At uh there is every reason to believe because of the actual physical evidence that what we’re reading is exactly and precisely what God’s Apostles and Prophets recorded so many many years ago and so if you remember the first time we got together three weeks ago we talked
About how our Bibles came to be in the order in which they are Old Testament New Testament and The Ordering of the books in each of the Testaments last time we took a look at the text of the Old Testament of course the Old Testament primarily written in what language
Hebrew and we took a look at the transmission of the Hebrew text and we did it kind of in a reverse manner we started with our current uh Hebrew Bibles and we worked our way back as close as we could get to the formation of the Old Testament uh Canon Somewhere
In the inter-testamental period to see is there any evidence that the text of the Old Testament went through any corruption and of course the evidence shows the answer to that no today what we’re going to do and about halfway home last week I told you we were going to look at the apocryphal
Books this week and about halfway home my brain actually began to engage and I remembered we’re not going to talk about that next week we’re going to talk about that on the fourth time together so if you came tonight expecting to find out all about those interesting apocryphal
Books that your Catholic friends have in their Old Testaments you’re going to have to punch pause and we’ll uh we’ll get to that the beginning of our time together next time which will be two weeks from now next week Mark I’m going to be gone I put my wife on a plane this
Morning and sent her to Michigan to play with grandchildren and next Tuesday morning I’m going to join her and so I’ll be gone next week and so we’ll pick up the last three lectures of this in the first three Wednesday nights of October so that’s where we are what are
We going to do tonight well tonight we’re basically going to do three things instead of the Old Testament we’re going to take a look at the text of our New Testament of course Old Testament written primarily in Hebrew over a very long period of time over a
Thousand year period of time in a fairly limited geographic location primarily written in and around the Holy Land the new testament’s a little different New Testament written in a different language Greek written over an extremely short period of time probably less than 50 years every one of the New Testament weeks was
Probably written somewhere between 50 and 95 A.D somewhere right in there and over a vast geographic area the entire Mediterranean Basin and so uh so the new testament old testament a little bit different in their manuscripts the Old Testament manuscripts because it’s so far in the past aren’t as numerous
As a lot of Scholars would would like and that’s not just the Old Testament most of the works that came from the ancient world the manuscripts are not as numerous as the scholars would like that is not the case with the New Testament not the case with the New Testament at
All in his wonderful Divine Providence God has granted vast numbers of manuscripts and when I say manuscript let’s define some terms a manuscript is a hand copied uh version of a literary work and manuscripts usually we look at before the invention of the printing press in
The early 1400s and so all the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament are hand copied by scribes down through the ages of time I used a couple of other words that Mark said you might want to define those and I thought yeah he’s probably right we used uh use the the
Title codex I have a codex up here of one of the the second earliest entire uh copy of the Bible this is a facsimile exact size and just photocopies of of the actuals called the Codex sinaiticus we’ll talk about that a codex is a an ancient manuscript Bound in book form
Like we bind books today there are three types of ancient manuscripts there’s Scrolls and we all know what a scroll is there’s a codex and then there’s something Scholars call the curay which is a manuscript that is like most of my manuscripts they’re just loose leaf papers that haven’t been sewn into a
Book or pasted into a scroll and so if I refer to codex a manuscript that’s a codex that means it looks like what we would think of as a book bound together on one itch and so what are we going to do tonight I’m going to try to do
Oops try to do three things first we’re going to look at the early manuscript evidence for our New Testaments and see how close can we get remember last time with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls the Isaiah scroll we have a copy of an Old Testament book that it
Probably dates within maybe a hundred years 150 years of when the Old Testament was finally all put Under One Roof but still probably about you know 500 maybe some odd years after Isaiah actually wrote it we have sections of the New Testament that date within 25 to 30 years
Of when the actual authors wrote the original manuscripts and so that’s very exciting so we’re going to do that that’s going to take up a lot of our time and when we’re done with that we’re going to then see how does the manuscript evidence of our new testament stack up against other pieces
Of ancient literature that are taught every day in college campuses as if they were unquestioned in the Integrity of their text how does the New Testament stack up against the writings of Aristotle or a Herodotus the great Greek historian some of those others and I think if you’ve
Not taken a look at that before it’s really quite shocking and then finally and I I didn’t know whether I should do this or not it’s always kind of an anxiety creating how many of you when you’ve re if you’re reading a newer translation of the New Testament that like the NIV or
The English Standard Version or one of the newer translations how many of you have noticed sometimes down at the bottom of your page there’s a footnote and the footnote will say something like this some ancient MSS and that’s an abbreviation for manuscript some ancient manuscripts read and it’ll give you a
Slightly varied reading I want to talk just very briefly that we could spend a whole semester talking about that I want to talk very briefly about variations that show up in some new testament manuscripts to me they’re nothing to worry about but we need to talk about
Them because actually we have thought we have tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament you would expect all done probably by different copiers you would expect with that many manuscripts somewhere down the line some copier got tired and copied a word wrong so the nice
Thing is that when you got ten thousand manuscripts that have it right it’s easy to figure out which one which one got it wrong but every once in a while it’s not quite as easy and so we’ll talk about that and why those footnotes show up in the bottoms of your
English Bible so uh let’s let’s go to the manuscripts we have what’s the scholarly word scads boatloads buku numbers of New Testament manuscripts we have 5 300 plus ancient manuscripts of the New Testament in the original language in which it was written Greek and then we have numerous
Uh manuscripts of the New Testament when it was translated into Latin and remember Latin ultimately became the the standard language of the Roman Empire and so in the the four and five hundreds most Christians didn’t read Greek anymore they read Latin so we have thousands over ten thousand manuscripts
Of the New Testament translated into Latin most of them are are Jerome’s translation that he did in the 400s Adu that we call the Vulgate and then we also have over 9 000 manuscripts in numerous other ancient languages that the New Testament was being translated into some of them
Date from three four and five hundreds A.D just a few hundred years after the books of the New Testament were actually written they were being we have evidence that they’re being translated into numerous ancient languages something that wasn’t actually at the time super common in the world of of of literature and so
Let’s take and so all those manuscripts we’re only going to be able to take a look at just a few and the few we want to look at are the earliest remember we talked about the little game that if we gave somebody at the back of the sanctuary a sentence and they
Whispered it all the way up to the front that we’d worry that maybe the sentence Changed by the time we got up to the front we saw that that didn’t happen with the text of the Old Testament and there’s there there’s hundreds and hundreds of times more evidence that it
Didn’t happen with the New Testament so I want to look at some of the oldest sections of the New Testament somebody asked what is the oldest peace of the New Testament that we have and the answer is the John rylands fragment this fragment dates to around 1
30 A.D it is a portion of John’s gospel it’s John 18 a section of verses 31 through 33 on seven lines and this is just a little small section it probably is about so big and about so wide it was it was found in Egypt and some Scholars even date
This fragment to 125 A.D where most scholars believe that John wrote his gospel around 90 A.D and if that’s the case this is a small little section now a lot of people say where’s the rest of it it didn’t survive it just wasted away over 2 000 years of time
But here’s a little section of John’s gospel found in Egypt on the high side 40 some Scholars date John’s gospel as late as 95 and they did to John ryland’s fragment as early as 1 25 it could be 30 years after John wrote and so I want to just
Toss it it’s possible that the Scribe that copied this copied it from the original manuscript of John that’s within the realm of possibility it’s possible that the Scribe who copied this knew John we don’t know anybody thing about The copier but we know that this manuscript showed up in the Sands of
Egypt now I’m going to ask our new testament man over here where did John write his gospel as best we are able to determine yeah Western turkey western coast of turkey in the ancient city of Ephesus most old churches or ancient Church historians tell us that’s where John was
When he ended his life and wrote his gospel well if that’s the case think about this Ephesus as the crow flies is about 8 900 miles from the area of Egypt where this manuscript probably came from and if you if it came by the land route it’s about 1500 miles
So within 30 years of John finishing his gospel we have evidence that copies of it are being transmitted around the Roman Empire now that’s that’s amazing that’s amazing and we compare the text of the John rylands fragment just the few words that we have with the modern text of John’s gospel
Guess what we discover no variations no variations another ancient manuscript of fond of the New Testament is the bodmar papyrus 2. um bodmar Papyrus II contains most of John’s gospel if you if you want to go see the John rylands Papyrus the one before let me just back it up uh if
Somebody say well where are these things this is in the the John rylands library at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom Mark Moore how many of you know Mark Moore Mark Moore told me his story about getting to see this fragment did he tell you the story Mark
Moore who’s a pretty gregarious character said he went to the University of Manchester they didn’t have this fragment out on display at the time and he he said he went up to a guard and he said can I see the John ryland’s fragment and the guard said well it’s back in the
Archives and they’re doing it and he said he goes I’m a scholar from the United States and I’ve come all this way could you ask the curator of the museum if I could be allowed to go back into the into the archives and see this and
John and Mark Moore told the guard if you do I’ll give you a kiss the guard said I don’t want a kiss but I’ll see what I can do and he actually got mark back into uh to see to see the oldest extant small little piece of the
New Testament uh the bodmar Papyrus too isn’t more than just a fragment it contains almost all of John’s Gospel of course there’s a little bit missing here and there from the degradation of the writing materials it’s written on Papyrus which is an early version of paper made from the Reed of the Papyrus
Plant that grows in low-lying areas in the in Egypt and elsewhere it’s really cheap it’s easy to make the problem is it’s not very durable so the fact that we have a Papyrus manuscript of almost the entire Gospel of John dates to Scholars argue about this on the early side 150 A.D
So 60 years after John wrote to 280 would be the late date I I’d put it somewhere in the middle so something like 70 years after John wrote his gospel we have manuscripts of basically the entire gospel what did we discover when we compare it with our more modern Greek manuscripts
Practically no variations some spelling things and a few things that we’ll talk about a little bit um and if you want to see this you get your wife or husband to take you to Switzerland because it’s in the bodmer library in Geneva Switzerland is where this is housed another early
Manuscript collection of the New Testament documents and a few Old Testament documents and other things as well it’s called the Chester Beatty papyri guess who discovered them yeah if you’re a famous archaeologist and you discover something you can name them after yourself so these are were discovered by Chester Beatty they date
To about 200 A.D there are seven Old Testament texts and but since we’re dealing with the New Testament there are three sets of New Testament documents uh they’re the first and they number these Papyrus the the Papyrus number p45 which stands for papyrus number 45 contains the most
Of all of the gospels and the book of Acts p46 contains uh most of the Pauline Epistles and remember this is papyrus and some there’s a few page here missing or parts of pages have deteriorated and p47 contains uh The Book of Revelation the earliest extant uh manuscript of the
Book of Revelation so we have major sections of the New Testament in manuscript form before a hundred years after the death of the last apostle what do we find when we compare our modern Greek New Testaments from which our English is translated with these early Chester baby papyri virtually no no textual variations
Um some other evidence of in your text I think I might I might list the DIA tesseron I didn’t put a picture of that up we know that by the middle of the of the second Century A.D Christians were comparing the four gospels they recognized that Matthew and John record
The story of Jesus but they give us some differing stories not not contradictory stories but uh you know John was probably I believe John was aware of all the other three gospels and so he he includes a lot of unique material since he understood that that somebody had
Already written The Sermon on the Mount so I’m going to give you some other discourses of Jesus but early Christians by the middle of the second century now remember Jesus dies First Century 30 A.D the you know Paul and Peter die probably 66 67 65 A.D first century John the last
Apostle dies mid-90s A.D by about 150 160 A.D Christians we know have gathered the four gospels and they were writing what we call a Harmony of the gospels and Mark could tell you all about this because he taught gospels forever it Ozark Christian College how many of you
Own an Harmony of the gospels it’s where you have four columns and in each column you have Matthew’s material Mark’s material Luke’s material John’s material and it shows where they are similar and where each gospel writer gives you some unique material from their own perspective I remember when I got to Bible College
And I took Harmony of the gospels class I thought to myself have to memorize all these different story units and all these different differences and I thought you know the people in the second or third Century probably didn’t have to do this they just loved Jesus and went to
Church but then I then I found out Christians were actually putting these things together within a hundred years of when the gospels were finished now we don’t have any of the early manuscripts of the DIA tester and the earliest manuscript of the dear tester on we have dates to the late 400s A.D
But we know from the writings of early Christians that it was known and produced in the middle of the second Century A.D and once again what do we find when we look at that study almost no variations from our modern texts I want to close this section by looking
At two of the probably most important manuscripts of the New Testament and Old um somebody asked what what are the oldest copies we have of the whole Bible all the New Testament together and there are two that date from the early 300s A.D so by within a couple of hundred years
And a few more decades after John finishes writing we have actual copies put together by Christians of the entire Bible Old and New Testament bound together in a book um the second old I believe the second old most Scholars would agree the second oldest is this I brought Ozarks
Um facsimile copy of uh the Codex sinaiticus it was discovered and recognized uh as an ancient manuscript by a scholar German scholar by the name of Constantine Von tischendorf in 1844. it’s quite a story there are lots of variations on the story of his discovering it I’m going to tell you the
Popular one uh and uh as he’s traveling through the near East this is the dawn of the age of archeology and discovering these ancient manuscripts that are in Old Monastery libraries and he’s traveling through the near East looking for ancient manuscripts of the New Testament that was what he was
Interested in and he was traveling in the Sinai Peninsula and he stayed the night at Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the base of the traditional site of Mount Sinai there’s an there’s an orthodox Monastery there and he asked if he could stay the night and they let him
Stay actually for several days and he’s talking to the monks after supper one night and they were starting a fire because it gets cold out in the desert after the sun goes down and he notices that they they put the wood in the in the in the little stove and then they
Are using some old pieces of parchment that’s writing material made out of animal skin he goes oh can I see that so the monk says sure he brings it over to him and he goes oh my God this he could tell from the uh from the decomposition of the parchment and
The style of the letters of the writing that this was a Greek copy of the Old Testament that was earlier than anything that he had seen up to that point he goes oh my goodness where’d you get this this isn’t very complementary to the Orthodox monks and you get a little different version
Of the story if you read the Orthodox Church’s uh issue of this but Constantine vonteschendorf said the monk said oh we got some old books in the back we can’t read them anymore so we’ve been using them to nobody nobody uses them anymore so we’re tearing Pages out
In the evenings to light our fire luckily a little over half the Old Testament remained and all of the New Testament because they had at that time one of the earliest known copies of the entire Bible uh the Codex sinaiticus dates to about 350 A.D now that that’s a crazy story but uh
The the nuts and bolts of that story are absolutely true absolutely true um when we compare the text of the New Testament with the Codex sinaiticus 99 percent no variations in the text most the variation spelling issues and that sort of thing what is the and if you want to see this
You’ve got to go to three different places it’s it’s gone through some some political Intrigue through the years the bulk of the Codex sinaiticus is at the British museum in London which I call the largest repository of stolen goods on planet Earth is the British museum in London
Um even though they they raised British citizens raised in the 1800 or in the early 1900s a hundred thousand pounds to bring the major section of the Codex sinaiticus to to London there’s a section in Leipzig Germany there’s a section in Saint Petersburg Russia and there’s a small section of it back at
Saint Catherine’s Monastery the Orthodox Church really wanted a small section of that so it is no longer in one piece anymore but yeah so if you want to see all of it you have to go to those four different places what is the oldest extant copy of
The Bible that we have to date I haven’t given up on the archaeologist there’s plenty of dirt and sand that have not been Unearthed in the near East the oldest known copy of the entire Bible is the Codex vaticanus guess where it resides in the Vatican library in Rome
This most scholars believe this dates a few decades before the Codex sinaiticus most dates given are anywhere from 325 to 350 A.D it again contains almost the entire Bible the Old Testament in Greek translation and the original Greek of the New Testament um we know it’s been in the Vatican Library since 1448.
If we study church history we think it was in caesarea sometime in the 500s A.D what happened to it between 500 A.D and when it showed up in the Middle Ages in the Vatican Library nobody knows I’m sure if the book itself could talk it
Would have quite a story to tell in the 1800s in 1809 when Napoleon conquered Europe he he conquered Italy and he sacked the Vatican actually and he took this manuscript back to Paris as a booty of War to display in Paris but it ticked the ticked the French Catholics off so
Much that in 1815 they got Napoleon to return it to uh to the Vatican where it has resided ever since so really from about 14 the mid-1400s to now except for that to six year period of time it’s been in the Vatican library and as I said it contains the entire New
Testament and the basically the entire Old Testament what do we the what do we find when we compare our modern Greek New Testaments with the Codex Vatican virtually no variations and so there is really no question in the scholarly world that when we pick up our New Testaments
We are reading what Matthew wrote what John wrote what the Apostle Paul wrote um there are other ancient versions I don’t want to get into all of this oops my my thing went backwards there are Syriac versions that date from 350 to 500 A.D manuscripts the New Testament
Translated into Syriac there are like we said thousands over ten thousand Latin manuscripts most of them the Vulgate which was translated in the 300s A.D their Coptic versions which is uh ancient Egyptian written in the Greek text and they date from 2 to 400 A.D and there are numerous other ancient
Versions that date from the 300s to the 500s A.D once again even though these are translated into different languages you can see well what what is the reading of this in Latin well that matches the translation of the reading of the Greek and so in all of these languages 24
000 plus ancient manuscripts of the New Testament that’s that’s amazing if all of them disappeared today if all of them were gone we could still reconstruct virtually the entire New Testament by quotations from the New Testament in the writings of the earliest Christians we call those early Christians the church fathers
They wrote from really the end of the first century the earliest Christian non-inspired Fellow that we have writings of is Clement of Alexandria and he dates to about the end of the first century it’s possible that Clement Clement wrote an epistle to the church at Corinth it’s
Possible that that predates the Book of Revelation so from from the end of the first century really to the beginning of the of the 8th century we have tons of writings of the earliest Christians and we Could reconstruct the entire New Testament just from quotations of the New Testament in their
Writings do you want to see the set of books uh here it is uh the the library has a copy of these I’ve got a copy in my I think I’ve told some of you my bucket list goal if the Lord lets me live long enough I’m currently reading through all well there’s
10 encyclopedia sized volumes actually 11 of the the writings of the earliest Christians before 325 A.D and then there are 28 more encyclopedia sized volumes of the writings of the early Christians between 325 and the early 700s A.D I’m getting ready to start the fourth volume laughs they’re all small print double columns
Seven eight nine hundred pages and so uh but hey daytime television is really bad now that I’m retired and so this is what this is what I’m doing and uh enjoying it immensely uh and so we could reproduce the entire New Testament just from the quotations they give of the New
Testament in their writings and so uh can oops let’s see here we go conclusion of the matter let me back up conclusion of the matter from the manuscript evidence our new testament text stands secure how secure in comparison to other ancient literature well let’s make a comparison and Josh
McDowell Drew attention to this long ago in his wonderful book evidence that demands a verdict and that material most of it is still very viable and usable Josh McDowell put together a chart listing numerous ancient authors how many manuscripts in existence do we have of those authors
And what’s the year gap between when they wrote and the very first manuscript that we have we have we have you know we have New Testament John written 90 A.D we have whole copies of John within a hundred years of when he wrote most of the New Testaments like that
How’s that stack up against other ancient authors well let’s take a peek I put a chart in your handout Caesar’s works and for this chart this is uh this chart is making reference to Caesar’s Gaelic Wars the book he wrote while on campaign and what would be modern day France
Taming the Barbarian Gaelic tribes and bringing that section of the world into the Roman Empire Caesar of course his dates are 100 BC to 44 BC on the Ides of March wasn’t a good day for Caesar in Rome and uh he he wrote in his lifetime the earliest
Copy we have of Caesar’s gallic War his description of his military campaign dates to 900 A.D that’s a thousand years after he actually wrote it how many manuscripts do we have 10. 10. and yet nobody at the University history class bats and I when they make reference to things that
Caesar wrote in the gallic war even though it’s only based on 10 manuscripts that are a thousand years removed from when Caesar actually wrote it’s interesting Plato of course wrote numerous things mostly in the name of his teacher Socrates Plato’s probably most famous work the Republic and others will take the
Republic as a chief example Plato of course wrote near the end of the Old Testament period 427 to 4 3 47 are his dates as you can see um the earliest manuscript we have of anything written by Plato 900 around 900 A.D again so there’s 12 1300 years difference
Between when he wrote and our earliest copy we only have seven copies seven And yet when I you know when I took philosophy nobody questioned that Plato actually wrote those things about totalitarian government in the uh in the Republic and on it goes tacitus his
Famous book lives of uh uh the uh uh 12 Caesars he he writes around 100 A.D the earliest copy 1100 A.D that’s you know eight about a thousand years we we have a lot of those we have 20 whole manuscripts Herodotus the father of secular history wrote uh history of the
Ancient world in his time the ancient Greek the earliest copy we have 900 A.D 1300 years we only have eight eight extant manuscripts eight uh Aristotle uh his book The tetralogies 14 oh we got a bunch of those 49. but the earliest copy we have is 1400 years after he wrote it
But nobody questions it what is the best attested ancient piece of literature that we have next to the New Testament and the answer is the writings of Homer or the homeric tradition in The Iliad best best attested piece of ancient literature outside the New Testament uh keep
All right Homer uh The Iliad he wrote Force his writings come from 900 BC and if there’s some ancient Greek literary people here I recognize there may not have been an actual Homer but the writings come from around 900 BC we actually have some manuscripts that
Date to the end of the Old Testament period they’d ate around 400 BC uh only a 500 year Gap most of the manuscripts of Homer are far later than that and we have a bunch of 643 wow but all of that pales in the insignificance when you compare it to the manuscript
Evidence of your new testament of course the man oops hit the button too fast New Testament written between 50 and 100 A.D earliest copy 125 A.D of a section 25 years and we have 24 000 plus manuscripts the text of your new testament is thousands of times more verifiable
Than most ancient literature and hundreds of times more verifiable than the best attested piece of ancient literature so don’t let it don’t let anyone say oh well you can’t trust that if you can’t trust the text of your new testament we have to throw away everything we know about the ancient world
And I don’t know anybody that’s ready to do that and so because of that in all honesty there’s simply no comparison between the New Testament and the text of our New Testament and any other piece of literature that comes to us from the ancient world now
I don’t want to spend much time on this last little point but to say that the text of our new testament stands secure is not to say that there are not slight variations occasionally in the manuscripts you would expect with 24 000 people making copies that some
Scribe somewhere is going to get tired and write something wrong occasionally and so when we study and compare the manuscripts it’s obvious that some of the scribes made a whoops every once in a while the the nice thing is we have so many manuscripts it’s easy to see
Normally where one scribe made a whoops if you’ve got twenty four thousand manuscripts that all have it one way and one that has it a different way well I think I’ll go with the twenty five thousand that’s not always the case uh and the and the issue is what if most
Of the manuscripts have it one way but the very earliest ones have it a different way and that’s where some of those footnotes come at the bottom of your New Testament and so I want to talk about that in the last 10 minutes we have to declare the
Integrity of the text of the Bible that it’s been established without doubt and it has is not to say that there are no minor problems with the certain wording and phraseology of some manuscripts and this is a whole science that you can specialize in I am not a specialist but
I have looked into it it’s called the science of textual criticism comparing all the manuscripts and seeing where they’re identical and the few variations that occur from time to time occasionally uh we’ll see those and our English Publishers will let us know where they are in footnote uh if you got your
Bibles turn to this passage um oh well I want to say yeah turn to First Timothy 3 16. it’s one of the famous 3 16s in the Bible you want a good devotional uh project look up all the three sixteens in the New Testament some of them aren’t overly interesting
But there’s a whole bunch of them that are and this is this is one of them so first Timothy 3 16. before I say that let me talk about uh uh the manuscripts because the Bible was copied by hand all of the manuscripts in existence contain minor variations spelling problem here
And there’s something like that a word about ancient manuscripts in 1611 the King James version was was made available to the English-speaking public in Great Britain it was translated from the best Greek manuscripts of the New Testament at the time and the best Hebrew manuscripts at the time with all other extant
Translations at the time compared and we’ll talk about that when we when we talk about the English Bible which we’ll begin talking about next time but in 1611 there were only a handful of these ancient Greek manuscripts available uh somewhere around on you know we’re not exactly sure Rasmus doesn’t tell us
How many exactly yet somewhere around 20. no more than 25. and they all dated to the 10th and 11th Century A.D he didn’t have any of these early it hadn’t been discovered yet so he did the best he could you’d work with what God gives you and and I think
King James is a great translation Jesus is in there I I gave my heart and Life to Jesus Christ reading the King James version and and there’s still sections of the Bible that will not be scripture unless I quote him in the King James version like 23rd psalm and Lord’s Prayer and
Things like that and so I I have great respect for the King James version the scholars the 50 some odd Scholars that worked on the King James version did the best they could with what they had available however an Erasmus produced an edited version of all those manuscripts in a
Greek text that’s very famous we call it today the textus receptus or the received text and this was used in all of the earliest English translations of the New Testament leading up to and including the King James version but uh there have been thousands upon thousands of manuscripts discovered since 1611.
And many of these are these early ones I just showed you and so occasionally there are variations between the text that was available in 1611 and some of these earliest manuscripts that have just come to light in the last couple of hundred years uh and so the variations can be can be
Seen and and some of the significant ones are the ones you have footnotes in in your Bibles uh let me just let me spoiler alert for my conclusion none of them alter any basic teaching in the New Testament not a single one I would I would be I would be suspicious
If Scholars told me we have 24 000 manuscripts all written by hand over a thousand year period of time up to the in the printing press and they’re all exactly the same I’d I’d think something fishy was going on if if somebody told me that so uh uh a
Christian scholar is it I think and I don’t want to bad mouth other religions but Christian Scholars have been dead on honest try to be dead on on us through the centuries make a Muslim friend about early manuscript evidence for the Quran they’ll just blink and look at you and
Go what are you talking about because they don’t talk about that Christians have never been ashamed to talk about the evidence that God has given in the way he’s chosen to give it down through the centuries of time and so compared to the text that was available in 1611 and what’s available today
Occasionally the text showed some variations uh here’s here’s one uh First Timothy 3 16. somebody have King James version somebody’s got to have a King James version here man the congregation can’t be saved unless somebody brought King James version to well if we would look at the King James
Version in first Timothy 3 16 it says God is talking about Jesus being incarnated talks about God being manifest in the flesh but most of our modern translations English Standard the NIV simply say he was manifest In the Flesh now if you if you read the whole context still talking
About the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ but what did the text say did the text say God or did the text have the pronoun he well the King James manuscripts had the word God or an abbreviation of the word god which you can see on the right
Up there which is uh it looks like a a zero with a line through the middle and uh a sigma which sometimes you’ll see in the fraternity houses some of you know how to read the Greek alphabet because you’re in college fraternities Theta Sigma with a line over the top is an
Abbreviation in ancient manuscripts for the word god it’s the first and last letter of the word god Theos with a line over the top and they were just trying to save writing material since God shows up so much the other one on the left is the Greek pronoun he Omicron Sigma now
Can you see where a monk late in the day after he’s been working all day looks down and he he knows what he’s reading he’s talking about the Incarnation of God and and we all know that Jesus was God and he looks at the pronoun the earliest manuscripts that we have say he
But somewhere down the line a monk thought he saw the abbreviation for God wrote it in his manuscript and that got copied and recopied and copied that’s probably how that variation got in there if you read the context of both of those it’s still Jesus Is God being incarnated in the flesh
But you’ll see that in how many of you in your Bible have a do you have a footnote there in any of your Bibles you got one Gordon yeah if you got a study Bible you’ll get a lot more of these type of footnotes so that takes place
Sometimes in your in your handouts I’ve given you several other uh ways that Scholars sometimes were prone to make a whoops in their copying sometimes they misread similar words like this we even have a manuscript that left out a line and I didn’t put it up
On the text but in in your handout on page three uh number one section three uh the Codex vaticanus the oldest complete copy of the entire Bible The Scholar who copied that left out a line of the text codex vaticanus John 17 15 reads I do not pray that you should
Take them from the uh world but thou should or I I do not pray that you should take them from the evil one that’s what codex vaticana says what how did that get in there Jesus is praying that his disciples wouldn’t be rescued from Satan no it’s obvious
That the Scribe I went from one line down to the next and he omitted a whole line sometimes that happens you’ve done that now remember the content of the Bible is the inspired word of God God inspired the original authors but God didn’t inspire the copiers any more than he inspires
You when you copy a verse from your Bible into your notebook he doesn’t protect you from making an heir and he didn’t protect the copiers he just provided us with thousands of copies so that we could tell where the errors are that’s the problem that’s that’s the Glorious thing um
So sometimes there were variations of the eye sometimes scribes worked in this way instead of one scribe having one old copy of of the Gospel of Matthew and he’s writing a new copy they would work in in community in a scriptorium and they would all be Scholars and the head
Monk would stand up in front with the old copy of Matthew that they were wanting to replace and there’d be a room of 10 or 12 scholar monks all sitting at their podiums or standing and they’re all going to copy as he reads Matthew and so he would read the genealogy and
They would all write the geology of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ the son of David the son of David Son of Abraham and then they’d go on now if you do it that way you get 15 copies you know in the same amount of time it was take one guy to make one
Copy so that’s that’s a positive thing the negative is sometimes words sound very similar don’t they uh if you’ve got your Bible this is a very interesting textual variant Romans 5 1. King James Version Romans 5 1 says we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ
The revised Standard Version in the published in 1950s how many of you use the revised standard at some time in your life Wilbur Fields like the the revised Standard Version out of those are Christian College the revised standard when it first came out has instead of we have peace with God it has
Let us have peace with God now that go being a grammarian one of those is in the indicative I’m going to be a grammarian and one’s in the subjunctive one of them’s making a statement of fact and one is suggesting something to happen now why did the why is there a difference
The oldest manuscripts considered by manuscript Scholars the best oldest ones have the phrase let us have peace with God it comes from the Greek word Echo men Echo Man means let us have to say we have peace with God it’s Eckerman now let me say them both together ekomen ekomen
One’s the long o sound one’s the shorto sound if you’re speaking Greek and you say EK amen you’re saying uh we have something if you say EK o man then you’ve said let us have that’s just grammar can you see where a scribe might have made that whoops now here’s the interesting thing
Who has a more modern translation like the NIV who has an NIV anybody have NIV somebody look up in the NIV Romans 5 1 or the ESV our preacher likes the ESV 5-1 we the newer translations went back to the old King James reading even though the oldest manuscripts
Have the other one why’d they do that the context of the passage Paul in Romans isn’t in that section of Romans he’s not asking us to do something he’s talking about what God has already done for us and so to say let us have peace doesn’t make sense in the context and so
Just because one manuscript is older than another doesn’t necessarily mean that it has the correct reading so when this variation came to light in the midnight in the early and mid 20th century a few of the translations that came out around 1950 changed it to let us have but as the scholarly Community
Looked at that they said that’s not what Paul’s talking about in this section and so they went with the original so just because it’s the oldest one doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right win and that’s what makes this study something that I’m glad experts are willing to do that because I I’m not
I’ll take their word for most now at the end of the day we’re having peace with God aren’t we it’s it’s not like there’s any giant change it’s just a small variation in the way uh the exact meaning and so that’s what normally the variations and they’re not common they’re not common
That’s what’s going on in your English Bibles your new version English Bibles when you see a comment about older manuscripts have maybe a slightly different reading now when we’re all said and done and there are a couple of larger problems the end of Mark’s gospel John the eighth chapter I’m not going to
Deal with those ask Mark about them all I want to say is after everything’s said and done and you look at the slight variations that occur occasionally in the manuscripts oh there’s one more and I’m not going to take time to do it it’s the inclusion of
A gloss where a marginal note might be included if you want an example of that acts 8 37 the story of the conversion of the Ethiopian treasure most of your modern translations won’t have verse 37 in the text it’ll include it in the margin my notes will kind of explain maybe what
Happened there although that story was known from the middle of the second century irenaeus who wrote in the middle of the 200s and late 200s make mention of that verse and it can’t be interpolated as part of his argument so I’m not convinced that some of our newer translations are
Correct I kind of think 837 was a part of the original but that’s where Scholars do their do their thing so uh so but um sometimes there was an inclusion of a marginal small marginal note occasionally but it didn’t hurt you know it happens once or twice the entire New
Testament in a couple of manuscripts the conclusion of the matter now I only talk about manuscript variations because they’re there and if I if I gave this lecture and somebody that’s informed and said oh he talked about the text of the New Testament and you would say yeah we got
All these manuscripts and they’re in agreement with our our current text and they would say did he tell you about the textual variations and if you just said no they’d have said he didn’t know what he was talking about And so uh none of these none of these oops let’s get there yeah the conclusion of the matter is simple no textual variation in question today changes or Alters any basic teaching in the New Testament none and compared with any other piece of ancient literature you want to talk about textual
Variations take a look at some of the works of Aristotle in those eight or nine manuscripts you’ll find out about textual variations compared with any other piece of ancient literature the text of our Bible stands established without question but our question so I pick up my new testament
Even though there’s an occasional note in the margin well we’re not sure whether it was this exact word or that exact word it doesn’t change the basic meaning of what the author is trying to tell us I think God has made sure of that and so all of the evidence points
To the fact that when I pick up my Bible it is exactly what God wrote inspired his inspired authors to write in English translation so we’re to the point where we have to start asking okay we’ve got the Hebrew Old Testament it’s secure we got the Greek New Testament
It’s secure but I don’t read either one of those I read English so how did my English Bible come to me well that’s pretty much the rest of our time together and we will say a word or two about those interesting extra books our Catholic friends have
Next time and we’ll and then we’ll I’ll just talk about that for maybe 20 minutes and then we’ll talk about the earliest English translations of the Bible and I’ll start having some facsimile as an actual 500 year old pages of English Bibles for you to take
A peek at and that’s all I’ve got to say about that all right thank you Terry
source
