like that and i while there may be some interesting things that can be derived from that i think it's primarily a dead end uh but that's an issue we can't really get into today scribal errors even from bart ehrman's perspective are still the reason for the vast majority of the differences that we find in the manuscripts of the new testament and so many of these errors involve common scribal errors mistakes that we continue to make to this very day now the younger folks in the audience might not remember what this was like but when i was in school i wrote my term papers on an ibm selectric oh yes yes and it was a trial it was a trial because do you remember not only whiteout and correction tape my daughter's laughing at me but um you also might remember what would happen when you would forget to put a footnote at the bottom of the page remember how you had to remember to put that in and you're typing away and you're doing so well and then you realize you forgot the footnote and you know what you do at that point you take the piece of paper out and you crumple it up and you throw it out and you start all over again yes mankind did somehow manage to survive this particular period of its history and so you would actually have to put a book next to you and instead of doing cut and paste you had to copy it yourself and even in our day with glasses and lights and air conditioning and ibm's electric you could make mistakes and one of the mistakes you might make is you might look over and you might be copying a certain word and you might see a common ending like tion or ing and so you type the word and you look back and you see ing and you continue on except that ing was on the next line down and hopefully you'd proofread and you'd catch it but then again you take the paper out you start it over again well that has happened for a very very long time i'd like to give you an example from the new testament where scribes had the same problem long before in ibm's electorate that is first john 3 1. first john 3 1 in the king james says behold what manner of love the father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of god therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not some of you might even know that as it sung in a little praise hymn type thing or something like that now compare that with the new american standard see how great a love the father has bestowed on us that we would be called children of god and such we are for this reason the world does not know us because it did not know him now for the gentleman the audience who are color blind and such we are is in red and it's not in the king james version of the bible now unfortunately there are people who utilize the differences between manuscripts as a foundation for causing division and for preaching long sermons and if i was a anti-king james guy i could go see you know what this means this shows that those nasty anglican translators the king james didn't like adoption as sons of god and so they took it out well that's ridiculous the reason the king james doesn't have it is because the manuscripts that they were translating from did not have that particular phrase and the reason the new american standard has it and the esv has it in the holman christian niv and so on so forth have it is because the manuscripts they're using contain the phrase but why is there a difference well this is a standard error that i just illustrated for you just a moment ago called homoi teluton homoi telutang which is just a fancy latin way of saying similar endings similar endings so we will have a quiz on this at the end of the presentation so you do need to memorize that particular that particular term so what happens is here is the information now this is a modern greek text and you can get this for your your phone and your ipad and your computer it's amazing the amount of information is available to us any longer but this is what scholars look at and uh actually if you can read a little greek on the third line right toward the end you see the phrase kai esteman there's a little red square next to the word kai and that's the phrase and we are and if you look down at the bottom in green on the right hand side there's a little square and then kl049 69 then a squiggly m for the majority text what that's telling us is that that phrase and we are is not found in those particular manuscripts and it includes the majority the majority of manuscripts majority of greek manuscripts but those all come from after 1000 a.d but that still doesn't really answer the question as to why a scribe would have made that particular kind of of mistake ancient writers we know made the same mistakes we do in regards to home italian time and unfortunately this only comes across in english right now due to the ipad but what they did is they would actually write in all capital letters for the first 800 years of the history of the text they would write in all capital letters no spaces between words and almost no punctuation the first 800 years of writing new testament all capitals no spaces between words and almost no punctuation whatsoever and so you would have this long line of letters and we can see what happened here and that is that when it said called claythoman in greek that ended with mu epsilon nu and then the very next words were chi esmin which used ends with mu epsilon nu an early scribe writes clayto mu epsilon nu his i goes back he sees mu epsilon at the end of s-man he goes on and inadvertently and we are is deleted common scribal error of sight and then once new testament manuscripts started being copied in scriptoriums we have a guy up the front and he's reading and you have a group of people writing which you can make more copies that way then you have errors of hearing for example we can tell that back then the difference between uh in in i was taught was called erasmian pronunciation so i would say hey mon and hey mean just sound like e mean to them and so unless you were listening very carefully stopped asked which one it was a my person's mind could wander a little bit and there would be errors of hearing that also creep in especially with words that had the same pronunciation well since we know what those errors are and since we don't just have one copy of the gospel of first john we can compare them then we're able to see these kinds of standard scribal errors but you see what the problem would be if we only had one copy and that was done by someone who committed the error of homework tell you time we'd lose the phrase and we are we wouldn't know that that was originally there but because we have many copies from many different places then that provides this with a variant yes but it also provides us the original and that's what a lot of people miss is they don't understand how ancient documents were transmitted over time and how important it is to have a wide and rich textual manuscript tradition okay so that's how you can see how that uh that happened now the majority of those 5700 plus greek manuscripts date from after 1000 ad comprising the majority text the earlier text are called papyri text written in unsealed or magical text all capitals and the papyri you know papyri wasn't meant to last for 2000 years i mean i'm i'm looking i'm looking at the books that i bought when i was in seminary and the pages are turning yellow and stuff like that and yeah that was a long time ago at least according to my kids but for most of us that really wasn't all that long ago and so papyri which was made by taking the leaves of papyrus plant putting them at 90 degree angles pressing them together that really wasn't meant to last for 2000 years it's amazing that we have as many papyri as we have that have in fact lasted for 2 000 years as i said unseal text all capital forms no spacing no punctuation here's a a graphic that sort of shows you the distribution of manuscripts over time so at the bottom second century third century fourth century up to the 16th century you can see that the majority of manuscripts come from after the 10th century which makes sense i mean you know think of europe and places like that we've had things called like wars you know world war one world war ii not good for manuscripts they don't handle bombing well fires things like that but you've also got things like bugs uh and uh and and mold and all sorts of things like that that can take their their toll over the time on manuscripts so it makes sense there's also other things that need to be seen here notice the blue is the papyri green are the unsealed texts that were written on vellum which is animal skin but very thin animal skin and the unsealed texts were written in all capitals you see they sort of fade out by the 10th century because people started going you know large letters small letter spaces easier to read and so that that way of writing became became predominant but there's also something else to remember about history here and that is what happened between 632 and 732 this is where you need to know a little something about history because you see very early on the western church primarily switched over to latin and so greek was primarily in north africa and in in israel and uh and up into constantinople and greece and things like that but then what happened between 632 and 732 it's called the century of islamic expansion muhammad dies in 632 the islamic expansion is stopped in europe at the battle of tours charles martel 732. so for a hundred years and islam spreads all across what had been christian lands all across north africa spain portugal and all the way up through the holy lands and all the way up into the borders of of byzantium and constantinople islam is not really good for the production of greek manuscripts in the new testament and so the production of those manuscripts is impacted by the rise of islam and the primary place left where greek manuscripts are being produced is constantinople or ancient byzantium which is why the vast majority of these are byzantine manuscripts because after a certain period of history that's the only place to be producing manuscripts in the first place so you can see the distribution now i've found that christians like to see some of these manuscripts it's one thing to see uh the footnotes down the bottom the page but i've found the christians like to see some of these things so let's take a look at uh at uh at one here this is ryland's 457 also known as p52 now i love p52 it is right now the earliest agreed upon fragment of the new testament that we possess there's rumblings right now that we now have some earlier papyri fragments that are soon going to be published but we don't know when but until they're published we can examine them can't say this was discovered amongst a box of papyri that had been brought to to uh london uh you know the british went all over place stole everybody else's treasures and dragged them back to london during the colonial period and a guy was rifling through some some boxes and he pulled this out and he started translating and said this is from the bible and they they sent it to the to four of the greatest pepperologists alive at that time and three of them dated it to 125 now when you date a papyri what you do is you compare it to other manuscripts where you know what the date is as to the writing styles and so it's always within 25 years one way or the other so it's a 50-year window so if you date it to 125 it could be as early as 100 or as late as 150. and so three of the four dated to 125 and the fourth dated it to 95 the first century which is amazing i'll show you how amazing that is a little bit later on what's really cool about p52 if you had gone to seminary back in germany in oh the 1870s you would have been told that the gospel of john was written around 170 a.d why well because it has such a high christology has such a high view of jesus that it couldn't have been written by anybody who actually knew jesus because we all know jesus wasn't like that you see and so it had to have developed and evolved long long long after that that's what that would have been the assured results of scholarship you see that's what i love about 52. it comes along and guess what 52 is from it's from the gospel of john in fact this is john chapter 18 verses 31-34 on the front half and 37-38 on the back in fact i really love it is it has the very words of jesus when he says the one who is of the truth hears my voice is on the earliest papyri fragment we have of the new testament i think that's awesome i think there's been an angel assigned to this little piece of paper for 2 000 years he was so glad and that guy finally in the basement said hey he's like good can i do something else now lord and it's great it's wonderful so now one thing you don't know about me none of you in this room could tell at all about me that i'm a little geekish especially my style but not only that i actually make my own ties and here i am in my debate with bart ehrman and if you look at my tie that's p52 now it's blown up because p52 is only about the size of a credit card so it's blown up but you can read all of it and there i am giving bart ehrman his own p52 tie now i don't know what bart ehrman does this 52 time i think maybe he wears it once a semester just to just to talk about the crazy fundamentalists that he debated once i don't know maybe he burned an effigy once i don't know but there i am giving barterman his own 52 tie and that's one of the few times during the debate they actually smiled so uh there there i am with 52. now this next one i am i am not going to interpret for you this is one of the earliest fragments we have of the book of revelation the book of revelation now you can see how the page sort of was and how much of it's missing it's gone notice the straight part right there in the middle what do you think that indicates it was probably folded over at some point if you want to tear a piece of paper you don't have scissors what do you do you fold it over it breaks the fibers in the paper that's probably what happened right there so you can see this was once a full page but this is all we have left now we only have like two early papyri manuscripts in the book of revelation in fact guess which book of the new testament we have the fewest manuscripts of the book of revelation it has the most interesting and unusual transmission history because if you know the history there are a lot of people didn't accept revelation as canon scripture in those early centuries so it's going to have a different transmission history than you're going to have for example the gospels which are universally accepted by everybody from the very start i don't care how many people tell you oh there are these all these gnostic gospels stuff like that none of them came for the first century there weren't a bunch of christians going on i love the gospel of thomas no those were a bunch of weird gnostics in egypt that was you know that's just not the case so anyways i want to blow something up here i want to show you something this is from revelation chapter 13. and what's in revelation chapter 13 well folks what's the number of the beast everybody knows the number of the beast we could stop a biker going by outside and go what's the number of the beast to go it's right here no it's right here you know it's 666. everybody knows the number of the beast right a little bit of a problem in the earliest manuscripts we have the book of revelation it's not 666 it's 616. i will give one one theory that dr dan wallace of dallas seminary has propounded i think is incredibly insightful it's incredibly insightful he says 666 is the number of the beast and 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast i'll let you think about that and we'll move on from there this is a p-72 from around ad-175 to 200. i saw this exact page in 1993 in denver i was up debating uh on the subject of roman catholicism and the pope was in town which is why we're having those debates and um the papal treasures exhibit was in town and when i saw it they had a part of p72 i said we've got to go and we go walking in here they've got gold crowns and tiaras and diamonds so i could care less right at the beginning of the of the tour here this is under glass and i'm just standing there oh look at this you can see the noman of sacred the nomen of sacra for some reason christians we don't know why we have no idea why but christians developed a series of abbreviations god jesus lord spirit they'd abbreviate those words and put a line over them if you look real careful you can see a bunch of words and there's these little lines over them only christians did that we don't know why but i started translating it and what i really like is this is actually you can see right at the top it says petru epistolae bay second peter this is the earliest manuscript we have that's the end of first peter and the beginning of second period the earliest manuscript we have around 175 to 280. now you look at it and you go um this guy did not win the handwriting competition in first grade lines aren't exactly straight you know that's not the most uh perfect cursive handwriting or whatever you've ever seen this is probably just a believer obviously had some education because not everybody could write back then obviously some education probably what happened here is christians when they would travel they would go into other churches and they'd fellowship christians love to have fellowship with one another and they probably brought out first and second peter started reading from this guy goes what's that we've never heard that before we don't have that in our church could i have a could i make a copy of that and i've always wondered if our folks had to hand copy their own copies of the scriptures how well would we do how many would have only first a second peter certainly wouldn't have many copies of isaiah or ezekiel would we probably not it's hard to get folks just to show up for sunday school let alone have to copy their own scriptures but this here's someone who loved the word so much that not only were they willing to handwrite it but remember up until 313 christianity was a religiou elicita an illegal religion and many people lost their lives for possessing the christian scriptures and the romans destroyed thousands of manuscripts of the christian scriptures so here's someone who loves the word so much they want to hand write it and risk their own lives in the process that was almost in tears but what's also really neat about it is that if you know 2nd peter 1 1 you know that that is a reference to the deity of christ i remember back when the da vinci code came out and and everybody's going oh the deity of christ was invented by constantine the council of nicean 325 this was written long before constantine was a gleam in his daddy's eye and what do we have right here our god and savior jesus christ called a granville sharp construction where god and savior both applied to the one person jesus christ here written long before constantine ever came along documentary evidence that dan brown owes us all a refund but i don't expect that in this lifetime anyways maybe in eternity but here is this incredible uh text p72 that uh i got to see and then we have uh manuscripts like p75 incredibly important gospel manuscript that's actually the beginning of john you can if you look you can't from this distance but if you look you can see at the beginning of the gospel of john here incredibly accurate text very closely related to the great unseals especially codex vaticanus and then i really like this picture of this manuscript this is p66 also around the same time period what i like about this is you can see what it looked like as a book normally you just see a page notice the damage to the outside pages and how it's more obviously it's the outside the inside is going to be protected by the spine of the book and the other pages but it's also more toward the bottom than the top for some reason that kind of of damage you see we'll see it in a moment on another manuscript but this is also the beginning of john uh john 1 1 and again just to prove dan brown dan brown didn't know he was talking about there's that final phrase kaithias in halagos and the word was god found there at the end of john 1 1 another reference to the deity of christ here in this very very ancient copy of the gospels and here here is where i am going to have to ask for some audience participation by voting now every time i do this i get dissed and i don't know why and i don't think it has anything to do with the ties at all because what happens is i ask people to vote in this little poll that i take and at least a third of the people sit there and go i ain't gonna do it no you can't you can't force me no no i'm not i'm not guessing no i'm not gonna don't don't look at me vote okay when i ask you the question vote this is p46 awesome round ad 175 200 and what is p46 well let me blow this up for you prosphilopaisius this is the earliest collection of paul's epistles okay extremely important obviously i mean especially if you're talking about romans and things like that right i got to see this a manuscript it's on display portions of it on display in dublin ireland just a few years ago and uh i i don't want to cause our our camera guys too much of a problem here but i do want to relate to a story that happened there um they have them under very dim lights because they don't want the no they don't want to damage the papyri but we're trying to read them and the light is really really dim and and we actually have i had on my on my ipod touch i had in in my uh uh accordance uh program uh the papyri so transcribed so we're trying to find you know make the correspondence and stuff and we're just straining so hard to see and then we realize wait a minute the light's coming from above so where is the light going to be best but direct reflection so it's going to be down below so what i did is i got down my hands and knees and started looking up okay it's much brighter okay okay i've got an omega new okay there and i started trends well we didn't realize is there's security cameras out there and i can just see the security guides oh great the christians are worshiping the manuscripts again oh man so you know this security guy shows up and excuse me but what are you doing and we're reading the manuscripts really yeah okay you know they didn't kick us out we did explain to them especially when i could actually show them and i saw this at this very page i've actually seen this page of p46 the beginning of philippians i wanted to see the carmen christie philippians 2 5 through 11. they had the page there they had it on the back side i couldn't see it as a back side of what anyways clearly whoever put those pages out had no idea what they're doing anyways here's here's the poll here's the quiz what book in the new testament do we not know the author of hebrews now a lot of people say paul wrote hebrews well maybe i'll tell you what my theory is i think paul preached hebrews in hebrew to the jews and luke wrote it down in greek because it's lukan vocabulary and lucan writing style but pauline theology so that's my theory all right but here's the question did whoever wrote this manuscript did they think that paul wrote hebrews did they include hebrews in the collection so is hebrews in p46 it's just a guess how many of you think it is in the manuscript many of you think it isn't in the manuscript thank you my daughter did vote she almost didn't she was she was tempted there for a moment uh p 46 is actually the second book right after romans uh i mean hebrews second book right after romans in p46 so it is included all that tells you is someone around the ear 200 thought that paul wrote it clearly uh that doesn't mean he did but he was it was clearly associated with him uh in in p46 so aside from the 5700 greek text we have early translations latin coptic sahidic boheric these are extremely important sometimes they can't help us in determining a textual variant sometimes they can't for example whether a word was or was not in the in at least the the greek original that was being translated from initially those translations can help us with things like that uh but then some grammatical things they really can't help us with that we have more than 124 greek manuscript witnesses within the first 300 years after writing the new testament notice this last line far more than any other work of antiquity far more than any other work of antiquity if people are going to try to promulgate the idea that we can't know what the new testament originally said then they need to be honest and say we don't know anything about history we don't know anything about what tacit has said or pliny said or any of the greek historians we don't know anything about history because we can't really know what they originally said but you know what they generally don't say that they generally don't express very openly their their concerns about the accuracy of those works they express their concerns primarily about the new testament and i would say there are certain certain reasons why that is that is the case in fact we have 12 manuscripts from the second century that is within 100 years the writing of the new testament these manuscripts contain portions of all four gospels nine books of paul acts hebrews and revelation comprising the majority of the books the new testament possessed today again no work of antiquity even comes closest early attestation and may i just mention in passing we do not include the quran in works of antiquity because it's a medieval work i mean it's it's you know at the very earliest around 650 a.d and so it's in the medieval period it's not a work of antiquity so it's not involved in this particular uh comparison now think about this the average length of time between the writing of most works contemporaneous with the new testament such as the historical works of pliny swatonious testis and their first excellent copies is between 500 and 900 years you know what that means the average time span between when those books were written and the first manuscripts copies we have of them is between five and nine hundred years now compare that with the new testament we have 12 within 100 years 124 within 300 years and they're waiting to 500 years to their earliest or as late as 900 years for their earliest that is a huge difference a massive difference we just want people to be consistent at that point want people to really understand now lord welland i've got a video clip for you here uh so you can you can hear what and i consider bart ehrman to be the leading critic in the english language of the new testament we did a debate a number of years ago and a lot of folks didn't know why i was asking him the questions i was asking him during the cross examination but if you know something about this field then you know exactly why i was asking the questions that i was asking him and he had made the claim on the unbelievable radio broadcast in london a program have been on a number of times uh that there was a enormous amount of time between the writing of paul when paul would write a letter like galatians and when we have the first copies of it and i found that odd enormous in comparison to anything else and so i asked him a question and hopefully here's how he answered on the unbelievable radio program in london you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of paul's letter to the galatians and the first extant copy that being 150 years you describe this time period as enormous that's a quote could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between say the original writings of suetonius or tacitus or pliny and their first extant manuscript copies very enormous sort of ginormous would be a good one ginormous ginormous okay um i mean ginormous doesn't cover it the new testament we have much earlier attestation than for any other book from antiquity so there you have the leading critic of the new testament admitting we have the earliest attestation for the new testament of any work of antiquity whatsoever i think if bart ehrman were to be simply asked what's the document with the earliest attestation he'd say the new testament i would probably say which has the widest and best attestation he'd say the new testament and yet people interpret his words and i think he profits from this as if we can't really know what the new testament says when the reality is if you really pin him down in a scholarly context what he's saying is there are certain verses that we're not exactly certain about but we know what the new testament was originally about but that's not unfortunately what you end up seeing in most of those situations so here's a graphic that a fellow down australia put together and the center point there is point of origin and then the round yellow dots are the relative size of the the number of manuscripts for work we have and then the distance from that center is how long you have to go before you have a manuscript of that particular work so so the the biggest dot to the right is homer and he's a good 500 years down the road we've got about 600 manuscripts and then you get farther out and you've got certain works like plato and stuff you've got like half a dozen to a dozen manuscripts and there's as much as 1400 years of silence before the first copies now the big thing to the left is not the sun that's the new testament that's the new testament in all of its translations as well and you'll notice how close it is to the point of origin and how massive it is as to the witness that it has that gives you a graphical idea of the difference between what you have in all the other works of antiquity and what you have with the new testament and it gives you an idea of going wow why are people so skeptical because the real problem that new testament scholars have is we've got so much to work with that's the real issue we have so many manuscripts to work with the people in other areas that study something like you know the manuscripts of plato wish they had what we have but they don't they just don't have it now every remember the phone game i think some people call it chinese whispers that's how unfortunately a lot of people today present the idea the new testament and even when i was talking about how scholars present it well you have one copy and there's errors in it and then it's copied and those errors are multiplied then that assumes a single line of transmission over time is that how the new testament came to us the answer is that it is not instead when you think about it what you have the new testament is what i call multi-focality multiple authors writing it multiple times to multiple audiences all right that means there's never you know no one ever sat down and wrote the new testament at one time and hence could control it paul's writing individual letters to churches james is writing his letter peter's writing his letter they're writing at different times different places not even everybody knew that they were doing this at the same time there's no cooperation where any cell phones no fax numbers anything like that at all all right so books get written and then they get transferred to other places and they get copied and then they get moved to other places and eventually what happens is you start putting collections together for example p 66 the gospels p 46 you start putting collections together and then eventually over time you have the entirety of the new testament what what you need to understand about this is that there were multiple lines of transmission the transmission of the text new testament did not follow a phone game single line not only are written documents less liable to corruption than what's spoken in your whispered in your ear because you've got something that's actually physical that you can look at but the phone game involves a single io transmission the new testament originated in multiple places written by multiple authors with books being sent to multiple locations and this results in multiple lines of transmission and that is extremely important this multi-facility leads us to the final considerations that demonstrate the bankruptcy of the modern attacks on the text of the new testament to make specific changes in a text like the new testament which originally circulated as a a group of texts not as a single body would require a centralized controlling authority you'd have to have you know you've seen some of the movies where they have these rooms filled with monks and you know and they're copying stuff and they're they're determining which books are gonna be in the bible never happened never could have happened it's all fiction as often as people believe it it doesn't matter it's still all just a bunch of fiction there that's never how the canon was formed that's never how the text the new testament was transmitted instead you had it you had this christians want everybody to have a copy of the bible they want everybody to know about the gospel so they did not restrict the copying of their manuscripts they couldn't especially because the romans said it was illegal to have them and if they were destroying manuscripts the church had to be producing manuscripts or eventually the new testament could be destroyed and so you have this explosion of manuscripts all over the known world that means there was never a time when anyone could have come along and said well any of you old enough to remember shirley maclaine remember shirley mclean and she got off into that new age stuff for a while and she did that that movie out on a limb and you know she's walking along the seashore with her guru and he's teaching to say i am god i am god i'm god we're all sitting there at home going no you're not no you're not or you're not really weird and you know she'd go around saying well you know the bible used to teach reincarnation but they took it out the council of constantinople and we all go right except most of us have no earthly idea when the council of constantinople was and we really couldn't give an answer beyond that anyways could we and so this you know could that have happened could someone have taken a doctrine out or put a doctrine in the answer is no not a possibility in any way shape or form because there was never a time when there was a group that had control over the text the new testament now there was a time in the history of the quran when that happened and this is a vitally important issue i've debated this issue in london you'll be debating it in just a few weeks in south africa there was a time when a group a committee determined the text of the quran and what happens when you have a group that can control the text you have to trust they got it absolutely right there's no controls you see we keep finding earlier and earlier and earlier manuscripts and what they tell us that what we've had all along is in fact what the new testament has always said so there was no group like that uh could not have happened christianity was a persecuted religion made up mainly of the lower classes there was no central authority could have ever gathered all the texts made wholesale changes such as impossible in the earliest days of transmission and given that we have such ancient texts now obviously could not have happened at a later point without giving clear evidence so in other words if someone had tried to make a big change and took out chapters and put in chapters as we find earlier manuscripts those later manuscripts are going to stand out like a sore thumb but that's not what we found we found earlier in earlier manuscripts of the new testament so that did not happen in the history of the text we can prove it it's just simply an impossibility it could not have happened this is extremely important apologetically this is extremely important for us to communicate to our to our young people and to all of us because it's this conspiracy theory idea that is so prevalent amongst many people not just because of dan brown but because of others that well you know we really can't know you know maybe this deity of christ thing was insured later on it is an impossibility because there was never an organization that could make that kind of change in the text of the new testament itself but that means all allegations of purposeful corruption such as those made by muslims fall upon the mere considerations the historical context and the data itself the rapid widespread distribution new testament manuscripts in the first two centuries precludes any purposeful centralized corruption but it also gives rise the need to study the relatively small number of textual variants because they didn't they didn't make you take a manuscript copying class to make sure you're really good at it you know if you want to have a copy you can make a copy well you might make some mistakes because you weren't the best copies in the world well that's why we have textual variants so that is a that's actually when we really understand it that's actually just simply the the side effect of the way that god used to preserve the new testament because it exploded all over the place we can say with absolute confidence that there was no editing changing inserting or anything else going on and we could detect it if anyone tried it but the result is we have to look at the textual variants because look if you want to say i'm not going to believe god can give something until it can be done absolutely perfectly you know the earliest point in time god could have given his revelation 1949 you know why 1949 is when they invented the photocopier even printed books have errors in them remember the addition of the king james version where the printer forgot the word not in the commandment thou shalt not commit adultery uh you know there are errors that take place in in printing too because you got to put the little letters into the thing to make the printing all it does is mean the errors you make get a lot more copies so it was not until 1949 if you want to make absolute perfection of transmission the standard that god could have given his revelation i think god wanted to get around to it a little bit earlier than that now real quickly this leads to another important point when scribes copied their text they were very conservative often incorporating marginal notes into the text since they could not be sure if the note was original or not when i have more time what i love to do is i ask i ask someone in the audience who has the niv uh could you read me john chapter five verse four and they start looking they start looking there is no john five four in the niv it goes from five three to five five now it's in the little teeny tiny font at the bottom of the page but the verse has been taken out of the text because it is most probably a marginal note that someone had written an explanation it's about the angel troubling the waters and it was a marginal note and a later scribe not knowing whether it should be there or not included it in the text i mean if you're copying someone else's handwritten text and they're dead you can't go back to them and say is this an explanation or is this supposed to be in here and so scribes tend to be very conservative they'd include it which means later manuscripts get bigger and bigger and bigger by up to up to like three percent once you get into the later manuscripts because they are including everything that's found there so they're very very conservative now that's extremely important that's actually a very very good thing that means they even preserve mistakes or silly readings this may sound bad at first but consider what it really means the new testament text is tenacious tenacious that means once a reading appears in it it stays in it even if it's a bad reading you go why is that good think with me for a moment that's how we know the originals are still there because the text is tenacious as long as it's been a reading it's still there and so when i'm looking at a variant and there's three or four options one of them is the original so when people say you think we've got everything paul wrote yep can you identify every bit of it well in my critical text i've got all of it now there are some places where i have to go well it's possibly this or possibly that but the original is still there that's the important part i heard an illustration once i think it was rob bowman that you used the illustration off top my head and this is a very good illustration it's like having a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle now what's the worst thing can happen to you when you put together a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle the cat comes along one night and eats one of the pieces and you get 9999 put together and then there's a hole in it isn't that the worst they could possibly have do anyone does anyone make jigsaw puzzles anymore i mean i think computers free will kill jigsaw puzzles but anyways what we have in new testament is we have a 10 000 piece jigsaw puzzle and we have 10 100 pieces now isn't it better to have 10 100 pieces than to have 9 900 pieces you see the extra 100 pieces are the scribal additions over time and we have to work through them but you see the point is the 10 000 pieces that form the puzzle are all there that's the vital issue that's the important point to remember no other work of antiquity could say that because the time frames are too big the number of manuscripts too small the new testament can the new testament can so that's why the believing textual critic can preserve an even the most difficult variance because one of the readings is the original reading now i'm going to give you one key theological example then we'll have some conversation i like to work through a couple examples so that you can see how this works out and this is a very important theological example if you have your bible take a look at first timothy 3 16. first timothy 3 16 compare the king james version and the new american standard king james version says without controversy great is the mystery of godliness god was manifest in the flesh justified in the spirit scene of angels preached unto the gentiles believed on the world received up into glory compare the new american standard by common confession great is the mystery of godliness he who was revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit seen by angels proclaimed among the nations believed on the world taken up in glory now that is a theological difference that's the difference between whether jesus is called god or not called god called he who that's big now by the way the exact same situation in reverse is found in john 1 18. in other words in john 1 18 the modern translation is jesus is called god but he's not the king james so there are important textual variants that have to do with theological issues and we need to be aware of them we should never be blindsided by these things read the notes at the bottom of the page it's important it really is important but we're just looking at this one now i have heard entire sermons preached on this about how all the godless men who worked at a new american standard since i've been at a critical consultant with the nsb i guess they included me don't believe in the deity of christ funny that i've defended the deity of christ literally around the world against muslims and jehovah's witnesses and every other other person along the line but that's what they say because see they took god out you got to be really careful when people use terminology like that what's the standard when you say something was taken out the king james was not the first english translation and it wasn't the last english translation and there are differences between the king james and the translations came before it geneva bishop's bible matthews et cetera et cetera so why does that become the standard and when you say took it out the reality is of course the modern greek texts do not have the word god at first human 3 16. now they have it the notes we all know it's there but it's not the main reading of the text since that's not what's translated but why would there be such an important theological difference between the two well like i said a lot of people really preach on this uh the variant's fairly evenly matched but in reality very strong uh attestation here's here it is here's on the screen uh on the on the fourth line you can say you can see haas ifanarothe who was manifest in the flesh and then there is a textual critical mark next to it and codex d which is codex beze cantor bridgeanses which is a really weird text which we don't have time to talk about and some latin manuscripts have a neuter and then you have the word theos which is found in the corrected edition of sinaiticus the corrected edition of alexanders the correct initiative c correct edition of d2 of d in the majority of manuscripts but the text is the original sinaiticus alexandrius cfg so on and so forth so there's the the evidence but again we need to look at what it would have looked like originally to see the difference the difference is between us and haas and the os in greek would have been shrunk down to theta sigma and theta is simply a circle with the lines of the middle in other words they would have been almost identical letters the difference is only a line above and in the middle of the letter and remember you're writing on papyri and what is papyri made out of leaves what the leaves have veins it could be very very easy for someone for the variant to go either direction so it's not a matter of a conspiracy it's not a matter of someone coming along and and trying to delete the deity of christ or something like that in any way shape or form like i said john 118 has the same has the same issue in it i'm going to skip over that uh for the moment and just get to the the summary let's summarize it 400 000 variants 99 of them absolutely inconsequential most thoroughly documented work of antiquity spread all over the world quickly no controlling authority any later editing would stand out clearly in comparison with ancient manuscripts and so while that was a fast run through hopefully it's given you at least at least you now understand that having a robust full early manuscript tradition is vitally important to being able to say we know what an ancient document said and of all the works of antiquity the new testament has that greatest level of evidence and purity of text antiquity of the documents etc etc so realize most of the time when people you know you're probably not going to run into barterman very often but you might run into people who read bart ehrman's books they've never looked at this stuff unfortunately most christians haven't either but the reality is when we start preaching the gospel what do we always say the scriptures say so we need to know what the scriptures say and why we can trust it the evidence is there there's work to be done but we're called to be salt and light in a culture that is being soaked with unbelief we're called to be light in the midst of that darkness and so i hope this will help you to get started at least on that journey you're a big thinker i'm not i go out in the middle you're much taller than i am and talk to the kids oh okay all right and i talked to the kids i want to try to recreate a conversation that i would have on a campus with the kid bring it down to the their attention span have you seen it yeah second long the videos are six seconds long and that's it so make it pithy mister there's a lot of mistakes in the bible well of course you might believe that my first question to someone would be have you read the bible okay and and immediately the response could be no so someone says if someone says that to me i'm assuming someone has told you that first of all i'd like to invite you to at least read one book of the bible and see if you can see for yourself what some of these mistakes are but secondly i have read all the bible and in fact i've taught both languages of the bible okay i stop i haven't i know but i'm trying to say to you if you say there's mistakes in the bible which bible are you talking about do you even realize we're talking about an ancient work here we're talking about a book that wasn't written in english are you really being fair with the bible what is your prejudice against the bible has the bible said something to you that you don't like see you can go that direction pretty quickly to find out if the possibility is that the reason they're saying this is because maybe they have a religious background they don't really like what the christian message is and this objection isn't really an objection to the bible they're going to stop me pretty quickly if in reality they really do have an intellectual problem but let's let's let's admit it for a lot of folks we could talk about there isn't an intellectual problem they're using this as an excuse to not submit the lordship of christ which they already know about and so when i say that i'm simply saying you need to be fair why are you being why are you subjecting the new testament to a standard you don't subject any other work of antiquity to they even know what another end work of antiquity it is but the point is are why are you being unfair people are very sensitive to the accusation of being bred prejudiced or biased or unfair and it stops them in their track and their in their objection and what i'm trying to say is you need to be fair and are you sure the sources that you're relying upon have been fair have you ever thought about that and normally that will that will cause them to step back long enough for me to drag the six second attention span out a little bit longer and say the reality is the new testament has more ancient attestation and a wider attestation than any other book of antiquity when you were in your history class did you hear a professor always saying we don't really know what happened in rome we you know suetonius he said this but we really don't know you didn't hear him saying that but the new testament has a thousand times the manuscript evidence of the sources that he was accepting for what happened in ancient rome why do you think that might be do you think maybe there might be a prejudice here you think there might be something going on here you got to get them you got to get them to step away from their unbelieving world view for just a moment to start wondering have i been fed a line have i been given something that's really biased uh that's that's been my experience in talking with folks like that if they do pursue that questioning there are mistakes in the bible what you just did you memorized a couple of facts right you know the suetonius manuscripts whether in whatever the julius caesar the golic wars maybe memorizing one of those statistics right would be helpful it would be very very helpful to be able to do that to be able people will the fact of the matter is people can tell whether you're following a sort of pre-programmed presentation or whether you're really speaking from your heart and that's why in talking with them i try to get to the personal level as quickly as i can on that level but yes being able to compare the new testament to something like that having some of those facts or being simply able to ask could you give me a you know an example now be careful you might want to know what some of the standard alleged contradictions are in in the text of the new testament because there's just all sorts of them uh you know i have an entire chapter on my book scripture alone of some of the standard objections like mormons like to use and things like that it's good to know some of those things but yeah most of the time they'll go well everybody knows that they don't really have a specific objection and then you can say well look you know i've examined a lot of alleged contradictions and what i have found is that in almost every single one of them the objection was based upon our ignorance of what the writer was saying and then i try to make it personal for example if someone were to look at what you've written in your emails and and text messages and things like that a thousand years from now not knowing what your life was like don't you think they might misinterpret you don't think they might think you contradicted yourself a lot now you might contradict yourself a lot but the point is they might accuse you of contradicting yourself when if they just know what your context was they wouldn't have accused you of that try to make it something personal they can relate to how much of this do you think comes from the confusion we take our contemporary ideas about how we transmit information yes versus the system that used to exist and maybe helping them make that little leap that is really that is a difficult thing to do though i mean because yes they're so accustomed to cut and paste and and the electronic i mean that's what they've grown up with that the idea that for example uh that that christians could exist for decades unaware of a book of scripture because they live in another part of the of the world and and there's there's a slow communication and you don't have fax machines and things that that is extremely important to try to be able to communicate to people but the way to do that is to say now make sure you're not you're not forcing on antiquity a standard that could only be relevant to us today you've got to realize they didn't have the technology we had and i like to throw in which probably means they're a lot smarter than we are because they did more with less than we do today i like to throw that in because man there is a massive amount of modern hubris amongst young people all of us today i mean we look back at preceding generations and think because they didn't have an ipad they were idiots when the reality is we're not producing anything in comparison what they produce literally or any or cultural or anything else so i like to throw that in there but yeah it's very important to try to explain the fact that it wasn't just a matter of paul tapping out romans and then just doing a mass email and that's how it got around that's not how it worked yeah i think even christians can be sometimes confused a council sometimes would take decades right they didn't just jump on an airplane and all come together right it was a little bit more it was just a different time and explaining the time difference could be helpful all right you've been trying to demonstrate the reliability of the new testament does the argument the proof that the bible is reliable mean that it is inspired by god a lot of christians recognize that if god has not preserved the new testament then our claims of inspiration uh face a real difficulty but we have to recognize the different category that i've been speaking of this evening i believe in inerrancy i believe that the scriptures as given were theyanustas god breathed now that is a theological assertion about the nature of these documents what i've been talking about today is how god has preserved those documents and how we can have a reliable trust in the translations that we have of those documents today but just simply demonstrating that well the new testament has the best manuscript tradition of any work of antiquity does not make it inspired because someone could come along and say well the quran has the best manuscript integrity of any work of the medieval period so it's inspired no there's obviously a distinction between the two claims they are very closely related because if we believe god has inspired it there's going to be an issue of preservation involved but we have to distinguish between the two and unfortunately i hear a lot of christians confusing those two and when they're talking with someone and trying to talk about inspiration they start talking about how many manuscripts we have and things like that which means it's not clear in their mind what the real evidence for inspiration is which i think is far more if you want to talk about inspiration let's talk about having 40 authors over 1500 years weaving the same beautiful threads of meaning and teaching through different languages and different times and coming together what you got in the bible that's inspiration okay but that's not the issue of the of the manuscripts themselves would you tweak this sentence at all if i said i can demonstrate to you the bible is reliable but that doesn't prove that it is inspired would you tweak that no i i think that's i think that's a good distinction to make the only thing that would the next sentence would be now obviously i would believe that god's providence in preserving it is a fulfillment of his promise to give his word to his people but the inspiration speaks to the nature of the words the preservation of those words is what brings them down to us today which perhaps brings us to a controversy of the day which one of the manuscript or manuscripts is the line that is most accurate it is the king james version only controversy yeah yeah well one of the things i didn't have time to to get into is the fact that uh when we started producing printed greek new testaments the first printed and published greek new testament was by a man named desdarius erasmus erasmus was a dutch humanist scholar he rushed his first edition to print because his printer john froeben knew that cardinal jimenez had already done a multi-volume called the completion polyglot but back then you had to get papal approval before you printed anything and you didn't have fax machines and there was all sorts of red tape to go through so they were sitting in a warehouse and so erasmus printer is a entrepreneur shall we say and so he's pushing him to get this thing done to get it out as a result as rasus himself said his first edition was precipitated rather than edited had a number of errors in it he went into the book of revelation i gotta tell this story now he went in the book of revelation he could only find he thought the the library in basel switzerland would have multiple copies couldn't find a one so he borrowed a commentary on revelation from a friend and he had to extract the text of revelation from the commentary and he got to the last chapter and discovered that the last pages had fallen off and so what he did is he translated from the latin vulgate into greek for the last six verses of the book of revelation the amazing thing is he came up with readings no one ever seen in any manuscript before that was in his first edition that was in all five of his editions all the way through 1535 and to this very day the king james version of the bible has the weird readings that erasmus came up with from the latin in its readings in the text of book revelation to this very day because it was those five editions of erasmus the 1550 edition of stefanos and the 1598 edition of beza those were the seven printed greek texts that the king james translators used between 1604 and 1611 to produce the new testament of the king james version of the bible erasmus only had between 6 and 12 manuscripts we have 5700 and so that text that was used for the king james became known as the textual septus in 1633 uh the ellisville bro elizabeth brothers put out an advertisement for their printed edition and they called it back then latin advertisements were advertised were in latin if you can believe that it really wouldn't work today very well and texas receptus means received text and so for quite some time from from the 1600s till the late 1800s that was pretty much the text that was used even though it had a very small manuscript tradition behind it then as more and more manuscripts are found you have the drive to create a critical edition of the greek new testament we're using much earlier manuscripts erasmus wanted to use vaticanus he he wouldn't have had any problem using vaticans but it was in rome he couldn't get to it and so as we found earlier in earlier manuscripts now our critical editions which take into consideration not only the greek manuscripts but all these other translations have a much broader textual basis and so there are differences between that and the texas receptus so if anyone has a king james and remember if you had a king james today you don't have a 1611 king james you have a 1769 blainey revision of the king james and even then you've either got the oxford of cambridge and they're not identical to one another that's based on the tr the new king james is also based on the tr some people think it's a translation the jordy text it's not it's a translation of the texas receptus so they are going to have for example first john 5 7 the kami ohanian a text that was not a part of the greek manuscripts of new testament until at least the 1400s um there's going to be those places that it's going to vary in its text from esv and asb niv holman christian site which are all based upon the modern eclectic text which have this much broader textual basis all right let me just boil that down king james version of the bible textus receptus the received text from a manuscript that was a fair distance between the time of jesus manuscripts that were about 1200 years after christ okay 1200 years yes now since that time when the king james version of the bible came out we've had more and more manuscripts added called the eclectic text which is drawing from from the entirety of the spectrum and the other translations latin so on so and so some of the modern translations that we have today would be nasb uh the escsv real popular okay now an argument that the king james version folks would use and i personally sympathize with it i mean i i'm sympathetic toward it why would god do that why would he have people for two centuries thinking that the king james version of the bible is the most accurate translation and you folks come along with your little eclectic text business why would god do that funny thing is if they would read the introduction to the king james by the translators their position would be refuted because the king james why did the king james translators do what they did the geneva bible is perfectly fine in fact the pilgrims preferred the king the geneva bible to the king james bible by a long shot because king james told the translators there were certain words they could not use for example they could not translate baptize as anything other than baptized and the church had to be church and not assembly and stuff like that the puritans many of them did not like the king james because of that but there were english translations before the king james came along not only that but that was the exact argument that was used against erasmus because what was the bible for 1100 years for western christendom was the latin vulgate how dare you come along and both change the vulgate and give us a greek greek rendering as well how dare you do that simple tradition of use does not indicate godly uh approbation of that particular text or we'd have to go back to the vulgate and even when latin even when uh the latin vulgate was translated by jerome there was a near riot in carthage because up till then they had used the greek septuagint translation of the old testament and jerome more accurately translated that the gourd that drew that grew over jonah's head was a castor oil plant and when that was read in public they almost rioted why because they were used to the greek septuagint even though it never even crossed their mind well which one is more accurate it was this is what i'm used to and i understand that for a lot of folks if you i grew up on the king james i understand the the you know that's what if that's what you've heard god speaking in then something other than that sounds lesser and you're you're changing stuff but if you just recognize the need to have a historical perspective then you realize the importance that the king james translators themselves talked about of having an accurate translation using the best sources you were talking about three major manuscripts uh the codex syneticus alexander the vaticanus right and you'll sometimes hear people say oh this is the good one that's the bad one what is the good which is the good which is the bad what do we do with those well it's not specifically those manuscripts it's it's the the manuscript families that they represent sinaiticus and alexander sinaiticus and vaticanus are alexandrian manuscripts that means the text type they represent is associated primarily with alexandria egypt alexanderness interestingly enough is byzantine in the gospels and then alexandria and elsewhere so it's a mixed text the issue is those who defend the byzantine manuscripts that came out of byzantium constantinople like i said which underlie primarily the king james um will vilify the alexandrian mainly because of the fact that they're saying well our text is fuller these were written by frequently let's say by heretics there are lots of heretics and alexander actually there's lots of heretics everywhere in fact the greatest defender of the deity of christ was a man by name of athanasius who was the bishop of alexandria uh so you really can't go that direction but it's it's almost always a traditional thing for them they're they're basically saying that you know god blessed the byzantine manuscript tradition he didn't bless the alexandrian we've only discovered it recently which isn't really true but um you know the reformers use the byzantine well they didn't know the differences between them so you can't call on them either so it really comes down to we want to substantiate that particular tradition and so there's a vilification of the alexandria not really an argument that it somehow is lesser on the deity of christ or anything like that because it's not like i said it's it is a byzantine reading to say god at first timothy 3 16. but it's an alexandrian reading to say god at john 1 18. so it's really you cannot identify a specific bias in regards to orthodoxy and this is very important i want everyone to catch this if you take the most byzantine manuscript in the world and the most alexandrian manuscript of the world and apply the exact same rules of hermeneutics to both you will not come up with a different belief the only difference is if you use only alexandrian manuscripts the list of verses you're going to have in support of a particular doctrine is going to be somewhat different than if you use only a byzantine but you're not going to come up with a different faith and i've i have challenged every king james only advocate to debate that very issue and they just won't do it all right today what do you see in your debates with bart airman and others what are the three arrows that continue to get slung regarding the reliability of the new testament well uh one would be the the toughest one for most people to deal with is the people who've really well read are going to try to introduce a type of hyper skepticism this is what ehrman is now doing ehrman will admit we've we basically know what the new testament looked like 100 years after it's written there's really not a question from him he does he isn't in all the conspiracy stuff about inserting doctrines and all that kind of silliness what he's saying is what could have happened in that hundred years all right and in fact he was asked in a debate what type of evidence would you need to have to believe that the gospel mark that we have today is accurate and amazingly he said if we had 10 copies of the gospel of mark um that were dated to within uh i think he said i think he said like six weeks or a very short period time of the original then that would be enough for me obviously there's nothing in antiquity even close to that there wasn't anybody running around with date stamps and stuff like i mean it was just an absurdly a level of skepticism that just is utterly has been utterly unknown so that type of skepticism is the first thing uh the second thing would be to to prey on the fact that you know you can point to someone's bible this is what the muslims do and say well look your bible says right there so manuscripts don't say this some manuscripts don't say that so they will play on the fact that we are open about the history of of our text and then religiously a lot of the cults will try to use this as a means of sneaking their authority in and so the the mormons will do that and that's why you need modern-day revelation or you need the governing body of jehovah's witnesses know which one's which or whatever else might be so there can be a an unbelieving direction or a religious utilization of these things as well all right last thing you mentioned that there might be some manuscripts that have recently been uncovered that are within the first century what's the rumor on this well uh last year um dan wallace in a debate with bart ehrman announced that there had been a papyri find uh that would produce uh fragments of manuscripts of the gospels uh that are going to be dated to the first century which would make p52 no longer the earliest one and that these would be published by brill in the february of this year well we're past february of this year and if you ask dan well what's going on he says i've now signed a confidentiality agreement i can't comment so there's some sort of publishing issue um so we're all left going now i heard maybe as early as 60 is did you am i uh no well not in that time period the number of total uh papyri maybe but the ones that actually are second or first century was a smaller number but i i i had heard there was gonna be at least i think uh 18 that could be dated to between the first and the second uh century okay that's when even when it happens there's going to have to be a scholarly review of that material before we can really start confidently saying i mean 52 has been around for a while right you know we've pretty much been through the mill with that ones there's we need to be very careful because even though the unbelievers are very quick to jump on anything for unbelief we have to be more careful because we follow him who is the truth so right on somebody in the audience wants to know about your tactic with a college student to draw them out to try to see what is it that makes them opposed to the new testament reliability have you ever done that with bart ehrman no um and in fact most of the time uh with the people you're debating you have very little opportunity of personal interaction i did try to have some personal interaction with bart ehrman but he just was not a very friendly man to me uh john dominic crosston was uh this would be very different we did have a fair amount of personal interaction and i'm trying to make that more of a of a part of my interaction with muslims i i just had some debates in dublin ireland with a muslim apologist and the fact that we had lunch that day and talked about our our lives and were able to really communicate with one another i think made for the debate that night at trinity college in dublin to be one of the best that we had had there was much more i think personal respect between us and so it depends on the opportunity um but uh some folks that are that are in opposition to the faith just don't want to have any type of interaction with us at all they've they've come to their conclusions they're just there to do their their their spiel let's talk about bart airman for a minute because he is the billy club that is used by many people these days several times you've said he's he's not happy he's unfriendly i i've i've listened to bart ehrman speak in so many different contexts i mean he hardly knew who i was didn't really care who i was i listened to classes that he taught i listened to debates he had done i had his i read his doctoral dissertation for crying out loud i studied him and i just do not encounter someone there who who is really at peace i i there's there's it doesn't strike me as a really overly happy individual um and i've talked with people who knew him phil johnson knew him at moody bible institute for example there were students together there together and um you know he says it was not the textual stuff that caused him to lose his faith it was actually the issue of the problem of evil a lot of christians ignore that um but when you really read his book on god's problem the problem of evil it's really a very poor work on that subject it does not show much of a knowledge at all of christian theology in regards to theodicy and the justification of god in the existence of evil and things like that so my experience with him was was really indicated to me that you know certainly someone to pray for but doesn't seem to be really passionate about what he's doing but he gets slapped down as kind of the aha card he went to moody he went oh yeah where did he where did he get uh moody wheaton princeton for both uh masters and people princeton but he stayed under met skirt princeton he was metzger's last doctoral student interesting so clearly a guy who was really a christian and now he's not aha yeah well uh that's a theological issue and uh just simply you know i would say that you can learn more today in princeton's cemetery than in this princeton seminar uh no it's true ever been to princeton cemetery it's fascinating warfield edwards oh just reading the headstones isn't it as an education at the princeton cemetery uh but i'm not sure which is which maybe princeton seminar has become princeton cemetery i'm not sure but being as it may that's that's a theological issue the fact that someone uh you know you're assuming that if i just knew what bart ehrman knew that knows that i would leave christianity well i do know what bart ehrman knows and i interpret the facts very very differently and i find a tremendous bias in his part and the funny thing is we had originally agreed to debate does textual variation preclude the possibility of inspiration scriptures we got just a few weeks out he said i never agreed to that well he had i never agreed to that we had to call it uh misquoting jesus because even though he makes the theological assertion that the existence of variation means the bible cannot be inspired he will not defend that assertion because he knows it's indefensible because it basically means that the bible could not have been inspired until 1949 because he knows that any work of antiquity contains textual variation and it's funny i kept trying to get him to comment on the quran here is the james a grey distinguished professor of religion head of the department of religion you're just racist in north carolina i don't know anything about the quran nice he finally was more honest in a video clip that i've seen a number of times where someone said uh when are you gonna write your book on the quran and the only thing you would say is when i stop valuing my life somebody in the audience wants to know that are you stating that one of the strongest arguments for new testament reliability is the multi-vocality presentation well i think to understand the entire history of the transmission of the text and new testament you have to recognize its origins and it did not originate as a single document it originated during a period of persecution it originated from the pens of multiple individuals even those individuals we know paul for example writes some epistles while he's free and some while he's imprisoned he's writing from one location he's running to another location these are multiple writers writing to multiple audiences at multiple times and that means there is never this ability to control and to edit obviously to me the greatest danger in argumentation against the new testament is the idea that it could have been edited wholesale so as to insert or delete doctrines that to me is the far more grave accusation and so when you recognize how the new testament came about and how it was originally distributed that's an impossibility the issue of textual variation even bart ehrman will admit we're just we're just playing around right now we know what was originally written we know that it was about jesus and we know it was about the salvations of the cross and we know all the rest that stuff there might be a verse here or verse there where he says we're not certain but uh the the message the overall message really is not impacted by that the issue is can we know what was originally written and if there was this type of wholesale editing then we wouldn't be able to know that and so yes obviously recognizing the nature of the writing in the new testament is fundamental to laying a foundation for recognizing the bankruptcy of the arguments against it and most people again even most christians i i was i grew up in a christian family and yet it's just very natural to think that the bible's always been like this it's always had a leather cover and gold edged pages and and thumb indexing and everything else that's not how it came to be and once we understand the fact the book of romans was once a roll of papyri in a leather pouch of a guy walking streets to go to rome who never discovered deodorant you know uh then we realized it actually happened in real life you know and it really what we're doing is we're taking the biggest weapons against the new testament are ignorance and so we're doing is we're taking those weapons away so what they're left with is normally picayune stuff not not real stuff great last question from the audience whether it's with a student for adults what should be the big the one takeaway that you would like everybody to have well especially for students i want to communicate to them the fact that if everyone would be fair with the data in regards to the specific subject we were addressing by if everyone would be fair with the data that they would have to conclude that we can know what the new testament originally taught we can know what it teaches about the gospel this is the consistent message all the way through the new testament and that all of this skepticism that is out there is unfounded that's the main thing that i want them to understand is that we can know what the gospel is the gospel message is not just my opinion it's not just based upon a couple of texts that we're not sure about that there is no question about what the message of the gospel and the teachings of jesus christ was at the same time because we live in a society so soaked with this ultra skepticism um i think even for christians we need to recognize that we have evidence here of god's providence we have evidence here of the of the interface of the supernatural with the natural realm that that inspiration of scripture has also had to result in the fact that god has preserved that it's just we need to see that he did it in a way that is not exactly how we would have expected it and very frequently seeing how god has done things in a way that we don't expect it is a wonderful thing for us to know but we as believers i think one of the reasons that there's so much weak non-gospel out there is because many of our ministers are trained in schools where they graduate without confidence that god has spoken you can't say thus saith the lord if you don't think thus saith the lord is possible anymore and every denomination that has simply jumped off the cliff into oblivion started with doubts about the inspiration and inerrancy of the scriptures and so uh for me this is this is a gospel issue because as much as i defend justification by faith and the the the the atonements and the resurrection all that comes back to what we have in scripture it's always coming back to that point and that's why the enemy is always attacking there and that's why we have to be very very firm there just as firm there as at any other point along the line all right and if i could just add to that as we close close your ears right now because this is going to be real nice about you i think a lot of times too a lot of people don't realize that we've got some smarts in evangelical christianity that there's actually some people who work hard and study it this happens to be one of them with us tonight and exceedingly grateful thanks for all of your work and thank you

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Published: Wed Mar 24 2021