SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to Tech Support, the podcast of the Methodic Church of Project, where we encourage and equip people to interact with the biblical text. We're your host, Tim Martin, and Brian the Master.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

We are continuing our series looking at ink and inspiration. If this is your first time listening in, I encourage you to go ahead and jump back at least one episode, uh, but maybe start at the beginning of the series as we look at the inspiration and the transmission of our text today. Uh last week we looked at how human is the Bible on the inspiration. Today it's going to be how human is the Bible on the transmission of it. And Tim, we got a couple of questions we want to get to from the audience. Um, and one of those is kind of do we have the originals? Um, but no it might be worth we can answer that quickly. No, it might be worth explaining what we even mean by the word transmission before we move any further. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Yeah, what I would define that is is really in two chunks, one of which is how did the how did the scriptures get from their original composition? Today we'll focus primarily on the New Testament text, but let's just say how did how did Paul's writings that we have before us get from to us from Paul's original composition, what Paul originally wrote down, or what Luke originally wrote down, or what John originally wrote down, uh, and how how were those copied and maintained all the way up until what we where we are today, or really up until the time of the printing press is really what time we would go up to. Uh and then there are errors that are made in the printing process as well, but that's generally where people look at is is manuscripts, manuscript literally means handwriting, um, or written by hand. And so that that's what how do we get from the original, which we often refer to as the autographs, to what we have in front of us today as uh is our text in the original languages, Greek, or when we're talking about the Old Testament, Hebrew and Aramaic. And then then there's a second step to that is how do we get from the original languages, the versions of the original languages, to English translation for our audience in particular. It would it would be whatever language you're speaking. But that's another step in what I would call transmission, because I want to get all the way from Paul to the Christian reader sitting in the pew in in in the United States. And so that involves getting it in some cases to Spanish. I don't want to be uh There are other languages, but for a lot of our listeners, this podcast is in En this is in English. And so uh that's what I would call the entire transmission process.

SPEAKER_02 2:31

Aaron Powell Let me read to you one of these questions from the audience. It says, How do we determine what is original and what is added when we do not have the autographs to go back to?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Aaron Ross Powell It is a very hard challenge. Uh I would uh equate it to how do we grade an exam without the key, without the answers to the exam. Well, in general, to be short and brief, is that scholars who are in the science of textual criticism, which we'll describe a little bit more in a minute, uh take the available evidence, all the manuscripts that they have, uh not only in Greek uh from the ancient world and from the medieval world, not only in Greek, but also in ancient translation. For example, the translations of the Bible very early into the Latin or Coptic or Syriac or Ethiopic uh or Old Slavonic, you know, there's all kinds of languages that the New Testament was translated into. So they look at the whole of that body of evidence and say, okay, can we survey all those different manuscripts of the same reading and determine which one seems to be the most reliable? And that may have a number of factors in it that we'll discuss. And so that that's what's trying to be done with the best that we can. But we we do not have the autograph to compare it to.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

Two questions on that. One, you talk about the body of evidence. Give us a little bit more on that. Like how many different pieces of manuscripts and stuff are we looking at here?

SPEAKER_00 3:57

We talk about the Old Testament, excuse me, the New Testament in particular. There are well in excess of like fifty, five hundred manuscripts, I think. Now keep in mind that doesn't mean fifty, five hundred complete New Testaments. We have less than a hundred complete New Testaments in Greek. Uh we have thousands and thousands of manuscripts in Latin and in other languages, but we think about Greek, which is what we're trying to get back to, is the original Greek text. Yeah, we have about meant we have a lot of those, some of them are credit card size fragments, some of them are single sheets of the you know, single page of the book of Ephesus, excuse me, book of Ephesians, or their entire collections of several of Paul's letters or two or three of the gospels, or whatever it may wind up being, depending on what has survived and what is copied. So that's what we would mean by the evidence that they would look at as far as Greek manuscripts. We have a gigantic amount. We have a rich amount of evidence for that that far surpasses by many multiples any other ancient writings. So we have a lot of that. Uh, and so that helps aid, but it also increases the task load and the work it is to say, okay, I've got to survey all of those, and if I've got hundreds of copies of John, well, that means I've got to compare hundreds of copies. And they use computers and stuff to do that these days. I hope artificial intelligence will help with that uh as well to figure out what it is. And then there's a human process in there, too, to figure out, okay, what's the what's the most reliable reading here? But when I say evidence, that's what I mean as far as Greek manuscripts. And then also, as I mentioned, they use any available manuscripts in other languages as well.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

Aaron Ross Powell What type of materials are we talking here?

SPEAKER_00 5:28

For the most part, the oldest manuscripts we have are are made on papyri, uh papyrus, uh singular is papyrus, and so they are made from uh plant material, a writing document made from plant material. In a way, our paper is often made from plant material too, from tree pulp. Uh but they used reeds that were flattened and hammered in some kind of process I don't even know uh that was begun by the ancient Egyptian Egyptians. Another writing material that they would have in that day and time would be parchment for the most part, which would be like an animal skin that has been treated and scraped and cured and tanned or whatever you want to call it they do to it to where it's suitable to write on.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

So walk us through a little bit of what this process was and like how they did the copies and what issues came from that.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Yeah, I mean, it was human beings uh copying things. I don't believe that the copyists were inspired or divinely controlled, that's my personal belief. But you know, and I think they were copied by all different levels of copyists. You know, you may have people that were just at a local congregation that received a letter from Paul or a copy of Luke's gospel and said, Hey, uh, you know, Jim over here, because Jim's an ancient Greek name, Jim over here knows how to write. And so, but we and we want to make a copy of this for ourselves because the person who has this copy is going to take it somewhere else, or or our copy is deteriorating, whatever that may end up being. Jim, can you copy this? Yeah, I'll copy it. And he doesn't do that for a living. Maybe he's a blacksmith and knows how to write. And then at some point in church history, we also have people that really took on the task of copying scriptures with great reverence. Maybe they're uh of a monastic order or something like that, and copying scriptures is what they dedicate their life to. And so then we start getting the world of the professional copyists uh that do that. And of course, as humans, uh they uh introduce variants into the text uh in doing that. But we have, I think. What do you mean by variant? When I think about variant, it's a really nice word that encompasses not only what I would call errors in copying, uh, but also changes that were made uh intentional uh sometimes uh and and for for different reasons uh to the text. And so we're we we get made aware of those by copying by looking across and surveying the different manuscripts of a text.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Aaron Powell Before we look at some of the intentional ones, can you walk us through some unintentional things that maybe would occur?

SPEAKER_00 7:47

Yeah, the things that maybe some examples. Yeah, the things that would occur if you and I were copying a text right now in an air-conditioned room with nice artificial light with ballpoint ink pens uh and looking at a perfectly copied if you sat down and said, Hey, I want you to make me a copy of Deuteronomy by hand, uh that would have been a task you would not probably relish doing, uh and you would make mistakes. You would make copying mistakes, uh, you would make spelling mistakes. Uh what they did, what we find evidence of is spelling mistakes. We we see that sometimes they skip a line, uh, and so they would instead they miss a line and pick up on another line, uh, or they repeat a line. Uh sometimes they may miss a word uh in doing those things, or or just miscopy a word. Uh sometimes in Greek it just takes one letter in the shape of a letter to make a difference. Often I understand sometimes in these scriptoriums, people were reading the scriptures out loud and you were copying them based on like essentially taking dictation. Well, there's some Greek words that sound very close to one another but have different meanings. Uh, and so they may make a mistake in writing down that as well. And so those are errors that you would just make if you and I were copying something today. And so that's what I call just an unintentional error, and those are pretty obvious uh when that they stick out like a sore thumb. You know, somebody skips a whole line uh or repeats a line or or leaves a word off the end of a line or the beginning of a line because they get cross-eyed after looking at it by lamplight for hours and hours, th those stick out like sore thumbs.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

And that's kind of what leads us to the crazy numbers sometimes that we hear of when it's like there's so many textual variants in in Scripture. It's a lot of these because one may be like Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ, or maybe a word's missing, or it just says Jesus right. Like how many of these exist when you think of how many manuscripts are comparing?

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Like, yeah, you you hear different numbers depending on what textual scholar you ask, but I would say that somebody such as like Daniel Wallace, who's an extremely conservative Christian scholar in textual criticism and respected around the world in that nature, uh, would say that there are hundreds of thousands of them, if not over a million. So when people say to me, I hear there's hundreds of errors in the Bible, I'm like, oh no, there's hundreds of thousands of variants in the Bible. I think it's important to think about variance because uh error makes people lack in trust. And so something but if you tell somebody, well, we're talking about a spelling error, they're like, well, okay, I can understand a spelling error. That's not changing the fact that Jesus is the Son of God or something of that nature, that he died on the cross or some major theological point. Um, but when you say variance, it includes not only what I just described, but also what we're about to talk about, where there are intentional changes in the text, and this is a subject of a great deal of debate amongst people. What are some of those? Oh, okay. Well, sorry, I thought you were going to keep going there. Yeah, yeah. Uh you know, we would say sometimes what we see are very innocent, what I would call harmonizations or conflations. A conflation meaning I'm taking two story, two different stories, and I'm trying to put them together so that into one where all the content, like I'm saying, I don't know why Matthew tells it this way and he leaves out details that Luke puts in there, but I'm gonna put the details that Luke had over here in Matthew. And so I'm gonna kind of conflate those uh and that but that's not an ill intention, that's just like a surely Matthew, whoever copied this copy of Matthew left those out. Well, they have to make an assumption that that's the case, because over like if we think about the feeding of the 5,000, it's the I think the only miracle that Jesus is in all four Gospels. Well, there are variants amongst those stories if you read across them in in English, and so somebody might say, well, there's no way that that would be the case, then I just need to somebody just left these details out. Uh or you may try to harmonize the text where it's like, well, this this one doesn't read like this one does, and so uh maybe the details are the same, and I don't need to conflate the text, but I mean they just it doesn't have everything in the same order or something of that nature. And so those two things always get kind of blurred in my mind between harmonization and conflation, but those are two things. Now, I I also think there are uh intentional changes in a text. For example, when a scribe has copied Luke like five times and a copy of Luke comes beside him to copy, and he's like, well, wait a minute, every other time I've copied Luke, it's had this in it, or it's read this way. And so obviously this copy that I've got here is not right, so I'm gonna change it. But it could be that the other five copies he copied were wrong, and the one copy that he's correcting is actually the right one. Uh and so you don't know that. But he's like, you know, I've copied this a bunch of times, I know it's supposed to read like this. I don't know why this version reads like this. Obviously, the guy who copied this made a mistake. Because even the earliest manuscripts we have are copies of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. You know, they're several generations removed. And so those are things that I see. There are also there's also a great debate about whether or not there are some theological issues where scribes made a change because perhaps there was a certain heresy going on at that day in time. Uh, for example, one of the biggest heresies earlier, or the uh a group of heresies earlier about Jesus' divinity. You know, how can somebody be human and be God? How can God be crucified? You know, those things, was he divine? Did he seem divine? Or did he seem human and he was divine? All those different debates. They may try to reinforce, or some people denying that he's the son of God, like John's gospel in 1 John seem to be written for that purpose. They may put a little more emphasis on Jesus being the Son of God, or they may bend to text. Now there's a lot of debate uh about those particular texts. None of them are just groundbreaking changes. They're generally something that fits the Orthodox beliefs that we all believe in, but but there are some changes uh that meant to harmonize or put things together, or there's a there's a perceived historical or geographical error. You know, they're like, well, that no, that didn't work because that that wasn't in Jerusalem. You know, well, maybe, maybe, maybe it wasn't, especially if you're you know 500 years removed copying it. Um, but they may think, well, that doesn't make sense, or they may say Jesus went down to Jericho, and then somebody else may say Jesus went down to so-and-so or went up from Jericho. Which one did he do? Uh, or if he went up to Jericho, well, you don't go up to Jericho, you go down to Jericho from Jerusalem. And so they may this they just may perceive things like that of that nature, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

Yeah, uh follow-up question on that. So the people that do textual criticism, are there some guiding principles that kind of navigate what they give more weight to? And is there anything that they do to like represent these inner English Bibles?

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Yeah, well, we'll answer the first part of that question.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

Uh got some background music.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Yeah, sorry about that. Um Yes, answer the question, um the procedures that they may go through. That's gonna depend on the textual scholar that you ask. But in general, uh they ask these questions of a text. You know, what is the antiquity of this text? How old is it? And do we give a preference to the oldest reading? Because the oldest reading may not always be the most accurate reading. Do we give a preference to the majority reading, meaning the reading that the majority of the examples we have in front of us read by? Um Does the text make does this reading make sense? For example, is this how Paul writes grammatically? How does Paul spell this word? Uh does Paul usually write his sentences like this? Because Greek sentences don't have to be in the same order of like English verb direct object like English sentences. The the verb can be at the beginning of the sentence and the subject can be at the end. But is that Paul's writing style or Luke's writing style? And sometimes that's hard to determine because you may only have one example of a writer's style like Mark. I've only got one book, and it's very short, but I've got a pretty good representative example of Paul's writings, or of John's writings, or really of Luke, when you combine Luke and Acts together. And so do they typically write in that style? Is it an obvious thing, like for example, if I have one verse in this manuscript and another manuscript, that verse is longer. Well, is it more likely that a scribe added to a verse versus a scribe subtracting from a verse? It's probably more likely that it added to something to kind of maybe help explain things. Um I don't know that all ancient scribes thought of the text as immutable as we do, meaning that we wouldn't dare touch the text or add to it or take away from it, but I'm not so sure that ancient scribes felt that way. And there's a lot of discussion about that. But you know, is the longer reading to be preferred or is a shorter reading to be preferred? And so things of that nature are things that these scholars have to weigh uh and think about as they as they look at things. And the oldest is not always the best, and so they've got to figure out why is that the case or why is it not the case. Aaron Powell So how does how does these pop up in our English Bibles then? Aaron Powell But they're typically that was the second part, I'm sorry, I forgot to answer that. But uh what what they pop up as is typically they are dealing with um a footnote or some sort of annotation in your Bible. And I believe any good quality Bible we're studying from will have these annotations of footnotes in it. And typically what you would see would be like language such as uh in Acts 837, for example, uh and 837 is not found in the earliest manuscripts. Sometimes they say the best manuscripts. I think that's a little bit subjective. But it may say it's not found in the earliest manuscripts, and that's absolutely true. Some of them may say other ancient authorities read blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, when there's a variant to a verse. It may say some manuscripts add maybe if a verse is longer in some things. And obviously they can't do that for every variant in the Bible, or your Bible would weigh 10,000 pounds. But they will they will put a footnote for those where it might make a difference in how you understand or read the verse or interpret the passage, or it may alter the meaning of it, or if it's a pretty major thing, like most people will have brackets in their Bible around Mark 16, 9 through 20, or around John 753 through 811, where we have the adultery pericopy, uh, the adultery woman, woman caught in adultery, excuse me. So it it'll be noted either by some kind of markings in the text and then a footnote or just a simple little like a little number, like number two above a word. Sometimes it may just be a single word, sometimes it may be a phrase, sometimes you may have something that says son of man, and in other variants it says son of God, you know, and so people have to weigh that and think about because Jesus did refer to himself as son of man more than he ever referred to himself as a son of God. But maybe it's Paul writing and he says Jesus Son of God or Jesus God's own son. You know, th that those are just examples of of things you could have in a variant. Um, but typically, yeah, those are the major ones that you'll see uh in your Bible. And it should give us pause to think about, okay, does that make a difference? And do I need to research that a little bit more before I make decisions about what that passage means? Or uh that that I think they're a blessing to have.

SPEAKER_02 18:30

So I know you listed some some of those. I lost track of which ones you listed, but yeah. Uh what are like the main three, four, five people probably need to have a general understanding on, and how does that impact maybe how they view that scripture?

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Yeah, no, th there are three really ones that most people have some sort of major uh annotation in their Bible. The one I just mentioned, Mark 16, 9 through 20, uh, which is is not found in the oldest manuscripts. Some people get real upset uh about that because, especially in the restoration movement, because they rely on Mark 16, 16's statement about baptism to hang their hat on baptism being necessary for salvation. Well, we we have plenty of other manuscripts uh in other parts of the Bible to hang our hat on that, including Matthew 28, 19, uh which has no textual variants. I'm glad Mark 16, I hope Mark 16, 9 through 20 is not binding because I don't want to pick up snakes and drink poison. Uh but there's also uh additional variant there that there's a longer version of Mark 16, 8. Uh, and sometimes in people's Bibles it may be put in brackets as the intermediate ending of Mark, and then have a longer ending of Mark. And so that is one that people talk about, probably that's maybe the most famous one. The second volume.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

And I think on that one, it's like may the thought I think is like, hey, maybe they added some more to that end of the story there because it ends on a negative note.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

It ends and it ends very abruptly at verse eight. Which is which is not unheard of. Uh but yes, so you you have a lot more involving Jesus' resurrection and some other things than in Jesus' commissioning of disciples. And so it does end very abruptly uh in in in doing that, and so that's one of the arguments people say, well, there's got to be some, and so then some people have the intermediate ending in there. The other one is I also mentioned what's called the adultery pericope, uh, with the woman caught in adultery, the you know, whoever's without sin casts the first stone, Jesus writing on the ground uh in in John, I think it's 753 through what, 811 or 812, um, which I uh have done some research, a lot of research on, uh not a lifetime of research, but a pretty extensive amount of research on, and I don't believe it's original to John's gospel, but I I do believe it's actual something that happened. Uh for example, some scribes will leave a gap there. They won't put it in there, but they'll leave a gap soon. I don't really know if this I remember copying this in another one, but it doesn't have it in this manuscript, so but I'm gonna leave a gap there in case it really belongs, somebody can add it later. Uh some scribes put it at the end of John. I think there's two manuscripts where the story is in Luke. It's not even in John's gospel. And so uh and the oldest manuscripts don't have it at all. And so, but it sounds in many ways like something that Jesus would encounter. Somebody trying to set him up to say something that's gonna get him in trouble. Now, there's some other theological challenges to that passage, but uh that's for another time. And then in 1 John 5, you have like this Trinitarian statement uh of these three are one, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, um, where a lot of Trinitarian people hang their hat on the Trinity. Uh, and so that passage is usually footnoted in people's Bible uh as well, that most manuscripts or the oldest manuscripts don't have that Trinitarian formula uh in it of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And so uh those are one uh the one that I mentioned also a few minutes ago, Acts eight thirty seven, I think it's correct, where you have the Ethiopian eunuch's confession. Uh that gives a lot of restoration and a lot of heartburn because if you take that out, no, you don't take it out. If it wasn't there, uh it damages some of their evangelistic documents, you know, about hear, believe, repent, confess and be baptized. Well, it's okay because Jesus said, if you won't confess my name before men, I won't confess your name before the Father in an undisputed text. I don't need the Ethiopian eunuch's confession. Jesus told me I'm supposed to do that. And so I'm going to confess his name before man because I want him to confess my name before his father. And so I don't need that verse at all to reinforce what I think are are are necess is necessary for us to be saved. And so but those are ones who sometimes will get people's hair on the back of their neck standing up. But you know that's just a small sampling of the ones that are out there. But you know Mark 16 9 through 20 is a pretty significant amount of text.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

Yeah, and I think those are all interesting because those are I guess you could say the weightiest maybe even and yet on all four of those there are el other places in the New Testament that says similar things that are important to us when it comes to the doctrine of those passages there. Tim I know when people think about the Bible they think maybe we have our English translations and then there's the Greek Bible but and I put that in quotations or the Greek New Testament maybe. Walk us through maybe the proper way of actually understanding the sources that we're getting our translation.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Okay. And Brian was joking around there but there are there is a Greek New Testament and there is also a Greek Old Testament. But we're going to look and talk about the Greek New Testament primarily because it's the background tech.

SPEAKER_02 23:34

At least sometimes I think sometimes people think there's one. There's one.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

No there's not uh and so uh and that can't even be argued by King James only people. They can't even argue that there's only one text. People that don't know what they're talking about do. But there are generally three Greek New Testaments that are used out there in the formulation of English translations. One of which is only used by the King James Bible family or the New King James Version. And that is called the in in Latin it's the Textus Receptus. It means received text. It is based upon a I think 16th century if memory serves edition of the Greek New Testament produced first by a guy named Erasmus and then some later editions of it I think by a guy named Elzevir and maybe Stephanus and I'm trying to remember some other but anyway it represents a particular tradition from what I would call the Reformation period. And it's the background only for the King James Bible and New King James Version. New King James Version will have notes in it that refer to these other two. The second is called often referred to as either the Byzantine text or the majority text. And what it represents is a edition of the Greek New Testament where the where they've looked across the manuscripts and said, okay, we're going to take the reading that exists in the majority of manuscripts. And one might think well why not? But one of the reasons that that can be this has some fallacy to it is the majority of manuscripts we have are very late manuscripts. They come from the medieval period because the church was prevalent. People were copying manuscripts professionally people were dedicating their life to it. The church was preserving the Bible and they're younger than the Bible you know the the this copies that were made in the second century, third century fourth century. And so those are put together and it's called the majority text. In your King James version it would be called I think the uh I can't remember if it's M U or M T what it's called or it's I can't remember what the designation is for, but it's M it's M-dash text now I remember it says M-dash text reads this way. So if there's a variant between the Textus Receptus which is the background for the King James and the majority text it'll say M text reads this. The other one that you might see in there is an NU which is stands for the Nestle Allen and UBS Greek text. UBS stands for United Bible societies. That is what's called a critical eclectic edition of the New Testament. So what it has done and it's in its 29th edition now and it began back in the late 1800s of doing this is what that group of people of scholars do on a constant basis and revise it as new manuscripts are discovered is that they've taken all of the available Greek manuscripts including the texts that are related to the majority text and the Textus Receptus, as well as all the ancient translations of the New Testament in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, all those different languages, and compare to all of those, as well as patristic quotations, so quotations from early Christians like the church fathers or early commentators, and said, okay, what is the most reliable reading of this text? And so that is a piecemeal process to put that together but what they're trying to do is use all of the available evidence to put together a text that they think is as faithful to the original text as possible. That Nestle Allen text it's produced and researched in Germany is the background text for nearly all of the modern English translations of the Bible like an ESV, New Revised Standard Version, New American Standard Version. If you look in the preface to your Bible, it will tell you what the background text now some of them used the 27th edition or the 28th edition. The 29th edition just came out this year. And so but know that it's been through that many editions of people researching it and as we discover new manuscripts. So those are kind of the three primary background texts. Some of the issues with the received text are they had a very limited which is the background of the King James a very limited number of Greek manuscripts available. They did not have 5400, 5500 Greek manuscripts available. And they uh we have to also understand the King James translation was a was made from using previous translations into English as well, such as the Bishop's Bible and others they, when they were putting together that received text, the Textus Receptus, if they didn't have a Greek manuscript example for a portion of the text, they took the Latin Vulgate and reverse translated into Greek and used that. And so they were using an ancient version of the Bible and using it translating it. So there's nothing wrong with it. I think you know I use the New King James Version in my study just like I use the ESV or New Revised Standard. I use 12 different translations of the English Bible when I'm looking through and studying something in addition to trying to look at the original I call you original text, the original language as well. So those are the three primary versions that we have out there. And I will tell you that between the three of them they agree with each other like 80% of the time. It's not like there's some stark raving you know they're just wholesale differences between the two of them. I've seen numbers between 80 and 90 percent that they are in agreement with each other across most of the places. And you you'll see similar footnotes about the majority text or the the Texas Receptus in some study Bibles.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

You mentioned new manuscripts being discovered has that happened a lot? Like when have we discovered most of these manuscripts?

SPEAKER_00 28:56

I'm not an expert in manuscript recovery, but you know archaeology as a whole has really only existed for about 200 years. You know really it really began to fire up in the 1800s when people began to look into those things. I'm not saying that people didn't do that type of work before it but really as a as a business of opening tombs and researching those things. So I really think we have been blessed in the past couple of centuries to where a whole lot of those manuscripts have been discovered. You know they've been found in trash dumps. They've been found either in large quantities or in small quantities. They have been found in people's private collection where great grandpa bought what is an ancient manuscript from some you know trader in the in the Middle East one day said oh that's pretty neat I'll buy that and then come to find out later his family finds out it's a scrap of the New Testament and they're able to give it to a museum or sell it or whatever they do. A lot of them are privately maintained collections.

SPEAKER_02 29:48

Where are these mostly being found out in the world then?

SPEAKER_00 29:51

Hot, dry places. You know, you don't find them in Louisiana. Of course we wouldn't find them in Louisiana but I mean you don't you don't you don't find them in you know in the Serengeti. You know we find them up in a and buried in the sands of Egypt. We find them in trash dumps but uh we find them in just desert areas. But sometimes they're found, you know, if they're if they're medieval manuscripts they may be found in ancient churches. They may be found buried in tombs. They may be found you know kept in certain repositories of things in old old churches. You know some people think you know the Vatican's got all of them hidden in the Vatican library or some kind of conspiracy theory. But yeah, th some they're found in different ways and they come across in different ways. Luckily sometimes they find manuscripts like let's just say they find them in a trash dump and it's alongside contracts and other letters and correspondence that are contemporary and they're dated. And if I find some New Testament manuscripts in the same pile of stuff that has letters that are dated to the so-and-so year of Caesar so-and-so, well there's a pretty good chance that I can date that manuscript that way as well. And so or you find some manuscript clutched in the arms of some priest that died in the year 1031, well, we know that that that text had to be written before 1031. So they typically date them by what's called paleography by writing style. So also keep in mind that it's not an exact science. I mean maybe plus or minus a few decades in doing that unless they can really date it by some other you know other external means based on where it was found or something like that. But paleography means like the style of writing at that day which which changes. You think about how we write today versus how the colonial Americans wrote it's a very different style.

SPEAKER_02 31:28

You know for our audience some of this may be very new information for them and they may be wondering like well how do I even go about you know like understanding the text and like what is the proper response to this emotionally and mentally to our English Bibles and this whole process of getting it from the original writings to what we have today.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

Yeah I I think that I I want to tell people first and foremost you can trust your your English Bible in in in your in your theological beliefs for your devotional reading for your inspirational reading for your ethics and your morals and and for your finding salvation in Jesus and for getting to heaven all the things can be very trustworthy. What I hope this does is make some people a little bit sober to what they're reading meaning that first of all I don't think any doctrinal decision should ever be made from an English text. If somebody's going to take the responsibility to say I think this is what the Bible says and I'm interpreting it, well first thing foremost you need to go read the Bible. The Bible wasn't written in English. The Bible was written in Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic when we refer to the Old Testament. So people are like well how do I do that? I don't know how to read Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic. Well I understand that most people don't and most people don't want to but what you can do is lean on experts who can by reading commentaries or books or if you're a group of elders who are trying to make a doctrinal decision in in the churches of Christ. We have several universities that are chock full of biblical professors that are experts in those areas and the culture and the history and the writing in in in New Testament theology, Old Testament theology, Greek Hebrew language writing styles, all those they have access to all these different variants and the bill use those resources when you're making doctrinal decisions and just be a little bit cautious about espousing things based on like the word the in your English translation. Because we have to understand that translations are all an interpretation. And so a group of translators hopefully you never use a Bible that's translated by three or four people get one that's translated by a committee of people they've taken that text which whatever base text they use like we just discussed and brought it into English which involves some interpretation and they put it in English and then some English experts have come along behind them and said ooh you translators did a really great job but you're terrible at your grammar because that's not what their expert is so we're going to make it more readable and that may depend on the target audience. You may say well we're going to have an ESV or a new King James version that is going to be read at a high school level that's our target audience. Or we may make a different version like the CS the Christian standard Bible or the NIV or the New Living Translation and we say we want to be read more of a popular audience. Most Americans read seventh eighth grade reading level so we're going to put it down at a middle school I almost said junior high. That would really date me I'm going to put it at a middle school level or I'm going to make the Bible in basic English which is like what we would read when we go into jail ministry for people who unfortunately probably can't read much above a third grade level in many cases. And so you know we can't take something at a high school level and bring it in there and we're going to put people at a disadvantage who can't read. That's not to say everybody in jail can't read at that level I'm just saying in general from your work from from my work in jail ministry. Some of those guys have had a lot of struggle in life nobody's cared to take time to teach them how to read. And so we have to remember that that's a process. So that's why I call an English Bible a derivative but they haven't taken away from love one another, take care of the widow, take care of the orphan, you know, love your enemies, you know, blessed be the peacemakers. They haven't taken any of that stuff away but we just need just like we need to be aware of the historical and cultural and religious context when we read something and realize that that changes all throughout the Bible. Luckily in the New Testament we're kind of nestled in one little region of history and culture and religion but the world of Jesus is nothing like the world of Obadiah or of Isaiah or of David or Saul or Joshua. And so just like we have to be cautious about that context, we really need to be cautious about the language that we are getting it from. And so you can trust your translations for your your daily life, for your morals, for inspiring you, for encouraging you. You can trust that. But just be sober about getting above your raising and just like I am about stuff in the Hebrew Bible in the Old Testament, I rely on experts for that because I'm not an expert in the Hebrew language and grammar or of any of the languages even closely associated with Hebrew in the ancient world. So I use a lot of experts and I use a lot of experts in the New Testament because I I don't think of myself as an expert either but just be sober before you go around espousing doctrine or establishing doctrine for a congregation or making the challenging doctrinal decisions that a lot of elders are challenged to make just know that you might need some help. And if there's a textual variant there, those experts that you consult will know about those, they'll research them and say, well there's no bearing on the text or hey it could mean this it could make it mean that there may be a significant variant there. Let the experts help you just like you would go to a doctor you know none of us performs you know heart surgery on ourselves or any kind of surgery I hope. We go and we consult experts and so we should if we care about our health we should care about our spiritual health and consult experts in that as well.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Yeah I appreciate you sharing those thoughts because we definitely want this whole study to help inform us and really convict our faith that we have in God and in scripture. And when I think about this the God who created languages I think can handle getting his message to us through languages.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

I don't have any problem with God superintending that process a little bit um but there is human there's a human element in it.

SPEAKER_02 36:57

Yes yeah we want yeah we want you to know there's a human element and that's the way that God created this process to be like he's the one that inspired the writers he's the one that um has passed his word into written form for us today that we can come to know Jesus Christ and put our faith in him.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

You got any other closing thoughts there, Tim No, I hope that what I have found through all my study of textual criticism of both the Old Testament and the New Testament is it's increased my confidence in the scripture because we have greater evidence that can be researched and compiled and assimilated and assessed many, many multiple times over of any other ancient document that we put a lot of faith in, whether it's Homer's Odyssey or it's you know something written by Josephus or Shakespeare for that matter. If we don't have the original of it textual criticism has to come into play and we don't have originals of Josephus I don't have originals of Tacitus's histories. There's all kinds of things that we have to look at and realize we have an abundance of evidence to help us have high confidence. And thousands of hours of work have gone into maybe tens of thousands of hours have gone to work in making sure we have something as reliable as we possibly can as the textual background for our English Bible.

SPEAKER_02 38:11

To our fellow students of scripture thank you for joining us for tech support we hope you will join us next week this is a podcast of the Mount Juliet Church of Christ.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

You can find more personal growth resources like this one at mountjuliot.org slash resources the Mount Juliet Church of Christ exists to glorify God and make disciples by helping people grow in Christ, love one another and serve others