The Text of God's Word

Well, praise the Lord everybody. Praise the Lord. All right. Praise the Lord, everybody. All right. We are going to get Bible class started here in just a second. I'm so honored to be here with you. I may be the only one from the church staff here today. I think Sister Linda's run around somewhere. Brother Ry's here, so we're safe. We're okay. I'm happy to be here with you. How's everybody doing? How's everybody doing? Come on now. Listen, I had a big breakfast and a big cup of coffee this morning.

All right, so I'm feeling great. So, I want to make sure we're all feeling great. We're going to open up this class with just a word of prayer. We want to pray for this class, but also all of our CE classes, as well as a few needs that we have here at APC. Number one, my brother Adam's still in recovery. He did get to go home Friday, so we celebrate that, but still has quite a bit of recovery to go through to make sure his body is up and running.

We also have a special need, Brother Joe Dutton. I want to pray for him that the Lord would work on his behalf. Does anybody have a need in the house? You can just lift your hand up to symbolize that. APC, would you mind looking around seeing that hand? All right, let's go to the Lord in prayer for these needs and for classes today. Jesus, we love you. We thank you for your goodness. We thank you for your faithful presence that is always with us and always for us, God.

We thank you, Lord, that you are at work today in all of these CE classes. We pray that your word would be proclaimed and taught and that we would be drawn closer to you through it and by it, God. We also pray for the needs that were represented by an uplifted hand or those that we read off and Adam Wright and brother Joe Dutton. We pray God that you would move and work in ways of healing and provision and guidance. God, we trust you in all things and in every way.

We thank you for your help. In the name of Jesus, we pray. And everybody said, "Amen and amen." Well, praise the Lord again. Are y'all happy to be in the house of God? Come on now. That's what I'm looking for. The Lord has asked me to say this more and more and so I'm being intentional about saying it and I want to say it to you. I said it in the in the pre-ervice meeting, but I love this church. And I don't mean the building, I mean you.

I mean you in the seat. I love being a part of this church. I love serving the Lord with this church. I love watching what God is doing in St. Louis through this church. And we get to be a part of it. And today is just another tiny cog in that wheel of what God is doing as we try to draw closer to him through his word. Amen. Amen. Come on now. I'm looking for it today. All right. So, today I've been asked to cover what what I believe to be a very important topic, very crucial topic, especially for those that espouse Christianity and want to believe it with all of their heart.

But I also acknowledge that this topic can be can be very confusing and very difficult. And so, I'm going to give my best stab at this topic. And I'm going to try to be quick, fully acknowledging that I may produce more questions than answers. And if you have questions, ask brother Spaul. So, we're going to do our best to cover this topic. And that topic is that the formal name for the topic is textual criticism. Has anybody ever heard of textual criticism? Anybody ever heard that?

Yeah. Just just a few moments ago, maybe. Is that is that what that Yeah. Yeah. We've heard of that before. But essentially what it is is we are looking at the texts that produced our Bible. So who knows that the Bible was not written in English. Yeah. Who knows that the Bible did not fall out of heaven leatherbound and full King James ready prepared? Who knows that that's not how that happened? Who knows that it there was a process of prophets writing or apostles writing and those writings being preserved and copied and passed on eventually translated.

There's a bit of a process that God oversaw to make sure that we have in our hands today our Bibles. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, what we're going to talk about today is that process of transmission. Trying to answer this question. How do we know that what we hold in our hands today is the word of God? Meaning, how do we know the words we have today are English Bibles are the actual words that the prophets and the apostles wrote in the beginning? If there's this long chain of transmission, how do we know that we can trust those words?

Does the question make sense? Difficult question. Okay, so I'm going to start off with the with the truth here, and you can throw that title slide up for me, Brother Jason. Thank you so much. God inspired the word called scripture. He inspired it. It comes from him. But he also providentially preserved that word through time and through space to the point where we can trust it today. Isaiah 40:8 says, "The grass witherth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand forever." What God has said in the pages of scripture is settled.

It's true. It's trustworthy. and it's firm. Amen. Amen. Okay. So, let's let's ask the question again. How can we know the Bible we hold today is really God's word if there's been this long line of transmission? And to add to the problem, the original manuscripts like the original Isaiah scroll or the original First Thessalonians, the original Corinthians, we actually don't have those original manuscripts. They've been lost to time. They've been lost to space. So what we do have is copies of copies of copies that have been passed down over time.

Copies of copies of copies of copies, long line of copies, all the way to our Bibles today. And so this lesson is trying to wrestle with that issue and answer one of the most common questions that Christians will face, especially for those that maybe don't believe. Can you really trust the Bible you're holding? Now our our confidence in scripture begins with this truth that the biblical authors were inspired by God. meaning what they wrote is what God said. And so if what they wrote has somehow been lost, then we don't know what God said.

Does that make sense? That's a tough question. Now, I'm going to skip ahead to the answer. We can trust it. Just to calm everybody, we can trust it, but we can prove that we can trust it, which is the really cool part. So there's this is ironically this accusation, this accusation of can you trust the Bible? Can it really represent what was actually written thousands of years ago? It is the same accusation and I believe I have a slide for this one. It's the same accusation made by the serpent in the garden.

Hath God really said? Can you really trust what God said? Is that actually the words that that God used? And so I find it interesting that this is one of the number one accusations against scripture because it was one of the first accusations against God. Can you really trust the word? Can you really trust what he's saying? But thankfully, we have ample evidence to answer that question in the affirmative. Can you trust the Bible? Yes. Can you trust what God has said? Yes. So, to cut to the chase, we can trust it.

So, let's look at it. So, slide four for me, Brother Jason. Um, God could have communicated in in a myriad of different ways. And and he certainly did. He inspired prophets. He inspired New Testament writers. He he spoke through dreams and visions and all these things. But how he has passed on his revelation of who he is and what he desires and what he prioritizes. How we know who God is today primarily is through scripture. It is through a written text. It's through written text. You know the Bible's a written text, right?

So the question could be, well, why would God ch choose a written text? Why couldn't he choose like an MP4 or like a YouTube video or something? Wouldn't that be a whole lot easier? maybe, you know, they didn't have those all those years ago. So, he chose he chose a written text and and I can think of three reasons and this comes from uh the book that we've been walking through by Bishop David Bernard on the infallible word of God. But he gives three reasons. He says number one, if you have a written text, if you've written something down, you've recorded it, it does help with precision.

If you write down, you write down the exact words that you want, it's recorded forever. Unlike memory that would fade, unlike oral passing on of stories that can maybe get changed over time, like the telephone game, a written text gives more precision. I'm thankful for the precision of the word of God. I don't have to wonder what the word says. I can go to the word. I've got a written text to look at. Number two, it can help with propagation. And what that means is it can help with the sending out or the spreading of the word of God.

Meaning, if I've got a copy of the Bible and then I've got a spare copy, I can now give that to somebody. Can you imagine somebody talking to you like, "Hey, I'm going to read out loud to you the whole Bible as you sit here." How long would that take? Maybe a few days. I don't know. Yeah, if we don't sleep or eat or anything, might take a long time. But if I give you a book and I'm like, "Hey, I need you to read this like once a year, every two years, whatever." That's more easily propagated.

I can make copies of that. I'm only one person and I can speak to a few people at a time. But if I've got copies of a text, I can pass those out and we can propagate more easily. The third reason is preservation. And this is linked to the first one. If I told you a story and none of that was written down, you just had to pull on your memory. How long do you think you could remember that story exactly? Some of us have good memories.

You're like, forever. Steel box, not getting out. You know, elephant memory, whatever. Y'all, I don't remember what some people told me this morning. I'm just going to be honest. Brain is running. I'm thinking about a lot of things. I some of you I I've forgotten your name. All right. I'm just kidding. That was a joke. But when we have a written text, it's recorded. Not you. Not Not you, brother Thompson. Never. When we have a written text, we have a way of preserving permanently God's special revelation to us.

And so what I'm after here is God did not merely inspire people to share stories that we just have to remember. God inspired a text that we can hold in our hands today. Now moving on to our next slide. We also have to recognize that this text is not really like any modern western text written in English and and with the same types of writing style and stuff like it's very different. And to make it simple when we look at the Old Testament it is largely written in the ancient language of Hebrew and it's actually a little different than even modern Hebrew.

So it's it's written in the ancient language of Hebrew. There is some Aramaic and like Daniel and some other places uh but it's mostly written in Hebrew. Now Hebrew is an interesting language. All linguistic scholars when they look at Hebrew they say this language is really good at poetry. Have you ever read your Bible and you notice that the lines are set off like stairsteps? Have you ever noticed that in your Bible? That's actually trying to help you out. In English things don't rhyme because it's being translated from Hebrew.

But whenever you see those stair steps in your Bible where the lines are offset, it's trying to tell you that that's poetry, that there's actually cadence and rhythm and rhyming going on. And Hebrew is very good at that. It's very good at rhyming. Hebrew is also very good at storytelling. Who has noticed that the majority of the Old Testament, the majority of the Bible even is stories? Have you noticed that? Just a lot of stories. Well, that is one because that's what God chose to do.

But also, he chose to use Hebrew to write the Old Testament. And Hebrew prefers stories. It's really good at stories. And so, Hebrew makes sense. God chose a great language, and we can work to understand it. It helps us get at what God is trying to say. We also have Aramaic, some in the old and some in the new, but this was the common language in Jesus's day. This is probably the language that Jesus spoke most often on the street. He spoke spoke uh Aramaic. It's probably what most of his disciples spoke on the street.

They they may have been bilingual or even triilingual to some degree, but Aramaic would have been their preferred language. And in the gospels, particularly in some other places, some of the language of Jesus in Aramaic is actually preserved in Aramaic. Do you know when Jesus on the cross and he says Eloy, Eloy, do you know what I'm talking about? My God, my God, Eloy, Eloy. That's actually Aramaic that they leave essentially untransated. They don't translate it into Greek, which is what the New Testament is written, and we'll talk about that in a second.

They leave it in Aramaic. So Aramaic is one of the languages. And then finally the language of the New Testament is the Greek language. The Greek language specifically what's called coin Greek. Can you say co? It's spelled k o i n e. Co greek or it just means common Greek. Meaning uh do you know how if you're in a business meeting, brother buddy, you speak very official. You're like uh the quarter monthly statements, you know, I don't know. I've never been, you know, but you know what I'm talking about.

But then if you're hanging out with your grandkids or your kids, you speak a little more freely. Yeah. You're not talking about quarterly business statements with your kids, right? You're like, if you don't pick your clothes, I'm just that's how I've been talking to Lincoln. Um, but if you talk just normally, you use a different dialect almost. Do you know what I'm talking about? So, coin Greek would have been the common Greek. It would have been the Greek that individuals used in the first century to do commerce with one another.

There were a lot of different languages in the ancient world and to make sure that we could buy, sell and trade with each other even though we spoke different languages they agreed upon a common tongue and that would have been coin Greek. So almost everybody in the ancient world would have had a little bit of Greek knowledge especially if you wanted to participate in the markets. Okay. Do you know what the the trade language of the world is today? Somebody said it. It's English. So while they may have their mother tongue, most national business leaders, business owners, they will know some English or at minimum have a translator that can translate in English so that they can do business in the world economy.

So it is with Greek. Now Greek is also a good language for its precision. Greek is very precise. The ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, they wrote in Greek and it became the language of philosophy. So when you read the epistles and Paul's being really particular with words, he's being very precise with the words he's choosing. Greek served him well to communicate that. And what I'm after here by giving you a language lesson that some of you are like, who cares, right? Is to say God was so intentional and providential about choosing the right languages at the right time to communicate his message to us today.

And if God was that intentional, it points in the direction of a trustworthy scripture that we hold. So if it was written in all these different languages and not in English, we have to talk about how the Bible got to us. How was it transmitted? How do we go from the original Hebrew and Greek and some Aramaic all the way passed down through the centuries to an English text? Well, God inspired the original writings. Those writings were then copied by hand for centuries. For centuries, every whole Bible, every portion of the Bible was copied down by hand.

Has anybody ever written out a book of the Bible? Some people have done that recently. You ever done that where you pinned down word for word? No. If you've got like a few weeks, you know, feel free to do that for the Bible. But every Bible in the ancient world, they didn't have printing presses. They didn't have a way of mass-producing this. So every single Bible, every single piece of scripture in the ancient world was copied down by hand. And this required to ensure accuracy, this required extraordinary care.

So let's talk about the Old Testament. How was that transmitted? Well, we have something called Jewish scribes. And I've got a a slide up here for you. The Jewish scribes, they developed some extremely careful methods. Can you see that? You can see. Okay. Okay, I was worried about the the size of the words, but Jewish scribes, they developed some careful methods to make sure that accuracy was maintained. So, they would have their original scroll on the left and they'd have their blank scroll on the right and they're going to copy down, let's just say, the prophet Isaiah.

They'd begin to copy down and and when they were done, they would actually count the exact number of letters in the original scroll. And then they would count the exact number of letters in the copied scroll. And if there were not the exact number of letters between the two, they would burn the copy and start over. You couldn't just backspace a scroll. Couldn't do that. And it was holy scripture, so they treat it with a lot of care. Not only would they count letters, but they also would count words.

And if the words were not the number of words were not the same, they trash the copy and they start over. Not only that, they would actually count to the middle letter and the middle word of the scroll. And if the middle letter and the middle word of the scroll of the copy did not match the original, they would scrap it and start over. Can you imagine writing all of Isaiah and you start counting? You're like 442 over here, 443. Can you imagine that? Oh my lord.

This doesn't even mention how they would write the name of Yahweh or Jehovah, the name of God in the Old Testament. Some of our some of the research we have tells us that right before they would pin down the name of God, they would they would remove their clothes, they would take a ritual bath, they would put on new clothes, they would get a new pen and they would write the name of God. Then they would repeat that process and come back to normal writing. So they ensured that the name of God was made holy.

Y'all, there are certain parts of the Bible like your Lord God did this and your Lord God did this and your Lord God did that and your Lord God also did this. How many baths can you take in a day? They were the best smelling scribes in all of history because they wanted to take extreme caution and care. The goal of all of this, of all of the the extra, you might say, is to ensure or to mitigate the copying errors that could be made possible when you're copying by hand.

They wanted to be very particular. All this is to say, the Bible was not copied casually. It wasn't copied just like, "Oh yeah, this is we'll just copy this down real quick. It's the night before an exam of high school and I'm going to chat GBT." You know, none of that. It was copied with extreme extraordinary care. So, if we're talking about copies, we have to answer this question because it's the one that's brought up a lot. Is the copying down of the scriptures, whether old or new testament, is it like playing the telephone game?

Does anybody know what the telephone game is? Who's played the telephone game? lift your hand if you've played the telephone game. So essentially, you've got a line of people and this the first person has a word or a phrase and they whisper it in the next person's ear and then that person whispers whispers and by the time you get down here the word may have been like blue cheese and they're like turkey dinosaurs just something happened and the transmission of the telephone game where the word or phrase got completely changed.

And so the the question that people present is, well, if we had the original manuscript of Isaiah here and you had the telephone game all the way up to a thousand AD or whatever, certainly there's going to be as many errors as there would be in the telephone game, right? Does that make sense? Does that we want to make sure we understand the the critique fairly? So they'd say, "Yeah, that that that's what's going on." But that is not how biblical transmission worked at all. It's not like the telephone game at all.

Here's here's the issue. The telephone game has several built-in problems. Each person hears only one previous version, meaning they hear the person to their left. They can't go back and check the person before them. They can't ask them to say it again. They hear one previous version. And the previous version disappears. They have no access to it at all. They can't check earlier versions of it. And accuracy isn't the goal of the game. The game depends on mistakes. It's actually built to maximize mistakes. Biblical copying, biblical transmission worked almost exactly the opposite.

Every scribe copied from a written manuscript, not someone's memory. So, here's here's a graph up of the screen for you. Telephone game is up top. A to B to C to D to E. Notice what happens if B gets A wrong. And you can't go back and check A. You can't What happens to C? C is also now wrong. And what what happens if D gets C wrong after C got B wrong? Well, then issues compound, right? Well, biblical copying didn't work like that at all.

It actually looks more like a branching tree. Every scribe was copying from a manuscript, not someone's memory. They could look at the text in front of them. Multiple manuscripts existed at the same time and older copies continued to exist. Meaning, once the original got copied to A, B, and C, D, E, F, and I could copy from AB, and C, but they also early on could still reference the original. So they could compare the accuracy of A, B, and C to the Does that make sense?

I know I'm used like it gets you get tangled in the weeds here a little bit, but they could go back and reference to make sure things were accurate. And so when mistakes occurred, later scribes could compare many copies and identify the error very quickly because rather than one long chain, you had branching trees that made sure things remained accurate. If one copy contains a mistake, dozens of manuscripts would expose it in the tree version. Say A had a mistake, but all of them could go back and check BC in the original.

Well, then they're going to say, "Well, A clearly made a mistake." Does that make sense? We'd cover it again if it didn't. Give me something. Yes. Yes. Oh, thank you. Thank Well, appreciate that. Okay. So the more manuscripts we possess, the more the larger this tree, the more manuscripts we possess, the easier it becomes to identify copying errors and to recover the original wording. In other words, the Bible's preservation, the copying is not a fragile line where if one piece of the chain gets corrupted, the rest of it is corrupted.

It is a overlapping witness to the texts of God's word. In fact, we can still compare many of these ancient textual traditions today. We can go back and still check them today. We have, we're going to talk about in a second, thousands upon thousands of these manuscripts. Uh slide number eight, we're going to talk about Old Testament preservation. So, the Bible wasn't copied like the telephone game. The next question has to become, can we still actually see some of the copies? The answer is yes. How do we do that?

Well, when it comes to the Old Testament, we have three major manuscript traditions. The first one is the Maseretic text. Sometimes it's abbreviated as the MT. If you have a new King James Bible, in the footnotes, sometimes you'll see the letters MT. That means Maseretic text. This is the traditional Hebrew version preserved by Jewish scholars of the Old Testament. Almost all, I think almost all of your English Bibles today. The Old Testament is translated from the Maseretic text for the most part. That's where your Old Testament comes from today.

Straight from the Hebrew to the English. We also have the Samaritan Penetuk. The Samaritan Penetuk is a Samaritan version of the first five books of the Torah. So that's Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And it's preserved by the Samaritan people. And what's really cool about it is it actually agrees with the Maseretic text in almost all accounts. But there's really one major difference. There's some other differences, but there's one major difference. And it is about which mountain the people of God are meant to worship on.

And this is going to sound really familiar with you whenever you to you when you go to John 4. Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well and they begin to talk about living water and all this stuff. And the Samaritan woman says something to Jesus. She says, "Listen, you Jews say that you have to worship on this mountain, but we Samaritans, we worship on this mountain." What she is talking about is the difference between the Hebrew version and the Samaritan Penetuk. There's a discrepancy of which mountain the people of God are supposed to worship on.

And Jesus's answer is awesome. He says, "You know what? That's fine. uh Jews know best. He actually said that. He said, "Jews have it right." But then he said this. He said, "There's coming a day when you're not going to worry about whether you're worshiping on this mountain or that mountain. But one day, because God is looking for worshippers like this, you're going to worship God in spirit and truth." But even in our New Testament, I find it interesting that we have evidence of this penetuk, a Samaritan penetuk in the discussion of Jesus and the woman at the well.

Finally, we have the septuent. This is often symbolized with the Roman numerals lx. And this is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This was done before the time of Jesus. And by the time we get to the New Testament, almost all quotations from the Old Testament come from the Septuagent, the Greek version of the Old Testament. Almost all quotes in the New Testament when they're quoting the Psalms or the prophets or the Old Testament anyway, most of them come from the Septuagent. Some are from the Mesaric text and some other versions, but mostly it's the Greek Old Testament.

So we have these three textual traditions that we can go back and look and compare and make sure accuracy is preserved. But one of the greatest discoveries confirming this preservation actually happened completely by accident in 1947. The legend goes like this. In 1947, you had young shepherd boy in the area of Kuman and he's throwing rocks because what else do you do when you're watching a bunch of goats in the middle of the desert? So he's throwing rocks. He's watching his goats and he's throwing a rock into a cave and he hears what sounds like a clay jar breaking.

It's like and so he goes into the cave and he takes a look and he finds dozens upon dozens of ancient scrolls, ancient manuscripts. Some of them are tattered, but because of the humid climate and they were in the clay jar and preserved by sand, they were actually in pretty good shape for being a few thousand years old. So in 1947 they uncover what are called the Dead Sea Scrolls. Anybody heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Yeah. This is roughly How many years is that? Is that 70 years ago at this point?

70s something years. My math is bad. 80. Long time ago. All right. Long time ago. 1947. They find these Dead Sea Scrolls. And before they find these Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Old Testament manuscript was from roughly 1,000 AD or about a thousand years after the time of Jesus. That was our oldest Old Testament manuscript. Now, I don't know if you know this, but the Old Testament was not written in a th000 AD. The Old Testament was written thousands of years before thousands of thousand AD.

And so, our oldest manuscript postdated whenever it was written by quite a long time. But when these Dead Sea Scrolls are found, it actually pushes back our oldest manuscript, 1,000 years to about a 100 BC, which is pretty neat. And you know what's really cool is they compared the manuscripts between the 1,00 AD and the thousand-year-old older version of 100 BC and almost 100% accuracy was maintained. I'm impressed. I am so impressed by that. That tells me, yes, that humans took great care, but it also told me that God had a hand in preserving a written, handwritten text, not not photocopied, not printing press.

Over a thousand years, we have evidence that the words of scripture were preserved almost precisely. That is amazing to me. That inspires such confidence that whenever I read the scriptures before me, I am reading the words of God. The coolest thing we found in the Dead Sea Scrolls is an entire Isaiah scroll. We found an entire Isaiah scroll. And they compared that 100 BC Isaiah scroll to the 1000 AD Isaiah scroll. Do you know what happened? It said essentially the same exact thing. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, scholars were like, "Man, if we found older manuscripts, the Bible's like a telephone game.

It wouldn't match. You can't trust the Bible. All this stuff." Then they find this Dead Sea Scroll stuff thousand years earlier than what we have. And all of a sudden, all those scholars got real quiet. I wonder why. Because everything that they stood for, everything that they believed was smooshed by the evidence, historical evidence. I'm not talking about just having faith. You need faith. But God preserved it in concrete historical evidence that his word was kept faithfully true over centuries and even over millennia the scriptures were maintained.

Amen. So rather than weakening our confidence in scripture when we look at these ancient manuscripts and we do all the historical inquiry doesn't weaken our confidence in scripture at all. It actually strengthens it. Greatly strengthens it. Now what about the New Testament? This is where you get to throw numbers around. It gets really cool. So, when we look at the New Testament, I've got a little bar graph uh after this one. Stay there, Jason. I'm sorry. I've got a bar graph after this one. So, the New Testament possesses stronger manuscript evidence than any other work from the ancient world combined.

Every other ancient work in the ancient world combined, the New Testament has more manuscript evidence. Today, we possess over 5700 Greek manuscripts. Now, manuscripts aren't always full New Testaments or full books of the Bible. Sometimes they're actually little scraps where it's got like four verses on it and on the back it's got a grocery list. You had to do what you had to do in the ancient world. You had your Bible and a grocery list, same spot. All right. So, we have 5,700 Greek manuscripts, meaning the language the New Testament was written in.

But we also have approximately 10,000 Latin manuscripts that are translations from the Greek. And then we also have thousands of additional manuscripts in Syriak, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and other ancient languages. So if you add it all together, we have roughly 20 to 25,000 ancient New Testament manuscripts. And these manuscripts come from across the ancient world uh uh around different places, different textual transmission chains, and they allow scholars to compare and contrast independent witnesses all over the place. Now, let's compare that. Let's compare that to other ancient works.

So skeptics will sometimes look at the New Testament and say, "Yeah, we can't know what the original said. we don't have enough textual history, whatever. Yet, the historians, ancient historians, will look at other works and say, "Oh, we have ample evidence." Well, let's take a look at that. Are you ready? So, here's the here's the the bar graph I want to show you. The standard used for the New Testament is often much higher. I'm going to prove it. So, you probably can't read that, so I'm going to read it to you.

Okay? Anybody know who Heroditus is? You ever heard of Herodotus? Maybe you took a philosophy class or a classics class. Herodotus is an is an ancient author. And so we have roughly eight manuscripts of Herod Herodotus's writing and they date roughly 1130 years after he wrote. So over a thousand years after he wrote we have eight manuscripts long away long way away from the original. Anybody heard heard of Thusidities? Thusidities? Anybody? Yeah. Another ancient work. We have eight manuscripts of Thusidities roughly 1300 years after the original.

Anybody heard of Plato? There we go. We got some Plato. Yeah, Lincoln loves Plato. You've heard of Plato. We have seven manuscripts of Plato. We hear about him all the time. And we have seven manuscripts of Plato 1,200-,300 years after the original writing. Anybody heard of Caesar, the Gaelic Wars? Okay, we have 10 copies. We've really up the game right there from 8 to 10. We have 10 manuscripts roughly 900 years after the original. Anybody heard of Tacitus, Roman historian? Yeah. So, Tacitus, we have roughly 20 copies of Tacitus, 800 to a,000 years after he wrote.

Anybody heard of uh Livey or Livby, however you want to pronounce it. Yeah. Of the 142 books, we have copies of 28 of the 142 books. Only 20 manuscripts total, and they're partial at best, 800 to a,000 years after the original. All right. Now, I'm not good at math, but if I add that up, it's less than a hundred total manuscripts of these ancient works. All approaching a thousand years after the original writing of the New Testament, just Greek manuscripts, we have 5700. As a Bible nerd, that's really cool.

I'm gonna let that sink in for a second. You're telling me we've got like 75 manuscripts of all ancient works, these ancient works, but we have 5,700 of the New Testament. Y'all, we have more historical evidence for Jesus than we do Caesar. We have more manuscript evidence for the apostolic church than we do the Roman Empire. I'm just saying what's obvious. And historians will look at us and say, "You're crazy for believing that." Like, we've got more evidence than you ever had. You know what's cool about that is no historian will ever look at Julius Caesar and say I don't know if he wrote the Gaelic course.

No one doubts Tacitus wrote his histories. No university teaches that Plato's writings are hopelessly corrupted so we shouldn't read them. No university is going to argue that. Yet all of those works survive in only a handful of manuscripts centuries later. Some uh someone pointed out if you took all the ancient manuscripts in the ancient world, you'd have roughly a 4ft tall stack. If you stacked up all of the New Testament ancient manuscripts, you'd have a stack over a mile high. Can you imagine that? The New Testament stands in an entirely different category.

It is the best attested document from the ancient world, hands down. And why this matters is not because we don't have the original. No original of an ancient work exists today. We don't have any original of an ancient manuscript of of any ancient work whether Plato, Caesar, anyone. But the question is, can we accurately reconstruct the original text? And historians answer yes for every other ancient work using only a handful of manuscripts. But for the New Testament, we possess thousands. If the New Testament were any other ancient book, historians would call it text call its textual evidence overwhelming.

But because the New Testament makes claims about God and salvation and sin and Christ, it's subjected to a standard that no other ancient work is expected to meet. But if we would apply the standard judgments of history onto the New Testament, the New Testament wouldn't just pass the test, it would set the standard. And for that, I say amen. I'm going to give you an example. Uh this is next slide, slide 12. Anybody know the Gettysburg address? Four score. Yeah, great stuff. Right. So, imagine you're trying to reconstruct what Abraham Lincoln actually said that day and you had three handwritten copies.

I feel like you could you could probably reconstruct something. You got three handwritten copies. But if one had an error, you're like, "Okay, we only have three. So, like, how do we judge which of the maybe the error is the right one and the other two copied each other. maybe they've got an issue, right? And so that can be tough. Now, imagine you had 5700 copies of the Gettysburg Address from all different people all over the world. You'd have a much easier time comparing and contrasting and find out which reading is most attested and therefore finding the original wording.

And that's essentially what the what textual criticism does with the New Testament. Now, this comparison, just because we can prove we have the original wording of say a New Testament book, it it doesn't prove that Christianity is true. But it does prove something just as important to get there. Because when we discuss Christianity, we are discussing what the biblical authors actually wrote because that's what God said. We're not just discussing legends that became corrupted over time. And so, if we cannot trust scripture, then we cannot trust our own faith.

But if we can trust scripture, which I believe we're well on our way to saying it's obvious that you can, then you can trust. You can trust your faith. Now, what about variance? Are there variants? Meaning, are there differences in the manuscript tradition? There are. There are variants. Anytime that a text or a manuscript differs, they're going to call that a variant. Okay? But I want you to notice that most variants most variants, and I've got a slide for this, u for the kinds of variants there are, most variants are spelling differences.

So to say uh and the phrase John loves Mary, one manuscript will spell it jon in English and the other manuscript will spell it jo and they'll call that a variant because it is a variant. But does it change the meaning of the text? No. John still loves Mary. Other times it's word order. And that's because if you take the Greek language, if you take a Greek sentence and you shake it up and you throw it up in the air and it falls down in what whatever order it does, you could do that 10 times.

Whatever order it falls in, it will always say the same thing. It's just the way Greek works. The word order doesn't matter as much as it does in English. So, uh, Daniel Wallace, a textual scholar, found over 5,000 ways in Greek to say John loves Mary. 5,000 different ways. And each of those would be called a variant. So, you'd have like 4,999 variants. But, does the meaning change at all? The meaning changes? Not at all. Sometimes we have minor copying mistakes in our English context. That's like somebody forgot a comma or an M dash is now an N dash.

It doesn't affect the meaning at all. In fact, the overwhelming majority of all textual variants have no bearing on meaning. And only very small number of variants are meaningful enough for scholars to even discuss or even talk about. But even when they do discuss those, no doctrine is affected whatsoever. I've got a man by the name of Bartman that I have a quote that I want to read to you. Bartman is is no friend of Christianity. He was a Christian. He ended up getting hurt. He's a scholar.

He's he's a textual critic. In fact, he is probably the leading textual critic in the world today. This is what he spends his days doing, studying the Greek manuscripts, um, comparing and contrasting, trying to find out what the original word says, all this stuff. And he wants you to not believe or trust the Bible. If you just watch any of his interviews, he is anti-Bible, anti- good. He wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus. First of all, wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus. And in the Q&A section of that book, this is a this is a quote from his book.

He says the position I argue for in misquing Jesus does not actually stand at odds with professor Mezer that was his teacher also a textual critic says the the position I hold doesn't stand against professor Mezer's position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variance and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. So the guy that wants the New Testament to be wrong, false, inaccurate, all those things at the end of the day when he looks at all the evidence he says I can't say it.

Later on, he would further state most textual variants, Professor Mezer and I agree on this, have no bearing at all on what a passage means, which means the voice and word of God has been preserved. Even the guy, I think that is amazing. Even the guy that doesn't want scripture to be true has to concede and say, you know what, even the stuff I want to be, scripture is accurate. I have to concede to that. And he has to say that because we possess so many manus we have what one scholar called an abundance of riches.

We have an abundance of riches in our manuscript tradition that scholars can compare and identify when small carving mistakes are made and they can recover the original and the abundance of those manuscripts strengthens over and again our confidence in scripture not it does not weaken it. Now, I do have to add one caveat before we do a a concluding or wrap-up piece, and that is there's a difference between inspiration and preservation. This is a helpful distinction that can be made. Inspiration refers to the process by which God inspired the original autographs, meaning the original scroll of Isaiah, the original letter to the Galatian people, the original gospel of Matthew.

God inspired that. He breathed out, as it were, the meaning and words that fall on the pages of scripture as those authors originally pinned them. Preservation refers to the process by which God faithfully preserved faithfully preserved his word through accurate copying and transmission. Does that distinction make sense? And this distinction becomes important because when we look at the manuscript tradition, there are variants, there are changes, and that may call us to question or doubt. But God did not inspire every copy, but God did preserve the overall process of transmission.

And we can prove that through historical evidence that we have an accurate word in front of us. You're going to talk about um translations. I think in a few weeks, maybe maybe it's brother Thompson's going to cover that for us. Thank you for that. about different English translations and that's a helpful distinction to be made there that no English translation is inspired like the original text of scripture inspired but English translations can be an accurate preservation of the original word and voice of God does that make sense is that a good good distinction we can make there okay very good so let's let's give some some concluding thoughts here all right so God has preserved his word through faithful scribal practices careful transmission ancient manuscript traditions that we have.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, thousands upon thousands of New Testament manuscripts, other ancient translations, quotations by early Christians that I didn't even cover. I didn't even talk about how we've got second and third century quotations of early Christians quoting the New Testament that match the manuscripts that we have. So, that's another piece piece of evidence. I didn't even touch on that. And then the science of textual criticism itself all reveals that the word of God can be trusted. The evidence consistently points to one conclusion. We can confidently trust the Bibles we hold in our hands today.

But that's not the final word or the final application of this sort of lesson. Yes, God's faithfully preserved his word. That that's proven for me. But so the question is no longer can I trust the Bible? At least not not for me. I I believe you can trust it. The question really and I've I've got a two more slides for you, but the question becomes this. Will I read it? You can trust it. It's it's accurate. We we can look at that and say, "Okay, transmission, all the historical, it's trustworthy." But now that I could now that I know I can trust it, will I read it?

Better yet, when I read it, will I believe it? And then when you believe it, really, you're not finished yet. You've got to ask and fulfill this. Will I obey it? Will I obey it? You know, some people I I I live in the scholarly world. Scholars love talking about how trustworthy the Bible is, but they live as though God's truth has no bearing on their life. What is the point at looking at 25,000 different manuscripts to find out that the New Testament is accurate if you're not going to do anything with it?

If you're not going to read it, if you're not going to believe it, if you're not going to obey it, what does it all even matter for in the first place? Because the God who inspired his word is the same God who faithfully preserved it so you and I could have it today. You think he wasted all that time so it could sit on the shelf or it would it wouldn't affect our lives. We wouldn't experience the power of the word of God. No, he inspired it and preserved it so we could encounter him through it.

I love this question people ask and and maybe you've asked this. I've asked this. All right, since it wasn't written in English and it's been transmitted, all this stuff got to be translated. What is the best translation that I should read? Have you ever asked that? You can be honest. Yeah, there are some like, "Nope, I know which translation." Has anybody ever tried different translations? Yeah. Who likes King James? Come on now. New King James. Anybody? Pastor loves New King James. You ever read NIV? NLT, ESV.

We got some NLTers. All right. So, ESV, MSG, it's the message. It's a joke. Uh, what about NASB? That's a good Yeah, NASB is great. NE, that's a fun one. The Net Bible. Anybody read the Net Bible? Check it out if you haven't. That's a fun one. So, we've tried different translations, right? Have you ever been reading one translation then reading another and you're like, man, I want to which one's better? Have you ever asked that or am I the don't leave me up here alone?

I' I've read like which is the better translate? Which one should I read? I want to make sure that I'm living faithfully. I want to make sure that I'm honoring God and I'm living accurately with him. Like which one right now? Some people are not going to like me for what I say. But I'm going to quote Bishop David Bernard, the superintendent of our fellowship of the United Pentecostal Church. He was asked this question. Which English translation should I read? Which English translation is the best one for me to read?

And here's his answer. I'm going to put it on the screen. I didn't say that. I'm just agreeing with it. Which translation is the best one for you to read? The one you'll obey. The one you'll actually read. the one that you'll get in every morning and maybe even every night and say, "God, I cannot live without direction and wisdom from you. Thank you for inspiring this word. Thank you for preserving your word. Now, God, teach me your word and inscribe it on my heart and on my spirit.

Help me to lead my family by your word. Help me to lead my kids by your word. Help me to lead thy word. God, please help me understand what you're saying to me in this moment and this hour. Y'all, you can read whatever translation you want, but if you're not doing something with it to obey God, it does not matter. Some people might look at your translation and say, "Oh, that's not the one I would read. That's not the one I That's fine. They're not obeying it.

You are." All right. Read that translation and obey God when he speaks to you. Amen. Amen. I pray today that something that has been said has inspired greater confidence that we can trust the word of God, which means we don't have to worry about it anymore. We can just worry about being in relationship with the word of God. It's trustworthy. It's true, and it will lead us right. We can follow it to the end. Let's pray together here at the end. Jesus, we love you, and we thank you, Lord, for your word.

We thank you, God, for the steadfast truth that you have established, that you've inspired and preserved throughout the ages. God, I pray that you help us not just to see it through historical eyes or academic eyes, to be confident, to have answers for questions that might be asked. Help us to not just stop there, God. Help us to move into relationship. Help us to move into obedience. Help us to move into submission, God, to your word. Thank you that your word is trustworthy. But God, thank you all the more that it's also transformative, that it can transform a life and a mind and a spirit and a family.

It can free and deliver and release captives from prison. We thank you, God, for the power of your word. I pray that it would be applied to us today. In the wonderful name of Jesus, I pray.