Speaker 1All right, everybody, welcome back to the Apostolic Classroom. I am your co-host, Stephen Gill, joined by my other co-host, Andrew Herbst. And today, we're excited to bring a new installment to you. We're going to be talking a little bit about New Testament manuscripts, and there's a lot to talk about here. But before we get to all of that, I want to thank our sponsor, Live Hill Nutrition. Many of our listeners to this podcast, pastors, teachers, leaders, are men who are constantly spending themselves, spending a lot of energy in ministry and the things that they do for the church. Live Hill Nutrition understands something important. If you're going to serve well for the long haul, your health isn't optional. Live Hill Nutrition is an apostolic company offering personalized one-on-one nutrition coaching that is sustainable and in alignment with your life. Their approach integrates health with your life rather than competing with your responsibilities. It is spirit-led, time-conscious, and intentionally designed with men and leaders in mind. Live Hill Nutrition offers programs that are simple, sustainable, and designed to fit a man's schedule. When your health planner respects your time, consistency follows, and results come with it. Take the next right step and complete a self-assessment online at livehillnutrition.net, and the link will be posted in the show notes as well. Again, that is livehillnutrition.net. Thank you so much to Live Hill Nutrition for sponsoring this episode. All right. Andrew Herbst, how are we doing?
Speaker 2Man, we're doing good. We're back at, I shouldn't say back, this is my first time recording here with you. My wife and I just moved to our new house last week, so I don't have a study right now. So we're here at your place, which is great. Except you have so many books, like I'm getting distracted by looking at, oh, that one looks good. That one looks good.
Speaker 1Yeah, mine kind of doubles as like just one giant space for all, let's say shared space, we'll say. Like, you know, my wife's, you know, kitchen slash this, slash everything else. Awesome. Well, New Testament Manuscripts. So this is a episode that I think a lot of people, maybe even not our usual listeners, will be interested in. I'm talking a little bit about not just how we got the Bible that we have, but why we can trust that the way that our Bible has been put together is reliable. And I think a lot of people wonder about that. There's a lot of conversations out there today about, you know, how reliable is the New Testament? How, you know, how much can we really verify? And so having conversations like this, it's so funny because if you spend a lot of time in this subject, it seems like the conclusions are so obvious. Like it's, you know, it's very easy to talk about. Why we trust the New Testament is very simple to talk about the veracity of the text, things of that nature. But I'm going to kick it over to you to kind of get the rock rolling downhill on what people need to know about this topic, why we're talking about it. And so I'll kick it over
Speaker 2to you. Yeah. And maybe just to remind us, get us on the same page. You know, our first season, we did a lot with the Godhead. And then this season or semester, we're looking a lot at apologetics, defending what we believe. So we did, what do we do? Science in the Bible. We had God's existence. We did the canon. We did a lot on the canon. And then one of our last episodes where we were together, we talked about the Old Testament manuscripts. And I think how I portrayed the issue there was one of the critiques that people throw against the word of God is that, well, what you believe in your Bible, it's like believing, believing in the game of telephone. Or something like that. I don't know how many times, and you probably heard it too, how many times critics of scripture use the game of telephone as a real life illustration of how we got the Bible. And it is just so far from historical reality, so far from historical reality. So of course, the game of telephone, it's funny, right? Because it starts with one thing. And then by the time you get to the end, it's completely different. But so to connect that to the Bible, they would say, if there was a Moses, whatever he wrote in your Bible, it would be a Genesis. And so the Bible in Genesis is totally different than what the Genesis we have today, what we would read there, so on and so forth. But what we actually find out is that as far back as you can go in the paper trail, there's such mass consistency. And not only does this impact the question of do we have a Bible or not? Another topic, which I think we might do a bonus episode on later is not only do we have a Bible, but what translation of the Bible should we read? And I don't want to get too far afield. But when it comes to Bible translations, sometimes people really point to readability, like this translation is easier. But really, what you should be looking at is what is underneath the English? What, what manuscripts does your translation ground itself in? But if we're just looking at the the manuscripts themselves? Well, first of all, what is a manuscript? It's just an ancient document, it could be really small, it could be an entire book, it could be multiple books, but a manuscript is just we're just talking about ancient documents. And so when it comes to the Bible, there's a few different directions we could go. But if we compare the Bible's manuscripts, the New Testament specifically in this lesson, and then compare it to other books of ancient history, there's really no comparison. I mean, the New Testament manuscripts compared to everything else in history is just astronomically different.
Speaker 1You mean in regards to quantity? Or, or is that what you're talking about? Like, as far as why, why, why would we, why are we so certain that it is not just comparable to other ancient manuscripts, but actually more trustworthy?
Speaker 2Yeah, good. That's a good question. So if we were looking at manuscripts, whether we're looking at ancient documents of historians or philosophers or medical texts, or whatever, pick your ancient document, or we're looking at the Bible, a couple things that scholars look for. is they look at how old the document is, and how many of them are there. Right? So age, excuse me, age and quantity, you try to look, the age is important. In some regards, in many regards, because it shows you, if someone was living, I'll just pick a very easy year to remember just the year one, okay, they're living in the year one, and they wrote something, you try to figure out what where's the oldest manuscript in the timeline, because we don't we don't have what we call the autographs. So if we're looking at somebody writing in the year one, pretty much in all of history, we don't have the autographs, we do not have what they actually held in their hand and wrote. And that's true of all ancient manuscripts. Everything, not just the Bible.
Speaker 1Yeah, Plato, whatever, Thucydides, whatever, like, we don't have a copy that they held in their hand, with a pen and wrote.
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly. So when we're talking about the the copies, because when we say manuscripts, and I'm, I'm trying not to throw too much out, I'm trying to be sequential in this. But when we say manuscripts, really, what we're talking about are the copies, right? Because if we start with the autograph, we don't even have the autograph anymore. So the big question is, how many copies or manuscripts, how many of those copies do we have? And then how old? How close to the original can we be? That's why the age is important. So for if someone's writing in the year one, and if the oldest copy or the oldest manuscript that we have comes from the year 1000, right, there's a thousand year gap. And so what you would try to do is see like, okay, if that's the oldest manuscript that we have, and usually it's it's easier, you know, you write this out on a whiteboard. Kind of display it on a PowerPoint or something. There's a thousand year gap. And so you try to look at what's the oldest document we can get to when that person was actually writing. Okay, so the age, but then you're going to look at, okay, well, we have 10 of these manuscripts, we have 10 of these copies. Once you once you can count them, then you're going to try to compare them and see like, okay, do they match? Is there consistency between them? So scholars are doing this with ancient texts, you mentioned a couple, you ancient Greek writers, they're doing this with the Bible, they're doing this with other texts. So this is a very common, these are common questions that scholars are asking when looking at the Bible.
Speaker 1So if we, if we're treating the New Testament, because the thing is, is when people, in a lot of ways, the Bible gets unfair treatment in this category, because we have, and for those that are listening, that might want to know more about this specifically, we use a book at Indiana Bible College, Josh McDowell's The New Evidence, that demands a verdict. It's a good volume for a very quick reference guide to how we can talk about some of these things intelligently. But when I say the Bible doesn't get fair treatment, if I'm not mistaken, our earliest copy of something like Plato dates to, I believe, more than four centuries after his death. And it plus or minus 100 years, maybe on the other side, I don't remember the exact number, but it's within, it's significantly after the death of Plato. And we don't have that many copies to begin with. Like we don't, we don't have a ton of ancient copies of, of the Republic. By contrast, and no, and nobody really questions it. Like no, but nobody really questions Plato. In fact, Plato's Republic gets almost unfair treatment in the other direction. Like there's a lot of confidence that's attributed to it that, yeah, we can know very well this was, we're talking about a student.
Speaker 2Socrates, let's build on what you're saying there, because I think I know the direction you're going. And it's, it's a great point to raise because when we're talking about ancient books, so outside of the Bible, Julius Caesar is probably one of my favorite. favorite, um, historical figures to read about. He's just a very fascinating individual. Well, we have what we would call the Caesarian corpus of several books that he wrote. And then one that it looks like one of his generals wrote after Caesar had passed, that had been killed. And then that general added that last book to the Caesarian corpus and the older books like, uh, Josh McDowell and his son have updated the, the, that, um, first edition of evidence that demands a verdict. So the new one has the correct information, but the old, the old data of how many manuscripts that, that we have of Caesar's writings was 10. And so we, we had up to a certain point, we had about 10 manuscripts of Julius Caesar's writings. Now we're at about 200. That's the new updated information. Well, even at 10, that was a lot. And that's your point with Plato is that if you're looking at just the, the numbers of these ancient texts, if you have 10 of an ancient author, that's really good. That's really good. And I don't remember off the top of my head, how many we have a Plato, but that, so that's numerically looking at something when we look at how old something is. So Julius Caesar died in 44 BC. So if you're looking at like a timeline, it'd be in the negatives, right? So negative 44 BC. And the earliest copy, that I know of, and maybe there's new information, this stuff is always kind of being looked at. But right now, the earliest manuscript that we have of Caesar comes from 1000 years after he died grief. So 1000 year difference. And so scholars are looking at those 200 manuscripts, and they're from about 1000 years after him. And yeah, there's there's questions, you know, they're asking, is there consistency, and there's different families, they group the manuscripts into. But this raises a really big question. Why do we believe in the Bible? Or what makes here, maybe a better way to say it? What makes the Bible different than any other book in history? Because I've been asked this a lot, I'm sure you have to, why do I believe in the Bible? Why not believe in some other religious book or religious texts, in the plural sense, because the Bible is unlike any other book. And I want you to continue the point. I just, I want to interject that about Caesar, because I knew those facts a little bit. Yeah, clear with Plato, but keep keep going your line of thinking.
Speaker 1Yeah, you know, so when, especially like, I say, generally, just like critical scholars, but it's, you know, how you define that, I suppose is up to you. But when they look at the Bible, they often are skeptical of its veracity on grounds of the its connection to like originals or something like that. Or they might say something like, you know, scribal discrepancies, like, you know, what this word spelled this way, and this one and this way and another. And they hold it to this extreme scrutiny that is often not applied to other ancient manuscripts, to your point, like, whether it be the works of Caesar or Plato, whatever. The irony is that the New Testament manuscripts that we have, if you include fragments, being and by fragments, I mean, this was a whatever was written on papyrus or whatever, that we have pieces of a, of a manuscript that is, you know, been torn or is worn down over time, or we don't have the whole thing. If you include fragments, my understanding, you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I believe if you include fragments, we have manuscript copy that goes all the way back to the first century. At the very latest, it would be early, early, early second century.
Speaker 2Yeah, which, which essentially means we are effectively overlapping with that are very close to the time period. Yeah. Apostles are writing.
Speaker 1Yes, because the New Testament, assuming that the New Testament round numbers, let's assume it was written total between something like, I don't know, like AD 40 and AD 90. Like if that, if that's your timeline, we have manuscript fragments that go back nearly if, and again, if not, I could be, memory could be failing me here, if we haven't either in the first century, but I think we do, or early second century. So we're talking about within decades, not hundreds of years, not centuries, it's certainly not mold. Millennium, you know, it's, we're talking decades of when these were originally written, they were very widely distributed. And that matters a lot too, because when you think about the wide distribution, it seems like that should open up a lot of room for great discrepancy. And by great discrepancy, I don't mean something like the spelling of someone's name. I mean, something like it, there's a completely, a total narrative change, like a completely different story being told. But that's not what happened. And so we have these manuscript copies that go back. Even if you say second century, we have complete manuscripts. And by complete, I mean, either the entire book itself is whole, or a collection of books that was that was kept together as a codex is whole. Those date back to the second and third centuries. And so that is something that often gets, and I won't say it's neglected, because there are a lot of people that know about it. But they just gloss over it, like it doesn't matter. And in reality, it's actually, a very significant point, both with regards to archaeology, but also to our faith.
Speaker 2So yeah, well, let's build on that just to really drive home the comparisons. Because not very many people doubt the historicity of Caesar or Plato, right? But they've got a couple, you know, dozen, couple dozen manuscripts all the way up to 200. And 200 is, as far as numerically, 200 is very high for ancient documents. And the second, so if you take all of ancient literature, the second most documented work is the Iliad. And I forget the the exact number, but it's, if I remember correctly, it's just under 2000 manuscripts. And that is the second out of out of all ancient literature, the Iliad's number two, just under or very close to 2000, which is astounding, right there. There are some historians, some classicists that are working with just one or two manuscripts, they would, they would love to have even 10, you know, even if it was just 10, they would love that. But getting all the way up to 2000 is really astounding. What we haven't said yet, is, is how many New Testament manuscripts we have. So if we're looking at the New Testament being written in Greek, and the, as the first language, New Testament is written in Greek, if we only look at Greek manuscripts, we're very close to 6000 manuscripts, 6000. But that's not all of them. If you add in all of these ancient languages, various translations, you look at different sermons, different things, or well, I guess, no, the early church preachers, early Christian preachers would be a different category. So correct myself there. But if we're only looking at the Greek, we're around 6000. If we expand that, we're over 25,000 manuscripts, 25,000. Yeah. And when
Speaker 1you say expand, you're talking about like Latin, Syriac, all those languages. And then people miss that too, is because they, you know, a lot of people hang their hat on, well, you know, the Bible or the New Testament was, you know, it's originally written in Greek. And as if to suggest that any translation of it into another language is, it doesn't count, but we don't apply that standard to any other ancient manuscripts. If we found an ancient Arabic copy of whatever, fill in the blank, we would be, scholars would be elated and they would be studying it meticulously to figure out what it was. And so, you know, if we're only looking at the Greek, we're only looking at Well, that's true because
Speaker 2Josephus, we've really been able to understand more of some of what Josephus wrote in certain areas, because we did find other translations, or at least the origin of his document came from somewhere else apart from, you know, the West, we might say. And, and I, I really have tried to be as accurate as I can be when making these comparisons, because I used to give the data, well, Caesar has 10 manuscripts, but then, you know, I found out, okay, well, there's 200. And then I tried to figure out out of those 200, which ones of those are complete, which ones of those are separate. And I just am kind of giving the benefit of the doubt to give it as 200, because when we say 25,000 New Testament manuscripts, some of those, as you're referencing, some of those might just be a few verses all the way up to multiple books. And so I just, if we expect critics of scripture to, to be equal and fair in their assessment, I think we need to be fair in their assessment. And so I just, if we expect critics of scripture to be as well. And so I've just really tried to dig down and some of this information is very hard to find accurate data, because there's only a few scholars that are really working in this depth in various books, like the Caesarian Corpus, or even some other classical works. But I say that to say just we as Christians need to be careful that we're not trying to skew the data in favor of the Bible against these other books, because the evidence is there. And so when it comes to numerically, the Bible just blows everything else out of the water. And then you were alluding to or not alluding, but you were referencing the the age issue, how old are these copies? How old are these manuscripts? So if yeah, if you pull in ancient Greek Roman writers, and you've got several, normally, it's several centuries, and then Caesars is close to 1000 years. When it when you come to the Bible, and you do look at the Bible, you're not going to be able to see the Bible. You're not going to be able to see the the papyri or you do look at some of those early codex, codices, or the different corpuses that we're traveling around. Those are within decades. And yeah, I know that the older something is, the harder it is at times to have a consensus as far as scholars saying, yeah, we're pretty sure about this date for this particular document. But you can say, we have documents within decades, and that is of it being written. Like the Bible in history. And if you throw, so there was a debate between an atheist and John Warke Montgomery. And I don't think I referenced this last time. If I did, forgive me. But there was a debate, and John Warke Montgomery is a conservative Lutheran minister, just passed away just about a year ago. But he said, if you throw away the New Testament, then you have to throw away all the books that you've read. And he said, if you throw away the New Testament, then you have to throw away all the books that you've read. And he said, if you throw away all the books that you've read. All of the ancient Western heritage, essentially, because the evidence for the paper trail of the New Testament is so vastly larger, so much stronger than the history of the West, as far as those Greek and Roman sources. And the atheist pretty much doubled down and said, okay, I'm willing to do that. Well, the chair of the classics department was in the audience and jumped up and said, my God, you can't do that, because he's out of a job, right? So, just if you're looking at the Bible now, we as Christians would believe in the miraculous inspiration and preservation of the text. But if you're talking to an atheist, I've talked to a few atheist friends over the years, and I can't start with Acts 2, or I can't start with John 3, and baptism and filling the Holy Ghost, forgiveness, all that stuff. I can't start there. I have to show them that the Bible is respectable, as in there is evidence- standard. It's reliable. You can validate it. The New Testament manuscripts, whether, to bring in those two categories again, the age of those manuscripts and the number of those manuscripts show that the Bible is not like the game of telephone. You can just march through history and see links in the chain that it is consistently just validated over and over again.
Speaker 1Well, and it's interesting too, because it would be one thing if this was the trend line with other, I'll say, generic people understand my meaning, like holy books, like the Quran, the Book of Mormon, Carta Vesta, like whatever. You can look at these other religious traditions, and you would, I would assume if you're an atheist, you would expect to see a similar trend line. Well, of course, these are more well-preserved because, well, because these are your religious beliefs, because this is what you believe about God. And so it's like, there's this, it's almost like a cult-like preservation of it. And so what you find is that that's not the case at all. Is that the Quran, you know, again, one author and my understanding, and this is as recent as, well, whenever Eugene Rogan wrote the Arabs, I think that was 2018. I don't believe we have any evidence that there was a handwritten copy of the Quran, even within a century of Muhammad's death.
Speaker 2Well, and that's a great point, because so much of the history of the Quran, I think is misrepresented in history, because he was illiterate. And we know from, you know, I've read a lot of books, and I've read a lot of books, and I've read a lot of books, I think the Hadiths, right, the historical traditions that are connected to the Quran, that he's recorded as saying, yeah, I might misquote the Quran, so you might have to correct me. And it's said in the Hadiths, if I remember correctly, that he would just start saying things, and his friends and people around him would grab whatever materials they could and just start writing stuff down. You have a very early in Islamic history, a competition, a war over who had the right Quran. And they're finding this out, because more manuscripts of the Quran are being found, and they're shown to be very old. And they contradict each other. And so these early wars over the Quran and the winners burned the losers Quran. So, you know, the reason I say all that, and I love the point you raised, because Muslims, at times I've heard mock Christians, because we have all these Bible translations, right? And they say, well, we have just one Quran. Well, not necessarily
Speaker 1Yeah, no. And it's to your point about being more complicated, like, you have to sort out some of these terms for people, too, is like, what do you mean by contradiction? Because like, when we say that, when we say that there is ancient evidence of contradicting statements attributed to Muhammad that were later that later appear in the Quran, we're not talking again about spelling, we're not talking about the omission of two or three words that are included elsewhere. We're talking about reversals of, of logic, we're talking about an actual a methodological, a methodological a different approach to the way that someone thinks, or the way that someone, you know, contrasting statements, you know, that can't, they're mutually exclusive, I'll say it that way, mutually exclusive statements. And again, knowing full well that the that the Quran, that knowing its history, and that we don't have a like a codified Quran, that we could say that is the Quran, anywhere, certainly not within a century of Muhammad's death, that that should raise questions. The Book of the Book of Mormon is very similar in the sense that it's not just sense of like, it's, and you know, this is not, you know, that we understand that, you know, Mormonism is, is it is in some ways a, a, a heresy of a religion, but it's also like its own, it's, it really is its own kind of standalone, you know, but they, they would very much, you would expect to see the same thing is that there's this broad, you know, consensus, this broad manuscript tradition. And, and that's not, that's not really the case either. And the Bible is unique because the New Testament, you've got these 27 books that are not only preserved and we have, you know, documented evidence of their existence within decades of their original writing, but we also have, we have lists of their collection. We talked about this in a previous episode about canon. We have, we have lists of their, of what early Christians understood to be, you know, the veracity of, of like the New Testament is like, this is definitely this, and this is not. And in the, in the, the exceptions, they're always clearly identified as valuable, valuable to be read, but not scripture. And in other words, they had this understanding, even in the first and second and third centuries, that there was a defined border to the scripture and that there were things that existed outside of it that other, that, that were acknowledged to be in fact outside of it. And so that is unique. You know, like the New Testament is not, the New Testament is not like any other ancient manuscript tradition. I'm wondering if, um, I have, I don't even know how long we've been going, but, um, if you can talk a little bit, you mentioned with, with the Quran, things like contradiction. One of the things that comes up a lot with New Testament manuscripts is this question of contradiction of like, are there, are there not New Testament manuscripts that, uh, differ from one another in significant ways?
Speaker 2Yeah. So that consistency and going back to that, that illustrative critique with the game of telephone that what Matthew wrote then is different than the Matthew that we have now, et cetera. We see very high levels of consistency within the New Testament tradition. And what I mean by tradition, I keep saying the paper trail, cause I just think that has a good visual to it, but the, the manuscripts themselves give us those, those links in the chain, another kind of image, picture image, the, uh, the paper trail can also be, seen in what, what I call the early Christian preachers. And these are preachers from some of them knew the apostles all the way till hundreds of years later. And they are, they're preaching, they're writing letters, they're writing theological documents. And if we were to take their quotations, their references, uh, in their letters, in their sermons, all these different facets, we could pretty much construct the entire New Testament. Just from, just from these quotations and a very high percentage of these quotations match a, what we would call like a, a text family or a text stream, a very high percentage of them are consistent. And, and this is where, um, we, we potentially could get more into the, the translation issue. But when it comes to the, what, what we find in the early documents, in those preachers and teachers, there's a consistency in the New Testament manuscripts, in the very words that, uh, we can see there, there were, there were not changes right there, uh, overall. Um, then again, depending on which text family you're going to.
Speaker 1And I know we're not going to do Bible, we're not going to do Bible versions this episode, but I do want to just illustrate a point for, for our listeners who may be like listening and they might think to themselves, no, I've definitely read a book or I've definitely watched a video that has talked about discrepancies in the New Testament.
Speaker 2Are you talking about specific, like, do you have one in mind?
Speaker 1Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I just want to, I want to bring up an example, uh, so people can understand what, when we say there is consistency across the New Testament manuscripts, we are talking about to a, a percentile that is, is really beyond, uh, negotiating over like it, where we're talking about, um, the, the, the majority of the manuscripts that have been used throughout the centuries. Now, what we're not saying, is it true that in, in, throughout history somebody has sat down to write a copy of mark and have incorrectly copied things yes they they sure have um what we find though is that when we look at the larger body of work we take the blinders off and not just narrow our scope to one area one person one region when we broaden it and we compare we can see that across many different geographical locations in disparate periods of time there has been a version that has been preserved that is that matches itself that is yes a witness so somebody might say what about the exceptions because it shouldn't those get their day in the sun what people miss about the the the the discrepancy conversation or the the exceptions is that they've probably been misled to believe that this was larger scale than it actually was and so what i find is that when people want to talk about like what about you know there there's there's versions of the new testament out there that say and when i say version like what do you what do you mean versions like what what are you talking about and they usually are going inevitably they're going to reference one of five manuscripts usually but generally two yeah and so an illustration that i want to offer our listeners again we're not doing bible versions this episode but it matters because the way that it appears in certain bible versions if you were to go to the book of mark in many modern bible versions they are going to truncate the ending of mark it will end earlier than it would have ended in the king james version and they're going to have a note that says something like best manuscripts omit and so that's leading readers to the conclusion that in antiquity when we look at all these ancient manuscripts that the the best ones that the strongest tradition represents this idea that the long ending of mark does not belong there and i say long ending this is their words you know that the we would just say the ending of mark yeah but to give you this is from uh this is actually uh this book right here uh for our listeners if you want to check it out uh scribes and scripture um i do not agree with everything that's in this book but there are a lot of there is a lot of valuable information in this book if you want to understand how we got the bible old and new testament manuscripts uh again not a total endorsement of everything in there but there's a lot of good stuff sure um there are 1,600 at the publication of this book 1,653 copies of mark that have been discovered in different geographical locations egypt the dead sea rome europe etc that include the so-called long ending the version of mark that we're all familiar with 1,653 that include it there are two count them two ancient manuscripts from the foot both dating from the fourth century so they're not particularly old from the fourth century that have been discovered that end at verse eight codex sinaticus and codex vaticanus the funny thing about those and i i've talked to some students about this before is that even in the case of sinaticus and vaticanus definitely in the case of vaticanus there is strong evidence when you look at the actual manuscript that the that the scribe did intend to include the ending and the reason we can know this is because the pattern of how he started leafs on the codex so it was always his custom that if a book ended in the middle of the center column that the next book would start in the third column in this particular case mark ends and then third column is completely blank and he starts the next gospel on a new leaf that's not the the pattern that he followed in the rest of the book and so that is there's strong evidence to suggest that he either somebody was not finished with it that it was not done or that they knew that there was a problem with it in some way and so that's one example but my point just being and i
Speaker 2think the other one if sinaticus i think the other one it looks like isn't it ripped off at a certain point i could be it could be i'm not as familiar with not as familiar with that one let me just make sure everybody's trekking with this because i i think you you're you're raising some some good things here because i would say that the first part of this episode is really dealing with the new testament from a historical perspective if i was talking to an atheist or a critic i would present the information that we had laid out on the first part of this episode but there is also a theological issue that that is brought into this because we believe in inerrancy that the scripture has no error we believe in preservation that um i i should have said uh inspiration first if god has given his word then he can keep it he can preserve it so we believe in in all three of them three of those things inspiration inerrancy and preservation and so there is a theological element to this as well as a historical element if you compare the bible on historical grounds which we have done the bible comes out in a very strong position but then the theological question is this as as you were referring to when we when we look at okay the whole body of these manuscripts if we start zooming in and we start looking at some of these is there evidence that some of the bible maybe we have extra that we shouldn't have which is what some modern translations are essentially doing by removing the the one you just referred to is is mark 16 but there's many other ones as well and so i i know that a lot of our our christian listeners are probably going to bring in different things they've read or some youtube videos they've watched or whatever and and bring in well what about this and what about that and we we want to be evidence-based but you and i so people can maybe just understand where we're coming from we have a presupposition that god has inspired his word and he's going to keep his word and when we're talking about mark 16 we keep kind of zooming in on that because this is a very this is a very big issue it's a very common uh familiar example that if we look so your your comment here is that the mass majority of christians are going to be going to be going to be going to be going to have that overwhelming like even if there
Speaker 1were five or ten that were missing it we're not talking about 1653 that all have the same i'll say manuscript ancestor that's not what we're talking we're not talking about like well this was 1652 copies that were copied from the first one that's not what we're saying these are manuscripts from different geographical locations different languages different languages all over the world and they all include this standard ending of mark and the the critical text critical scholars they they have in many ways like a sycophantic obsession with vaticanus and sinaticus they they are and in most cases if you look at bible verses in the new testament that are quote-unquote disputed left out of modern bible versions things like that it's often on the grounds that they don't appear in sinaticus and vaticanus and these are
Speaker 2one of the reasons why there is this lifting up of these primary two and as you said there's a few other ones they include but why those particular manuscripts and documents are lifted up is because they are very old as far as fourth century fairly complete new testament right and so they they would say that these are i think so the oldest if not the oldest codices that we would have of the new testament and that but and that's an important
Speaker 1qualifier is that they are not the oldest manuscripts they're the oldest codexes the
Speaker 2oldest well and even even i'm just did the same thing you did yeah uh even even when it comes to you could say the oldest document but i think a very important question is is it the oldest witness
Speaker 1right it's that that's a better way to word what i was trying to say yes these are not the old because when this is the problem when people open like a modern bible and it says best manuscripts omit nobody stopped to ask the question what do you mean by best exactly usually what they mean is best quality and and it is true vaticanus and sinaticus are
Speaker 2very well preserved which why are they preserved you pretty much then lend your whole basis of bible translations on geography and what i mean by that is these were kept in places where it's hot and dry and and from my understanding uh well i at least some of the some maybe the early history i know where they were found was a little bit later but um in in um different places but well something
Speaker 1else people need to ask so about those best quality i have a bible up there that's in a box and it has sat in that box i i don't know if it's i don't ever take it out it's in mint condition because it never gets used yeah ironically the the bibles that have the most wear and tear on them are the ones that i use the most apply that same logic for just a second to ancient manuscripts is okay sinaticus and vaticanus are in very good shape do you understand why because sinaticus was discovered in a waste bin at the bottom of a convent where it was about to be burned allegedly and vaticanus uh was sitting on the vatican libraries shelves collecting dust and the catholic church knew about it and never used it hence why i said
Speaker 2their early history has connections to egypt yeah right but then over time of course they you know they might have moved around but so why so you might ask two
Speaker 1questions then number one why are they in such good condition yeah nobody seems evident they weren't used number two uh why didn't anybody use them and that's actually an important question because you might say something like well it was a conspiracy because they included their version was the true gospel what i would tell people about that is usually like curb your enthusiasm on what this is not we're not we're not talking about a lost book that tells a different gospel these these manuscripts although they contradict one another in no less than I think it's 2000 places. Just in the gospels, I think. They contradict one another. Yeah, it's not like they match. Okay, so like deal with that first. Is it, which one are you talking about? But even if you settled on one, the basic story doesn't change. The issue is key verses that are either left out or appear to have been altered for theological motivations. And that's not a claim that's based in no evidence. Like we do have, we wouldn't, you could say something like, well, they just changed it because that's what they believe. Well, somebody could accuse us of that too. So it's not, no, we're not just making baseless claims. There is strong evidence to suggest that there are these ancient manuscripts that in, especially in certain geographical locations were influenced by be it Gnostic thinkers, be it the Montanists, whoever it might've been in that region, that there were copies that were being preserved. So somebody might ask us the question. Okay, well, if these are two very well preserved, if each codex, even though they don't agree, if each codex very well preserved, very old, why, why shouldn't we, why shouldn't we attribute at least give them the feather in their cap for their age? Is that they can we at least agree that they're old? And I would say, yes, we can agree that they're old, but you just made the point. They are not the oldest witness. They are the oldest in whichever one you're talking about, the oldest codex that matters because the law, what we call the long ending of Mark, the modern critical scholars now call the long ending. That traditional, ending of Mark is documented as early as A.D. 120. Yeah. So somebody might ask the question, they might say, well, okay, if you're following the critical scholar theory, it's there was this ending of Mark that was added by later scribes at, it would be whoever motivated by the Catholic church, or maybe it was historical tradition or whatever. They added this ending later, but the earliest witnesses say it wasn't there. The problem is, is that we have witnesses older than codex Vaticanus and Sinaticus that include, include these verses that they omit quoting it. Yeah. And again, I say A.D. 120, I think I'm probably referring to Justin Martyr there, but there's others.
Speaker 2Yeah. That I would be interested to see if Justin does. I know Irenaeus does for sure. Yeah. And he's around 180 and he specifically says Mark. And then he quotes it. Yeah. That ending. So I would ask somebody like,
Speaker 1and I didn't even mention the name of the book earlier. I'm sorry. I'm really bad at promoting. So scribes in scripture is the name of the book. I was talking about that's John Mead and Peter Gurry. One of these two guys, I don't remember which one it was. I think it was Mead. He embraces the idea that the ending of Mark was added later. And I would be very curious to ask him, well, what do you do? Like, I know my answer, like, right. Cause we we've talked about it. Oh, it's views of inspiration. We have a presupposition. And I think there's a strong historical witness to that effect, but I would want to sit down with these critical scholars and say, why, what do you do with, uh, Irenaeus? What like, you know, do you think he made it up? Do you think that it, what, from where did that come? You know, if you really think that these two manuscripts should be trusted, these are both manuscripts that were discovered in the 19th century as well, which complicates things further. Because if you believe in inspiration, if you believe, if you have that presupposition that God will preserve his word, that he gave us a word and preserved it faithfully, you have to start with the claim that the church for over a thousand years, did not have true scripture, not until the 19th century when these two, you know, codices were discovered and say,
Speaker 2that seems ridiculous because yeah, what essentially what you're saying just to connect some dots is the, these two manuscripts that we've kind of been blasting a little bit, they are the basis for pretty much every modern translation. So, um, we can do that next episode if you want, but I added ESV, the NIV, the NLT, all these modern translations are based off of these primarily too. There are other ones that are consulted, but those are the primary two. And you have, uh, the mass majority, massive majority out of those 25,000 manuscripts, uh, are in a different family. And when we say 25,000 manuscripts, we're not saying that there are 25 full new Testament Bibles. We're not saying that, but just to remind people, we're talking about fragments sometimes all the way up to multiple books, et cetera. And we're, we're not saying like, okay, if you do look at, cause I guess what I'm doing is I know the critiques, like I've read a lot on this topic. I've listened to a lot of people talk. So I'm in my head, I'm hearing all these, I know what people are going to say back. So I'm trying to kind of be, um, um, what's the word I'm trying. I'm trying to think ahead to try to dispel some of these things that I know are coming, but we know that there, when, when you're looking at manuscripts, there are, there are differences like yours that maybe Jerusalem is spelled with two L's, et cetera. I mean, there, there's, there, there are differences, but we have a witness to what has been given there. These golden threads throughout history that we can see that we have a Bible. We, we were, we're not Bible agnostics, right? Right. Well, we don't know where the Bible is. We have a presupposition that we believe that God gave his word and he's keeping his word. There's no errors in scripture. And so the fact, of when you look at Bible manuscripts, we don't have to be afraid of that because you do see these golden threads of what we keep calling families or text streams. So when we're looking at these two manuscripts, they're over in what we would call the minority text or the critical text, the mass majority manuscripts that the King James is based off of are this massive family on the other side. And, and I'm, I'm simplifying things and, and I know we're going to have to, we're going to have people probably pretty mad at us from this episode, but it will be fun to talk through. So it is important because when you,
Speaker 1when you're talking about the veracity of the new Testament, this does matter is like if you're there's a fork that will, you'll come to in the road as a student, as a minister, as a scholar, whatever you are going to come to a fork in the road eventually, where when you're confronted with the question of new Testament manuscripts and discrepancies between our ancient copies, you have to make a decision about what informs the way you understand history. Either you are going to look, look at the history of the new Testament manuscripts and say, because it is God's word, we can reliably trust that God has preserved his word. Therefore I can reasonably conclude that I should find, like you said, golden thread that, that leads me to the tradition, the long standing tradition of the church. If you're on the other side, if you say, well, I suppose that the discrepancies that are there actually do raise serious questions about what is to be trusted, what, what should I believe? Things of that nature. I think that sometimes people think that if they take that critical approach, that they're either earning some credibility with academia or they are perhaps being more open minded. What I would encourage people though, that might be drawn toward the, the, I'll say the critical argument is to remember that you are not home free on the issue of history, scholarship, textual variant thing. It's not like you're picking the, the academically necessarily, academically preferable choice for reasons that we just mentioned is that you have to make some very interesting decisions about the way that you understand history is that is it reasonable to say that out of 1,653 copies of Mark is it reasonable to say that these two witnesses from the fourth century should be trusted not only above the manuscript copies of Mark but also the patristic citations which you referred to like Irenaeus were talking about quotes, which you referred to like Irenaeus were talking about quotes, where a, an early church writer was quoting a passage and we can look at the way that they worded it. And it's not vague. No, no. And I say that
Speaker 2to strengthen the idea. He is quoting Mark 16.
Speaker 1Yes. And if you, and don't get me wrong, there are cases where they make allusions to verses, but we're not including those. We're talking about direct citations. So like, let's say somebody living in the second century was writing, they were writing, just like we would say for writing a sermon, like we write out the verse, what, how did they word it? And what manuscript does it match? Turns out it matches the, the general tradition of the one that the received text. So if you take the critical route, you have two questions to answer. First, you have to almost believe in a conspiracy theory in some sense is that like, I'll take the two over the 1,653, but you also are left in the unenviable position of trying to figure out where did these early church, church writers, where did they get their version of the gospel they were quoting? Because it couldn't have been from these manuscripts. They weren't written yet. Yeah. So I, I wish people would consider that a little bit is that, and also have some, just take the load off of your shoulders a little bit. If you're, if you're somebody who is trying to learn more about these things and you, and you're wrestling with questions, the veracity of the new Testament has, has withstood the highest levels of scrutiny you can possibly imagine in manuscript research be precisely because of the secular motivation against it to you know, to criticize the religious observance or to poke holes in a religious tradition. And it, and it's still here. Like it's, it's, it's still here.
Speaker 2Let me, let me add something. You said secular motivation. I think this is directly relevant. So for pretty much the entire, if you're looking at the 2000 years of Christian history, pretty much for the entirety of that, the history shows that Matthew was believed to be the first gospel written. Right. It wasn't until a few hundred years ago where scholars were looking and they're saying, well, you know, wait a second. So you have Matthew, then you have Mark and you have Luke, right? They're, they're looking primarily at the, these three and they say there's a lot of similar stories, similar wording, in some cases, very much the same wording. And so there is this assumption that shorter things like verses, or in some cases, books, the shorter is going to be earlier than something that was longer. And this was something you talked about the discovery of those two documents. And I don't want to get too much into the history of the progression of how those documents were used. But there's this assumption, and I think it is very much an assumption to say that if you have one manuscript that has a short verse, and then you have another manuscript that has a longer verse, they would say, well, obviously, the shorter verse is the one that's better. Because over time, people add to things. Yeah. Well, that's an assumption, because we could point to places where things are removed. I can pull up Jerome, where he says that I know, open up another can, right? Jerome said that I know of people right now that are removing 1 John 5, 7. I know people that are doing that. So there's just as there's evidence that there's just because something is short, that doesn't mean it's early.
Speaker 1Yeah, the interesting thing, too, about I've always that idea that texts grow over time. I, I've always wondered about that. And I know that for for people that are having a hard time following, secularism has to explain harmony. That's what we're talking about is that secularism looks at the Gospels, and they have to explain why they match and they can't defer to inspiration like you and I. And that's exactly it. So they have to come up with another explanation, which is that look at the one that is shorter and assume that it represents a complicated version of, you know, and the interesting thing is this, this theory that texts grow over time, is that it doesn't apply to texts in a meta sense, is that like, I don't understand how they sort this out is that they would say, Well, look, you know, you can look at a version here. And it's added to its attitude. And so the texts grow over time. And the I'll say it this way, the legend grows, like the story becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. But when it came to the canonization process, precisely the opposite happened, where we had an abundance too many, we had this, the story was out of control in some places in some areas. And the idea from a meta text perspective, because
Speaker 2the false gospel is the
Speaker 1idea was that they that there should be adherence to a standard is that it was shrunk down, is that like, when we look at, again, this from secular perspective, obviously, you know, you and I would talk about canon completely differently. But if you're talking about friend from a secular perspective, they would have to try and square that circle where it's like, well, if that'd be the case, why would the Gospel of Thomas be? removed? We would say it was never there. But they would say, why would it be removed? Why would the apocalypse of Peter? Why would the is I thought text grow over time. And if it happens in the minor sense, it should happen in the major sense, because the only motivation is to put your spin on it to tell your version. And apparently, your version is acceptable to those around you. So that's what people that's what they can't seem to understand is that you're they're assuming that like, when Matthew would write his version of events, they would say his version, and that he was building on Mark, that his version, when it's distributed, would be well received by his audience, because they had no notion of Mark's inspiration. And so his story is just as permissible, just as acceptable as Mark's. But that's not the story that history tells. The story that history tells is one of rejection, that there might be a version of a story that comes out that the people reject and say, that's not true. The apocalypse of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, etc. Why is that? And so that the adherence to a standard is in and of itself problematic. But that's a little bit of a rabbit trail. But that is just something that people need to be aware of, is that the way that we talk about what are the assumptions?
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, to go, I like how you said, secularism trying to explain harmony. Yeah. Because what they would do is look at those first three Gospels, and they would say, how can they be so similar? And again, like, like you said, it's inspiration. But what what they would say is, well, church history has said that Matthew was written first, and then Mark was written. But they would say, well, no, that doesn't that doesn't make sense, because Mark's Gospel is shorter. So again, I'm trying to kind of distill things a little bit, but these secular scholars would say, well, probably what happened is that you have Mark, and Mark wrote his Gospel first. And then you have Matthew and Luke, taking from Mark, and then adding their own content, like you're saying it expands. And this is also where if you've heard of the Q document, which is a hypothetical, no evidence, absolutely no evidence for I believe it was Jeremiah would know that I think it was Cyrus Gordon, ancient Near East scholar that somebody asked him, well, what do you do with a documentary hypothesis, something that relates to the Pentateuch? And he said, Well, I deal in real documents, not hypothetical documents.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's there's a quote, I'll find that you can keep talking, I gotta find it real quick.
Speaker 2But this is where secular scholars, or at least scholars that don't believe in the Bible very much, whether they claim to be Christian or not, they would say, well, you have Mark, and you have Q, and you have these other things. And Q is just this idea that it's, we literally have no evidence for it at all.
Speaker 1Again, you have to remember, they're trying to explain harmony. So they need to say there's this lost source that they were all dependent on.
Speaker 2Yeah, that that maybe Mark used it with, you know, and Matthews it to all, you know, it's got a bunch of stuff about Jesus in it, but we don't have it anymore. And, I mean, think about this. So I say all that to say this, with the short, supposedly short and longer ending mark. Think about this, if you are a secular scholar, and you can say that Mark was written first, but the original mark did not have Mark 16:9 through 20. What is in Mark 16:9 through 20? The resurrection, right? Think about how impactful that would be to say that the very first gospel did not have the resurrection in it, and that it was added later. Yeah, this is a very serious issue to say that, you know, because people that that believe in modern translations, you know, they, they might look at that and say, well, the gospel ends and the women are afraid, and it looks like he's resurrected. But, you know, it just kind of ends that at verse eight in kind of fear and the unknown. And so that that's a pretty serious attack against the historicity of the resurrection from a historical perspective.
Speaker 1Yeah. And it's funny, too, because and like people, people may not even realize how influenced their their immediate environment is in the church world by these theories. There are prominent Pentecostal thinkers, I will say it that way. Prominent Pentecostal thinkers who promote the idea of Mark in priority of Q theory of redacted criticism that Matthew used Mark and Luke used both Matthew and Mark. One is Pentecostals that adhere to this idea, and they don't really know what they're saying. And that's my charitable read on the situation is I don't think that they fully understand the implications, like what you just said, is that if you assume Mark in priority, and then the next step is not only do I assume Mark in priority, but I see that the ending of Mark is gone in one, two copies, whatever, then my next conclusion is there was no resurrection. And that might seem like a huge jump in some people's minds, but it's not a huge jump from like the secularist perspective. And so it's important to have an answer on these things. When people ask these questions, they need to know what there's generally a motive like you can you can get down, usually you can get down to the to the root of the matter and figure out the motive. The book I was looking for, I can't reach it. But there is a book by Mark Goodacre, the case against Q. Mark Goodacre is not exactly I wouldn't characterize him as like a conservative scholar. He's, he's, he's, you know, a lot of interesting. Oh, you know, I'd be curious to talk to him. He's got a couple of his more recent stuff, because the case against Q was written like 30 years ago, and that are 20 years ago. And so it strikes me as a little bit more like, so open minded, your brains falling out kind of thing. But the his recent book that when I read last year, the fourth synoptic seems like a strong like course correction toward like the other direction. I've listened to him more than I've read him. But I've enjoyed Yeah, he wrote a book called he's the chair area was I don't know if he still is. He was the chair, I think, at Duke Divinity. But he's the he wrote the case against Q, he wrote the fourth synoptic. So those are books people can check out on that stuff. But yeah, it's, you know, manuscript tradition is just a funny thing. Because, you know, this gets in back into the whole, like the New Testament gets the Bible gets more scrutiny than any ancient, you know, document by by far hands down. And people need to know that there is a a strong case to be made in favor of the version of the New Testament that they have in front of them today, and the Old Testament, but that why we trust the Bible, like we, we can point to, of course, inspiration, faith, all these things, and we should, but to your point that you open with when you're talking to like, maybe an atheist, or somebody who's agnostic, or they're, they're just kind of like, they don't know what they they don't know. Sometimes it can be helpful to demonstrate for them that the reliability of the story is unlike any other story in history. And it really isn't even close.
Speaker 2Yeah, no, very true. And you know, know, I've, I've talked to some people that, that I see as very godly people that do not hold the same positions I do. And, uh, you know, I, I still call him a brother, still love him, but I just, there's, uh, points of disagreement here. And, uh, what I, what I tell my students is I have convictions and they have their convictions as far as, you know, we, we love the word and I can say, at least for myself, I'm trying to be as close to scripture as I can be is all of that to say, I'm trying to be as close to scripture as I can be. And, uh, and I think the evidence is pointing a certain direction. And so I I'm trying to, uh, and I, and I say, I think we're, we're both trying to articulate, this is our conviction. This is what we're seeing in, in the evidence. So whether you are talking to an atheist, the historical evidence is there. And whether you're talking to, uh, another Christian who, who believes in the Bible, whether you're talking to a Christian who believes in the Bible, whether you're talking to a Christian who believes in the Bible, I think these are, these are fun conversations to have because I think hopefully at the heart of it is that we're seeking truth. We're, we're trying to figure out if, if there is a, thus sayeth the Lord, can we point to it? And, and I think those are, those are fun conversations to have. You know, I, I had a, I'll maybe wrap it up with this just brief comment is that when it comes to translations, maybe you vastly disagree with a lot of what we've said here, but hopefully what we have demonstrated is that the manuscript tradition, this topic, it just connects to translation. So I mean, although we've talked about what's underneath the translations, we will do a bonus episode, right? So there's a lot more to be said. So all of that, maybe just to end it and my comments here, and then I'll, I'll turn it over to you just very briefly here is that when it comes to translations, maybe you vastly disagree with a lot of what we've said here, but hopefully what we have demonstrated is that when it comes to translation, maybe you vastly disagree with a lot of what we've said here, but hopefully what we have demonstrated is that when it comes to So I just, I would just challenge them, okay, I understand that maybe readability is an issue. But what do you think about these, some of these issues we've brought up, and we've had some fun conversations working through these. So I guess just just to end it all, just to say, you know, talk through it, dig into it, look into this, this challenge of the manuscripts, from the question of what is underneath the English, that that's a good question. What's underneath the English?
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, we'll do, we're going to do more conversations related to this as we go on. So if you were, if you're listening to this, and you're, you're feel like you're on a cliffhanger with some of it, we'll, we'll, we'll cover it more in detail. But I think, I think as far as New Testament manuscripts go, I'm good. That was, it was a lot of fun. Thank you again to Truthbook Co. for sponsoring the program, or excuse me, for producing the program, and Live Hill Nutrition for sponsoring the program. Tell Jordan he's sponsoring our episode. And thank you so much. And we'll see you all back here next time for our next installment. Thank you.
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