The Latest Textual Discoveries of the Bible (ft. Dan Wallace)

do we have reason to believe that the Bible we hold in our hands today has been Faithfully preserved from the original I mean I don't know nobody knows how are manuscripts discovered today there's no one better to discuss these issues than our guest today Dr Daniel B Wallace from the center for the study of New Testament manuscripts a manuscript is something that is hand written not printed he's an author professor and he just returned this year from trips to Jerusalem Vienna and Oxford in which his team has done some deep Dives studying ancient manuscripts and we're going to get an update Dan it's great to see you thanks for coming on hey Sean what an introduction thank you yeah good good to be with you again well I've really been looking forward to this for a long time because I want to hear myself what's going on so it was a fun introduction but before we get to some of these adventures and and the questions we cited earlier maybe just tell us what is an ancient manuscript what are we talking about when we mention that word a manuscript by definition is something that is hand written not printed now when at the same time it has a wider variety of uses when a an author turns in a manuscript to be published now it's something that they type up on their computer but when we speak about manuscripts of the Bible we are talking always about handwritten documents when we were speaking about manuscripts of the Greek New Testament the New Testament was originally written in Greek when we're speaking about that we are talking about men scripts on either Papyrus or parchment animal skins or paper that were copied by hand over and over and over again for centuries about 1500 years until the first Greek New Testament was published on a printing press 507 years ago this past March so up until that time the only way you could get a copy of the Greek New Testament was to see a handwritten manuscript we couldn't have anything that was printed until the Gutenberg praying press and that happened just you know 65 years before Erasmus published the first Greek New Testament that's super helpful now I kind of consider you a modern-day Indiana Jones trekking around the world find an ancient manuscripts we will get to that but I I'm really curious what is your personal training like learning how to read handle and even discover new ancient manuscripts well we have a we have a staff and by the way on Indiana Jones uh I I have to say actually the person in part whom Indiana Jones was created inspired by I believe was Constantine tischendorf a man who found the ancient world or the Mediterranean world I should say in the 1800s and discovered the oldest complete New Testament in the world codex sinaiticus that sink Monastery in Mount Sinai which now is housed at the British Library he's considered to be the most uh absolutely the the finest New Testament texture scholar of all time because of this well industry of finding manuscripts finding monasteries going all the play all over the place way out of his way and then uh publishing them he was he was immense and he died I think at age 59 he burned himself out wow interesting so that's an awesome backstory tell us what you did you went to school what your training was like to be able to do this yourself my training was in Greek more than in manuscripts I studied Greek I had four years of Greek at Biola University as an undergrad but during that time I also studied under Dr Harry sturz who was a very fine texture critic who had studied under the great EC Caldwell at Claremont College Caldwell looked at the manuscripts and he was trying to determine how can we tell how one manuscript is related to another and so he's the one who worked out all sorts of methodological things on these manuscripts so that to this day if a new discovery is made there are ways to tell if it's all the manuscripts okay flowed through streams and families and had not just 5 000 manuscripts that come independently going back to the original that would be silly they always follow in in groups in herds if you will and some of those herds they might split off but what Caldwell was trying to determine is okay does it fit in with with this stream or this stream or this stream and he came up with some methods for determining this that was a critical thing that I I learned well from Harry's Church uh and I took the course on textual criticism which is the examination of the Greek New Testament manuscripts and other witnesses to determine the wording of the original I also took that course in seminary under Zane Hodges and I didn't agree with Hodges in his views he felt that the majority text or the the Greek New Testament that largely stands behind the King James Bible is the true one but I still wanted to learn from him and get everything I could now how about the manuscripts we actually never looked at a single manuscript in either one of those courses but I had a hunger for it we had a Dallas seminary in my master's program a copy of codex sinaiticus facsimile done around the early 1900s and I spent days in the library just looking at that it's the oldest complete New Testament that tissue discovered by half a millennium the next oldest one comes 500 years later he was written in the mid-4 century this is astounding and so I started to get a deep interest in the manuscripts I said I want to see these things in the flesh for myself so I had I guess I ended up triple majoring in a Greek your Testament in single majoring in Hebrew Old Testament uh in my master's program and then I went on for my doctorate and majored in New Testament and while I was uh on faculty even as a doctoral student they asked me to teach the class on textual criticism to other doctoral students because nobody on the faculty at Dallas immedi knew the field as well as I did so I started teaching it long before I finished my degree but wow one of the things I did was I said let's go look at manuscripts Charles ryrie who's on faculty at Dallas Seminary for many many years top-notch theologian also was independent wealthy and we would visit his homes once a semester over this text critical class and he had just an amazing array of ancient documents and manuscripts including three Greek New Testament manuscripts those were among the very first ones those were the first ones I ever actually handled uh and uh ryrie allowed us to come and see those he had what he considered to be the finest edition of the of the 1611 King James Bible in the world and he had a Luther Bible that was only one of 11 Luther Bibles on Vellum it was it looks a lot like the uh Wittenberg I'm sorry uh it looks a lot like uh the Gutenberg Bible okay it's just beautiful and and I I saw just amazing things but I got kind of a bug for the manuscripts there so I'm self-trained as far as that is concerned okay but that training has come through reading the Best Literature living in for example Metzger's manuscripts of the Greek Bible that all of us know well if they're going to be able to decipher manuscripts and then I've learned from others on how to deal with them there are a couple rules when you go into a library about handling a manuscript one is do not chew gum you might fall out on the manuscript okay all right two is don't go in without clean hands if you had Cheetos for lunch you better watch up to wash up to your elbows I mean it's uh you've got to make it very very clean and the third is do not ever let a pen get anywhere close to a manuscript not even on this table now they've got some other rules like you never bring drinks uh and things like this but uh the examination of the manuscripts it used to be that all all of the libraries said you have to wear cotton gloves and turn the pages but that's been passe for several years now they said instead it's better to be have bare hands so we are keeping up with technology and with what curators are doing on manuscripts uh so we we were we have bare hands and we have to have them clean not oily and you do everything you can not to touch the ink on the page what you do is you pull it by the the edges of course like just a normal book you never do this uh where the Bubonic plague you used to live I mean that's literally true but uh I I've examined uh well over a thousand uh Greek New Testament manuscripts in the last uh plus years so I think I have pretty decent sense of how to do it and I've trained many other people on how to handle these manuscripts what to look for and especially how you prepare them for digitization which is a fascinating field all its own and that's that preparation is writing up a lot of metadata but it really is fascinating we've csntm has come up with its own methods on metadata preparation so that we are actually looking for things that nobody else is looking for documenting things that nobody else has documented we're going to get into some of that you're like me you talk with your hands which is creating a little bit of rustling with the sound so just a little heads up as we move move forward staple them to the table good luck with that now what I do want to know we're going to get into what the Cs NTM does but how are new manuscripts discovered I mean how do you come across new ones that haven't been really recorded like this before manuscripts are discovered there's there's really two ways uh there are still some manuscripts that are discovered in the Sands of Egypt uh but that's that's far less common nowadays and all of those would be on Ancient papyri which was kind of the ancient world's paper it's actually stronger than paper but the vast majority of manuscripts are already in libraries European libraries especially and they are manuscripts that no one has gone through carefully and examined and determined what they have so when we say we've discovered a manuscript it means actually one of two things it either means that we did actually discover a manuscript in a library that the Librarians the catalog system did not know was in their catalog wow and one of the first things we do is we say can we see the catalog it's usually something that was typed up 100 years ago and it's in-house in language so when we were in Albania there was a catalog in the Albanian language and when we're the National Archive in in uh kirana yeah anyway sorry oh oh my wife was there saying hi no worries I hope you can edit some of that out this is part of the fun I just might leave it in keep going I love it it's it's chirana Albania is the capital and when we went there I asked do you have the 13 manuscripts that uh we have a report from the official catalog of New Testament manuscripts that you have at the library and the the curator wrote back and said yes we have those 13. well when we got there much to our surprise they had four dozen Greek New Testament manuscripts that we noticed as we worked through the catalog and and found what these were so uh this was the biggest Discovery csndm has made it any one time we believe about 28 of them were brand new discoveries some of them had been in monasteries in Albania that when the CAC the uh communist government came to control Albania they gathered them all up put them in the National Archive and westerners simply didn't know where they were so this was a discovery that the library knew about but Western scholarship did not here's how we count a manuscript being discovered once we have images of it and we let the institute for New Testament texture research in Munster Germany know about it and even send them some images that's when a manuscript is considered to be to have been discovered because until New Testament Scholars know about it it's not a discovery so you got you have archaeologists that are discovering all sorts of things but if they don't publish it then um nobody knows about it so that's that's how we discover it I'd say about half maybe more than half you know a little bit more than half of the discoveries we've made we've made our manuscripts that the library did not know they have that's incredible even when we were at the National Library of Greece in Athens for two years digitizing all 300 of the Greek New Testament manuscripts 150 000 Pages altogether we trained 44 people it cost us over eight hundred thousand dollars all raised by donations so we could get those manuscripts digitized my job was to prepare all of them for digitization and in the two years that I was there I discovered I think 21 manuscripts and uh only about half of them did the library itself know about and that's because we're discovering manuscripts inside of other manuscripts at times that's a fascinating thing in and of itself that is really incredible to hear so do you think you said there's two ways that manuscripts are discovered kind of by papyri in the Sands of Egypt or in libraries do we have reason to believe that there still are some manuscripts Greek or others buried somewhere that we're going to find with some kind of Technology are there still some out there that are worth searching for in that method rather than going to a library in the way you described I'm sure there are the the town of oxyrencus or the sharps nose fish as it was called in ancient Greek is a town in Egypt that was excavated by two British very young scholars in their 20s way back in the late 1800s and they they went to the ancient garbage heap where things had been put after they were of no longer any use to people it could be that some of these had been left in a home and the next owner of the home um maybe the people died the next owner sees these actually Christian manuscripts and says oh I don't want these so he throws them out there's a number of ways in which these could get into the garbage sheep but that's how an awful lot of our new testament papyri dozens of our new testament football Pottery have been found in oxarankus well that started a revolution in manuscript studies and biblical studies going to the Sands of Egypt and finding these papyrus up until 1895 most Scholars would say well okay we we've got these letters written in Papyrus on Papyrus from average day folk they're not literary they're not theological they're not from scripture they're worthless that was until Adolf Dyson in 1895 a pastor at the time he was also a a doctoral student or had become had her in this doctor he published a little book in German Bible studio and her translated Bible studies innocuous sounding book and what she did was he said I've been looking at these Papyrus discoveries that have been published and what I'm finding is that there are a lot of words and phrases in the New Testament that we have never seen in any other literature of the of the New Testament vocabulary of about five thousand different words 500 of them were actually words not found in any other literature prior to the New Testament and so one scholar back in the 1800s said well this is the the New Testament is Holy Ghost Greek that is it's a language that could only be learned if you're a Christian and the Holy Spirit inspired but it's not the way anybody else would ever talk in that ancient world and you can't even understand it unless you are so that was really the prevalent view back in the 1800s until Dyson came along going through the library and look at his Papyrus publishes this book and of those 500 Greek words that had never been found in any other literature he says there's only 50 left after he looked at the papyri he found 450 of those words in the letters between common folk or petitions to an official or perhaps somebody saying I'd like to come to Cairo and live in an apartment and you can't send a picture in your resume so you describe yourself in one of them the person looked like they must have been ugly clean to the Bone I mean it's almost humorous reading to see this the diceman found in these letters one of the things you found for example was the word greetings in Greek which is an infinitive Chiron I won't get into the etymology those kinds of things okay but we see in the assessment only in Acts 15 and in James 1. both times by the same James by the way nowhere else in any Greek literature had we ever seen Chiron a greeting like that in any Greek until Dyson found it plentifully in these papyri and he said this is the way people would greet each other in a letter it just it revolutionized biblical studies and it almost completely outdated commentaries that were written before 1895 and the ones after that that at least took account of Dyson's discoveries really became a basis for understanding the Texas since then so your team has done metadata on dozens and dozens of manuscripts from around the world what are some of the things you're selling the shirt how about hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts hundreds and hundreds fair enough thank you uh from around the world you said yourself you've even looked at a thousand or so what are some of the things you've observed just some of the big patterns that jump out that might be of interest to apologists Skeptics and even students oh if you're throwing me a curveball here there's my mind is filling up with all sorts of possibilities uh one of the things though that is I I I get I I find that examining these manuscripts is both one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done in my life Wow and it's extremely tedious uh I'm hunched over my back my back is hurting my neck is hurting my knee is hurting I've had surgery on my back and my neck kneaded on my knee but I get done with all that and I'm fulfilled long days and yet it's it's just thrilling labor I should start by saying what we're looking for when we write up the metadata and along the way what we discover that is of significance beyond that but first I should mention this csentium has as its initial purpose to make sure that every single Greek New Testament manuscript in the world is digitized and made available to Scholars worldwide for free now I knew that we wouldn't be doing all of that but we are doing most of that uh there are other institutes that are digitizing their own collections but we're also coming in to help them so we have agreement with the bodilian library in Oxford where we are writing up the metadata and we're collaborating with them for them to digitize in in-house so when I prepare a manuscript the first thing that I do is I I count how many leaves are in that manuscript that sounds awfully mundane in fact you go to the back of the the book and you might say oh here's 176. that's how many leads are they they typically did not write paginate them they foliated them that means that the the scribes or a librarian typically put a number on just the right page not the left Page the back of it and so you know folio one is one in the back would be page two the next page would be three but they call that two so that's how manuscripts are damage what I have found and this is consistent is that about 80 or 90 percent of All Greek New Testament manuscripts have been foliated and about 80 to 90 percent it's been done wrong in some place oh wow so you can't count that number in the end as the correct number necessarily what will happen is a librarian sometimes as early as the 1600s perhaps even earlier than that we'll go and they'll write a number on the on the page let's say they're up to number 27 and 28 is because the manuscript had not been stored properly over the hundreds of years uh humidity had gotten to it and it's it it's kind of stuck with folio 27. and so he skips that one and goes to 28 which is actually 29 but he didn't know that so we go through these very very carefully and sometimes they duplicate another so you'll have 47a and 47b well we it's it's critical that we get an exact count of the leaves and where the numbering is off so that when the photographers come in they know where the pitfalls are and that they know when they see this number on the page it is really going to be this number so it's critical that they take an image of every single page we take a pictures of all six outsides you know the covered spine the three sides the back uh and we uh we also photograph a page if it's been ripped out which many if not most manuscripts have had that problem but there's still at least one half of one letter on that fragment that's just kind of stuck out in the margin that counts as a page for us and in fact that's how we've discovered a lot of manuscripts but anyway that count is critical uh and as I work through these I count the choirs now this is something that has not always been done and it really is very revealing acquire q u i r e is sometimes called folds or signatures this is when you have four double leaves and you lay them down and you fold them in half and those double leaves make eight leaves or 16 pages and what is done in the middle is then that middle section is sewn into the binding uh in the back so that the the spine is holding all these you you know you've seen this on on hardbound books you see the threads in them sometimes paperback books that do that but hardbound books at least most of them in all of them it used to be we're sewn in books they last longer that way and it's an ancient technology that that really goes back to the second century we have this technology and it wasn't very long before a choir was a standard size of eight leaves now when we go through these manuscripts we are counting the choirs and labeling them so if we see on the first eight leaves of a manuscript the letter Alpha which is Arabic numbers the Greeks didn't know hadn't been invented yet um there's an alpha and a bar over that means don't read this it's the letter Alpha read this as a number and you go eight more leaves through and you might see a beta and eight more leaves you're gonna gamma goes through like that and that will be on the first page of the choir it's not always there these main trips have been trimmed and sometimes that that choir signature is gone but by going through this what we've discovered is what the scholars used to think was a complete manuscript is actually missing a leaf here and a leaf there and we can tell that in an hour or two what would normally take somebody uh many hours to determine if there's any leaves that are missing so we I when we were in uh Oxford for example there was a a leaf that was a palim cyst in one of these manuscripts palimpsest is an old Greek word a script again and what's interesting is you have a lot of our parchment manuscripts where the Greek has been scraped off and then something was written on top of it this is one of the ways we make discoveries great discoveries frankly that somebody is maybe they're finishing a book and they don't want to go and kill another cow or a lamb and make the value and make the parchment for the uh the book so the final manuscripts scrape off the letters stick that into their book you know trim the sizes to make it fit that under text by definition is always older than what's on top and these scribes can often do a very very good job of erasing that under text they they scrape it off and then they do some other things to get rid of so I train people to look for Pelham cysts and there was one that we uh that we discovered in Oxford where Scholars for many years knew of one folio that was a palim cyst and the upper text was was something else but it was that choir was completed had all eight leaves so it's almost impossible that only one folio would be a problem cyst because it's a bifolio sown Into The Binding it has to be on both leaves and it just so happened that this was the outside Leaf of the choir all eight leaves were there and the other half of that palimpsist was just staring me in the face it wasn't quite as clear because it had been scraped off better but now we have the other half of that manuscript and this hasn't even been published yet but uh it's it's fascinating to discover my insurance this way wow that's so interesting I hope folks are appreciating just how tedious and laborious this work is so we can preserve as many manuscripts are out there as possible to study now let me jump to the question that I know a lot of folks are asking I'm curious how you answer this as well is you've handled hundreds maybe a thousand manuscripts yourself your team has analyzed these in depth for years why do you think we have good reason to believe that we hold in our hands today in the essentials and in the vast majority of particulars with the apostles and their Associates originally wrote down in the first century one of the great joys of my life has been to examine these manuscripts from the very oldest to the more recent ones all the way up to the 16th century and what there is is there's a stable Continuum of the core statements of scripture that do not go changing in any Witnesses I I talk about in one of my lectures John 1 1 where it says in the word in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God what's fascinating about that is every single manuscript of John 1 1 no matter the date no matter the language says the same thing about Jesus what's interesting is there's a couple words that may be played with a little bit but when it says and the Word was God they all say that and our oldest manuscripts from perhaps as early as ad200 say that in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code he said well a Constantine emperor Constantine invented the deity of Christ and he was based in a lot of his novel on what some other Scholars had written where they said there are no manuscripts of the Greek New Testament before the fourth century well that's just not even close to truth there's at least 48 and Mike by my count it's uh probably now up to 70. so uh here's a manuscript p66 this at least 100 years older than when Constantine reigned that actually says in the beginning what's the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God you can multiply that regarding every single Cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith God has so superintended over scripture so that not one essential belief is hanging on a textual variant that's only found in a few manuscripts or this manuscript but the the core doctrines of the Christian faith are Rock Solid even a guy like Bart Ehrman who's a very famous agnostic apologist and and he's a longtime friend of mine uh he studied in a Bruce Princeton seminary one of the world's great texture critics and he abandoned his faith at certain points but what BART recognized in his book misquoting Jesus when the editors asked him a question it had been came out in 2005. if your readers or listeners don't know about it they need to read misquoting Jesus uh it's an important book because Irma it's a popular book that talks about uh how the manuscripts have changed over time and when it came out 2005 within a few months he was on the John Stewart Daily Show he was on Colbert show and uh after he was on Stuart I think it was the next day it hit number one on Amazon this was his first New York Times bestseller and it's right down his alley of the field that he knows and and does very well they wanted to bolster the sales a few months later they don't meet only sold about 300 000 in the first or a hundred thousand the first three months so let's keep this thing going it's a great party you know so uh the editors added an appendix in the paperback version and what I want to encourage your readers to do is um I want to encourage your readers to get that paperback version Half Price Books someplace like that and look at page 252. there in the appendix the hearers say the editors asked Herman why do you believe against your professor Bruce Metzger that the Bible has changed so radically that even the doctrines have been changed in Scripture and Ehrman said well now that you put it that way that's not what I believe there's no essential Doctrine that's been altered by any of these texture variants that's remarkable hundreds of thousands of college kids have read that book as a textbook in college and I can't tell you how many I've I've heard about every week of somebody abandoning the faith because of what they think Irma was saying but when he is actually asked the question Point Blank he cannot find any essential Doctrine that's jeopardized and go further than that are there any beliefs that are jeopardized well I found one in Mark 9 29 where the disciples tried to cast out demons and uh they asked Jesus what's going on and uh and they couldn't do it so he said this kind can only be Pat cast out by prayer although a number of manuscripts add and fasting it would be the only place as far as I know in the entire New Testament that a matter of orthopraxy that is right practice not orthodox is affected by the variant because this would be the only place where by implication if somebody is doing exorcisms they need to pray and fast now in the in the uh two or three exorcisms I've been involved in I hedge my bed I'm not sure if it says just prayer or prayer and fasting so I make sure to do both but that's that's where it uh uh it's it's critical to to think about these issues but it's is that it is that the only one I suspect there's more but they're so minor they haven't affected anything that I know of what happens in these manuscripts is it is true that in some verses where it may have affirmed the deity of Christ in some manuscripts it doesn't mean by the lack of affirmation that it's a denial and we have so much material in the deity of Christ in the New Testament it's it's almost embarrassing uh Ed comshevski and Rob Bowman have published a great book putting Jesus in his place that deals with the deity of Christ and they're coming out with a new one the Incarnate Christ and his critics that's even twice as long and it's an overwhelming statement on how the deity of Christ is seen in every page of the New Testament I've used I've used passages with Jehovah's Witnesses to show that even in their Bible they have not been able to translate out the deity of Christ so even in transitions as much as they try words very direct and they'll they'll change the text without any accuracy to it but uh there's no Cardinal Doctrine there's no essential uh belief that is jeopardized the Virgin birth the bodily death the bodily Resurrection the Trinity the fact that we are justified by faith the deity of Christ we can go on and on and on and on are found in the manuscripts and none of them hang in the balance because of this manuscript have it has this one doesn't we chose this main challenge it doesn't work like this that's just amazing that is that is really amazing given how many there are different languages different places that similarity is powerful now you you mentioned that you have personally worked on a thousand manuscripts now presumably manuscripts will go up till about 1500 of course after the printing press people are still copying them by hand but are some of these manuscripts that you're discovering in libraries helping to further the case for the reliability of the New Testament or are they helping in other areas or both oh they're doing both one of the things that's interesting there are literally hundreds of thousands of texture variants among our over 5 000 Greek New Testament manuscripts now what that means a texture variant means that the wording is different in at least one manuscript from the rest and every time you find one of those like let's say one manuscript has there's this thing called the movable new in Greek where the letter N goes on the end of a word if the next word starts with a vowel it's like our indefinite article a book and Apple now what if I came across a manuscript that said a apple and that's the only one that does it that constitutes one texture variant what if a thousand manuscripts have a apple and you know however many have an apple it still counts as only one texture there are hundreds of thousands of these in fact my estimate based on some work that others have done on Counting these variants is that we have about one and a half million texture variants in our Greek New Testament manuscripts of those well over 99 affect nothing it's in fact that movable news the most common texture variant we have among the manuscripts so it might tell you that this guy's from Arkansas you know if he says a apple who knows but it doesn't really affect anything and there's a a large very large proportion of the variants are nonsense readings or they may be something that is so idiosyncratic as to really be impossible uh for example in first Thessalonians 2 7 there's a famous texture problem where Paul says we became little children among you or we became gentle among you one word in Greek is Napier little children the other is API gentle among you the word that comes before that is uh oh my gosh let me that's okay I'm still jet-lagged so let me just check my group text real quick you're good we want to get it right man I think is what the word is and I need better glasses too I can't see this no I appreciate that you wanna you wanna get it right that's why I hope folks can see this concern for getting details right on a YouTube video extends to your desire to get things right when you're setting these manuscripts we need somebody like you on it so that's great I'm sorry well you're probably going through your own book on Greek there just for the record no I'm going through the Greek New Testament look at this so um first Thessalonians 2 7 it says again before that's the word we became it ends in an n now our new testament manuscripts were Paul's letters in particular were dictated to a scribe who's copying it out and this is one place where the Scribe who's copying this again Napier organism API did you hear the difference I heard the difference but explain it to us okay but it may not have sounded that different I mean you you have to discern this very carefully when the last word starts with an n and the next one could or could not you run those together echinacea Napier what did I say is it uh little children or is it gentle and I think the error in copying started at that very point where whoever wrote the the letter for Paul by dictation heard one thing and Paul because he says in in in some of his letters I all write something to you he validates at second Thessalonians 3 17 that I Paul I this is how I end all my letters which means he's reading through that draft and making sure that it's and so I think this place in Romans 5 1 in the is one of the places I think where this may have happened where Paul takes the pin from his secretary and says no this is what I said not that so he adds the new before API to make it Little Children okay now I was that was a long explanation for a very significant texture problem and I think a scribe would have wanted to have apoi instead of Napier because immediately before this it says like a nursing mother we became little children what that doesn't sound right it sounds like it's he's confusing his metaphors like there's a hard stop at the end of liking like a nursing mother though we became little children among you starts a new sentence and so Paul uses family metaphor where he's a father he's an orphan he's a mother and he's a child um all in first Thessalonians 2. he's mixing his metaphors his family thing just to show how much he loves these people okay so that's a major textual problem Scholars still debated but what's interesting is one very late manuscript has we became hippoy horses we became horses among you now my guess is that this scribe may have been a Trojan fan you know I went to USC and he wants to have the horses there and all the others were to UCLA guys that didn't want to have horses but it's comical on one level it makes sense but it's obviously a nonsense error you put all those nonsense errors and there's tons of them uh the large largest majority of our variants are either spelling differences or nonsense errors or you simply translate the difference that's well over 99 of all the texture variants in fact when you put this down to that and even some things that are synonyms that don't change the meanings there's so many scripts that say Jesus others say Lord well what this does is it tells us that uh that's not going to affect the meaning like in John 4 1 when Jesus knew that the Pharisees had heard that he was making more disciples than Dawn John or Jesus or the Lord knew that the Pharisees are big textual problem there's not a single manuscript that says when Peter knew that the Pharisees said the reference is always the same you count all those together and it comes to over 99.8 percent of all texture variants so the ones that Scholars are debating are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the whole of one percent of all the variants are those that can well affect the meaning and are viable that is that reading could go back to the original it's not just found in the late 14th century manuscript but in early enough ones or in a good stream of cropping something like that where it's found in versions and fathers and these Greek Witnesses so when I look at the text of the New Testament I say I keep seeing things over and over and over again where even though there are these very interesting variants it doesn't really affect anything it does affect how we preach and teach that portion of scripture though so whether Paul said in Romans 5 1 therefore since we have been Justified we have peace with God or therefore since we've been Justified let us have peace with God it's a difference of one letter in Greek yeah an O A short o or a long o or echelman either either statement is something that proved Paul could truly say but the question is what did he say here and so that's that's what texture criticism about it's the handmaiden to exegesis we have to know what the text says before we can know what the text means and when we know what the text means then we can Proclaim it we can teach it we can study it and we can obey it would it be fair to say kind of in some the more these manuscripts you and your team and others who are doing this discover and make public is kind of narrowing down the number of passages that people debate on and given us more and more confidence in the scriptures as a whole like I think about this might be a bad example but like what was called vestigial structures in evolution things that we didn't think had a function and as we've learned more and more about the body we go oh there's functions for those so those numbers have gotten smaller and smaller over time interesting yeah is that a similar way like the the more manuscripts we find even though we're further from the events themselves those numbers get smaller and smaller that Scholars are debating I I I think in a sense you could say yes uh I'd say that even with all the discoveries sometimes well this is a different way to put this in our Greek New Testament today I'll show you a picture I'll show up here to you see if you can see this so you can see oh sorry I gotta get that I can't see now I hope it's there yeah we can see it okay you've got text above the line in the text below the line what's below the line is the apparatus listing variants and that Greek New Testament was called the Nestle all on 28th Edition that came out in 2012. and they continue to improve this this is done in Munster Germany where they they examine all these manuscripts in our images to determine the wording of the original I would contend that in every instance or in almost in almost every instance we have the text of the New Testament either above that line or below that line not as if we have a multiple choice option of there's a above the line B first variant below the line C another variant below the line or d none of the above that's not an option we have the New Testament in our hands today in the standard Greek New Testament that's published that's pretty remarkable the question with these new discoveries is oh here's a new Papyrus that we found that has this reading and now maybe it should be elevated to above the line let me I'll give you an illustration here in Revelation 13 18. John says the number of the Beast is 666. well tischendorf whom I mentioned earlier before he went to St Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai as a very young man in his 20s went to the bibliotechnacinal in Paris and he examined a Greek New Testament manuscript that originally had the whole Bible from the early 5th Century maybe ad400 even uh and it took him two years to decipher it because in the 150 or so leaves of this manuscript everyone was a palimpsist there was something else written on top so what he painstakingly had to do most likely is as he's looking at each page he's drawing out the frame of the letters that's beneath those upper letters and then that way he gets rid of the upper letters in his mind and then you can fill out what could possibly be there painstaking work took him two years at Revelation 13 18. he made an astounding Discovery discovery it says the number of the Beast is six one six now that manuscript that he went through it's called a framing rescriptive sort of codex C happens to be one of the two most important Greek New Testament manuscripts we have for the Book of Revelation and often it has the right reading when the other important one does not but at the time this was the only manuscript we knew of that had 616. then in 1998 17 papyri were published by the Egypt exploration society that publishes these oxyrincis papyri and 17 New Testament proprietary were published in the volume in 1998. one of them was a Papyrus from spreading out over nine chapters in Revelation it was essentially 26 postage stamp size pieces to the puzzle that uh you're or spread out of nine chapters you didn't have very big chunks but you knew where each one belonged that's a painstaking piece of work there that would take hundreds of hours just to put these in the right sink would to make sure that the same manuscripts and all this this one postage size stamp on Revelation 13 18 says 616. now it happens that that manuscript is the oldest manuscript we have of Revelation 13 18. and coupled with one of the most important manuscripts for Revelation that's a pretty strong witness there's another piece of evidence irenaeus the late second century Church Father chapter dealing with is the number of the beasts 616-466 and he came to the conclusions at 666 and he said the older manuscripts have 666 the more recent ones don't have it how did he know they were older well probably because they were used more but that doesn't necessarily make them older even Erasmus when he was doing his greeting assessment he thought that a manuscript that was only 500 years older than uh than him at the time was older than other very old manuscripts that he'd heard about and discounted that were maybe a century older uh than than his manuscript so it to determine the data of a manuscript is much more of a modern thing just a number of ways but there's a distinct possibility that 616 is actually the original wording at Revelation 13 18. so what does that change it means the text that's in the apparatus now gets put in the text 666 goes into the apparatus and the implication is that now seven tons of popular Christian literature have gone through the flames I was going to ask you about this one because it comes up a lot so that's really interesting that you think that solid of a case can be made I was not aware that irenaeus even in the second century was debating this that close to it and the manuscripts that is fascinating really fast I honestly cannot tell you which reading I think is original okay Tuesday I wake up the first thing I think aha number the b66 by Friday no I think the number is 616 that's the first things to go through my mind I love it well I've got just a maybe one or two more questions for you you made a statement earlier about the number of manuscripts before the 4th century and if I heard you correctly you said most would say there's in the 40s or 50s but you believe that number is up to around 70. over 60. over over 60. okay would you would you talk about that because one of the one of the criticisms I get which I think a lot of criticism very fair questions is people talk about when there's the number of manuscripts most are in the fourth fifth eighth 10th 12th centuries but when it gets closer we have less which reduces our confidence in the original because there's so fewer closer to when it was actually written down so how would you respond to that and why do you say in the 60s Plus I would say that first of all we have paleographical dating of these manuscripts which is a science in and of itself how do you determine the date of a manuscript when no date is written on it we don't have our first uh eight centuries of manuscripts not a single one of them puts a date in there later manuscripts do at times where the Scribe has a call off on a statement at the end about his work and he says this was done on Friday February 12th in the year and then the year will be I think it's 5500 approximately BC plus whatever it takes them because they counted dates from the creation of Adam and so you gotta work through all that then put it into our numbers but uh the early manuscripts don't have those what we do have though are other manuscripts from other literature where you can have firm dates and papyri in particular you've got these letters that are written to prefix and governors and even the emperor sometimes and and it tells you the date at times that this was done um in the second year of Augustus sees or something like that so we can pinpoint and what ours have done is they've looked at the handwriting of those dated manuscripts and compare them to the ones that are not dated and it's a whole science that has been able to say this particular manuscript can be dated within a century and sometimes we can even get it down to within about a 50-year period depends on the there's a number of factors that go into this sure but um they will look at this and get a sense okay look at these letter formations look at this Factor this Factor there's it's a whole size how large is the manuscript does it have one or two columns how many lines on each page are the letters written on the notional line or hanging from it as they didn't use lined paper but they kind of scored the material even parchments and uh parchments and Papyrus where they took a blunt instrument that used as kind of an indentation to say okay I'm going to follow this and write the letters on that line or have the letters hanging from that line that tells us the date when the manuscript was done within a rough area okay so when I say 48 I mean there are 48 manuscripts that dollars no are no later than the third Century second or third Century for these manuscripts that's still a very sizable number and one of the earliest is p46 probably mid 3rd Century so in the 250s or so this was discovered as long as 1930. and we photographed it we published a facsimile of p-46 and p45 p47 these they're called the Chester Beatty papari because he was the one who uh commissioned the the discovery in Egypt p46 has 84 leaves out of an original oh I'm sorry 86 leaves out of an original 104. and almost every leaf is 80 to 90 percent complete that's astounding it was just of Paul's letters and you can make some massive comparisons with that with later manuscripts so yeah we have about 48 that are dated up to the third Century then we have maybe another dozen or more that are on the customers caller says we're not sure if it's third Century or fourth okay but once it's claimed uh as fourth Century then we call that fourth Century so that's what I'm doing I'm I'm looking at what the standard dating is that is published by this institute Munster and uh then I'm saying what are the dates that they're sure our third Century before what are the dates that could be uh on the cusp between third and fourth that makes sense I have so many more questions for you but last one tell us about just kind of what you're doing at the and it doesn't roll off the tongue every time I have to pause and think about it the csntm the center for the study of New Testament manuscripts just tell us a little bit what you're doing how people can follow what you're doing maybe even support these efforts oh yes please uh csntm as you correctly said is the center for the study of New Testament manuscripts it's it's it's a mouthful but you can remember it this way you know who C.S Lewis is you got the first two letters down okay and you've probably watched The Wizard of Oz right okay antium CS all right there you go okay there you go that's what I've always Illustrated for people I put that to my first year Greek class last year and I drew blanks how many of you have seen The Wizard of Oz most of them had not I can't believe that that's an annual event in our home so I guess I'll have to come up with something different nowadays to remember what csntm does is we travel all over the world to find where these manuscripts are and then we worked with these we collaborate with these libraries over 50 of them now we've worked in and I've been in 35 countries doing this work we collaborate with them to get these manuscripts digitized and then post it online for Scholars to see anybody can see our images they're at csntm.org and you can go over to resources and click on manuscripts and you get nice full pictures we started with a four megapixel camera in 2002 which was state of the art amazing use is a 150 megapixel that I've yet to come across an Institute that has a better one even at the bodilian library at Oxford their best camera is 100 megapixels now once you get up to about 120 megapixels or so it's a real minor difference but the more megapixels you have the larger you can blow this thing up and see what's what's going on and it really does help to reveal things we also have a multi-spectral Imaging camera which is designed to see these scraped off texts that have been become invisible to the naked eye because all you can see is the upper text and this is this is a game changer because we're at the cusp of a new Renaissance where we're discovering things that have been in plain sight for centuries and yet we couldn't see them do you have eyes to see and you do not see well that's the case when it comes to these Palm cysts yeah the MSI equipment was the whole idea started by NASA to uh see camouflaged military installations from space satellites and one of the people who did this uh Greg Biermann who was a professor at Caltech the propulsion lab decided he was an orthodox Jew and he decided Well if we can do this from space we can actually do it on manuscripts and so he looked at manuscript one of the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been burned pretty badly and it's called the apocryphon of uh of uh Genesis I think and he's looking at 200 words in Hebrew that he could read the rest of it was burnt black it couldn't read any of it he applied MSI to this and now he discovered 300 more words the rest of the manuscript with that kind of equipment it's a game changer and so one of our tasks is to find out where these pound tests are so when we write up the metadata we are doing something for the sake of the library giving them it's a fingerprint on that manuscript and I should mention this too that's really critical because if I say here's a manuscript that has these Dimensions we always mention measuring in millimeters not inches and it has this content say you have manuscripts with Matthew Mark in it and we have the dimensions what material is it's made out of paper this many columns this many lines per page and what our date estimate is and then we find another manuscript that has just Luke and John in it that matches that fingerprint we have been able to reunite digitally manuscripts that have been in separate libraries for centuries and we've done this it's just amazing so I I could give stories but we'll just leave it to that but our initial task is to search out what manuscripts are examine them get permission from the libraries to digitize they always get a copy and they own the copyrights we don't we don't keep that ourselves that's for them we just want to take those manuscripts and put the images online and that's our first step ultimately what csentium is about is helping other Scholars determine the exact wording of the original in the few places where we don't know what it is now I I let me let me conclude with this sure these variants are all very very interesting to me a lot of them are interesting not because they tell us what the original wording is but they tell us how scribes change the text in different areas and how attentive they were all you get into the scribe's mind when you transcribe the text of an individual manuscript you almost know what the guy had for breakfast I mean it's really really amazing to see how this works but uh we do that I'm sorry I lost lost my my uh track of mine where I was going what was it I was talking about this is old age hitting me it's you know brain fart no no it's okay you were given a final kind of word and encouragement and then you went into some of the different variants across and I thought you were gonna maybe make the point that they're super interesting but how much they affect your faith uh right okay so so these variants are very interesting but do they affect my face no but I want to know about how the New Testament has been transmitted down through the centuries uh and and I'll leave with this one example there was a manuscript at the Bosnian library in Oxford that one of our guys was examining it has the genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3 as any Luke manuscript would well that genealogy is usually put into two or three columns going down like this what he found was that The Scribe who copied it thought his Exemplar was going across like this and so uh he screwed up all of the uh the order of I mean God is in the middle of technology in some of these manuscripts well what um this scholar who's on her team did Andy Patton he's finishing his Doctorate at the University of Birmingham he said there's another half dozen or so manuscripts that do this with the genealogy and they also have this particular note he said they're all a family so we're able to put that group of manuscripts together and say we know that they come from a common ancestor some intermediate between the original text in later centuries and that's the fun of tracing the family tree of all these manuscripts ultimately coming up with the genealogy so we can get back down to the original wording that's one of the great tasks so not just are we digitizing this manuscripts or publishing on the field and we're writing articles we're speaking at conferences and we're writing books that speak about the reliability of the text now you asked about supporting us uh we have a massive amount of places that we can go to right now where we already have contracts but we just don't have the money this has been the lowest uh giving year in recent memory and the donations can be made grants can be made from foundations people can donate stock they can give to us directly just go to csntm you can find how to donate but uh we need a lot more money in order to accomplish this we're we're right there where we can digitally preserve every hand written copy of the word of God wow and all that we're lacking is the money this is important these manuscripts are not going to last forever they all deteriorate because they're all made of biological material and so it's critical that we we digitize them so at least they're digitally preserved for posterity we need help and we're tax deductible haha that's awesome well Dan at this point I usually invite folks to subscribe study with us at Biola but what I want to do is primarily tell folks to go to CS NTM follow what you're doing and seriously consider supporting what you're doing we've benefited a ton at Biola a lot of the books that I've written with my father we cite you and lean on your research so the amount of effort you've put in I can't thank you enough I know it's coming to physical cost like you described but uh just grateful for your sacrifice in doing that so I want to end with that note encouraging folks to go to CS NTM to check it out and if you've been moved by this and want the scriptures to be recorded for posterity and none to go away this is a great investment of your resources Dan appreciate your work really appreciate your friendship thanks for carving out the time to come on right after you literally just got back from Oxford thanks Sean it's been a pleasure to be on your show first time for me hope it's not the last we'll do it again okay thanks

Channel: Sean McDowell

Views: 70,902

Keywords: can we trust the new testament, can we trust the bible, new testament reliability, new testament text, new testament history, new testament corruption, corruption of the gospel, bible relibility, gospel reliability, daniel wallace, christian discussion, reasoned answers, christian apologetics, bible history, bible corruption, new testament debate, bart ehrman debate, james white lee baker, william lane craig debate, apologia church, apologia studios, bart ehrman

Id: 6AfikYTymbs

Length: 67min 21sec (4041 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023