The Bible: How did we get it? Part II

Number seven should be where you're at. While you're turning to number seven, which is part two of how we got the Bible, I just want to point out one thing. Last week we went through these slides saying here's where we're going. We would have evidence for Christianity outside the Bible next week. I'm talking with Randy over his schedule. He's going to be doing the inerrancy of Scripture next week, so we're going to pull that forward. We also think it fits well with what we're doing. because he's going to have some out-of-town trips and we wanted him to be able to cover that. So he'll be teaching that next week.

We'll insert that at your numbering system. You can go ahead and keep it in order. You don't have to shuffle any pages or anything, but just we'll change that from the schedule a little bit. Oh, you're not allowed to be. That's not permitted. It should say 07 on the bottom.

Okay, 07 on the bottom. and how we got the Bible, part two. That's where we're at today. We last week talked about inspiration and canonization. Inspiration is, to be specific, and the key point is God's objective inspiration of His Word. It's not talking about our subjective response, but God's objective inspiration of His Word. That is true regardless of in the individual person's personal response to Scripture. So it's objective inspiration it's talking about.

Canonization is not human beings sitting down like some sort of a, hey, we're the big kahunas here and we're going to decide what's canon and what's not. We're going to decide what books are in Scripture and what's not. That's not what we're talking about.

Canonization is only a recognition of what God has inspired. So it builds on the inspiration of scripture. All we're doing is recognizing what God has already inspired. We're not inspiring anything or making something scripture that's not. It is only the church recognizing what God has inspired.

Okay, with that we'll move on to transmission. It has nothing to do with cars, so you can relax. Transmission and translation. So we covered inspiration and canonization and now this third one, transmission, is what we'll shift to here. Okay, anyway, I need to get the pun, lousy pun, anyway. All right, here we go.

The Old Testament was copied almost entirely by Jews, except for later copies of the Greek version of the Old Testament. What happened is that initially the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, except for portions of Ezra and Daniel that are written in Aramaic, a related language. And those were copied by Jews over the centuries. As the church began, and many of the people in the church were Gentiles, a Greek version of the Old Testament that was originally something that the Jews held, who were in the Greek-speaking lands, became something that the Christians started taking over, and so a lot of the Jews started backpedaling away from that. So increasingly over time, the Greek Old Testament was copied by Christians and even, you know, Gentile Christians. And so the Jews kind of distanced themselves from it. I see a puzzled look. Okay. Yeah, Tom? Yes. Okay. Let's see.

There would be a change and a person would have to know Aramaic to do that. There were Hebrew copies, however, even of those Aramaic sections. So the answer is both. But they were identifiably Aramaic, and the Aramaic continued on into the New Testament era as the common language in Israel. So people could read that, and in fact the Hebrew was something that they had to learn especially to be able to read. The Aramaic was actually the more common language into the New Testament era. The New Testament was copied by Christians.

Increasingly, those were Christians of Gentile background. The church started off in Jerusalem. For practically a decade, Jerusalem was the center of where the Christians were located. By the end of the first century, John had only been gone from the earth for a few years. Rome was now the most populous area so far as where the church and the Christians were located. And Jerusalem now, most Christians had left the area.

So a big shift, and increasingly the New Testament was copied by Gentiles, not Jews. So a different pattern there. The Old Testament documents written in Hebrew, and of course except for those portions in Aramaic, has come from us from a copying tradition.

This copying tradition is one in which there would typically be at least two people involved with the copying. They would wash their hands before doing any copying. There was a cleanliness that was involved, and as they would write, they would leave blanks where the name of God was to be written in, because you had to write that with pure ink. They would leave it blank and copy the rest of it and then go back and fill in the name of God where they had the blanks so that they could use the pure ink to fill that in. They had counted the numbers of words and letters in each of the books and said, we have to have the right number and we have to have the middle word in each one and the middle letter be the correct one.

And so they had copying, Not just copying process, but also copying quality control that kept it from getting off the mark. Any scroll discovered to have an error in it had to be destroyed. Can you imagine? You might put away a lot of work. You could not just blot it out and fix it. It had to be destroyed. So they were exceedingly careful with what they copied. done with great care.

That copying tradition was how, until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was how we got our copies of the Old Testament, which up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, about 900 to 1000 AD, was the earliest copies of the Old Testament we had, until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were then a thousand years earlier than that. Okay, then until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls from 1947 into the 50s. The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1947.

There was a Palestinian shepherd who was going on, you know, trying to manage his animals and find them. One of the ways that they would manage the animals is they would throw a rock over where they wanted the animal to move away from and so they would just you know, be tossing rocks and the animal would skitter away from wherever they hit the rock. The shepherd went, tossed the rock and he heard a, he said, that's not normal. Checked it out.

Here was a cave and that's where he discovered the first location of the Dead Sea Scrolls by throwing a rock and hearing an odd sound. Anyway, numerous ones were discovered into the 1950s and other adjacent caves around the Dead Sea. Ah, okay, I hadn't heard that piece, but okay, someone has to check into. This is one little exception, that little piece here, the Nash papyrus is one exception where we have a piece of the Old Testament dating from the New Testament era. And that had been discovered before the Dead Sea Scrolls. So that was one exception.

Now, the Jewish copying tradition, they credit Ezra as the one who said, here's how you go about copying. That's how they say it began. It had certain explicit traditions. They were to wash their hands before and after copying. They were to pray before each day of copying. Lord, help me to copy your word with great care. So this was something they took very seriously. It wasn't a, you know, hey, let's do some copying today and, you know, by the way, bring me a beer or something. It was a, you know, we're going to take great care with this.

We're going to wash our hands before and afterwards. We're going to pray before we copy. We're going to have at least two of us. We're going to keep track of everything. And if we find an error, we're going to destroy the scroll. Major, major project. but they took great care in their copying. The name of God was left blank to be filled in later with a pure ink.

By the way, we talk about the earliest copies until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls being around 900 to 1000 AD. Then the Dead Sea Scrolls moved that back by about a thousand years. Now, what's real interesting is you look at that and you say, okay, now we've got a thousand-year check. How well did they do? One scholar, after looking at everything very carefully, said, to give you an example, throughout the scroll of Isaiah, the largest prophetic scroll, 66 chapters, we'll be starting the study of that next month, he says, I would change the spelling on three words. That's the difference after a thousand years of copying, and multiple copies of the scroll of Isaiah. Three words change the spelling a little. That's it. Yeah? I mean, to sit there and copy it?

You know, I don't have any specific numbers, but let's take, for instance, The book of Isaiah was a favorite. As a matter of fact, remember Philip met with the Ethiopian eunuch, and the Ethiopian eunuch spent a good deal of money for that Isaiah scroll that he bought.

For an individual to buy something like that was quite a purchase. He spent over one year's wages for an average person for that scroll. And it was not just the copying, it's also getting a sheepskin of sufficient quality and the sewing together on all the seams of sufficient quality, and then the copying. So it was a lot of work just to get the scroll. So they took great care.

So this Ethiopian eunuch we read about in Acts says, here I am with this copy of Isaiah. He paid a lot of money. If we were to put a current value on it, something upwards of $30,000 if we were to try to put some equivalent in our culture. He paid some approximate equivalent to that for the scroll of Isaiah.

So, amazing. Each scribe would check the middle word of each section with the original, also counting the number of words in each section. So they go through and they get the number of words and the middle word and it had to be correct. And what happens if it's not? You throw it away. You start over. Well, you can bet that they were exceedingly careful. If they weren't sure they had it, they didn't put it down in ink because if you mess up, you're going to throw a lot away. Yes, yes, you had to absolutely destroy it. Okay, what happened?

If you look over the history of Israel, you know, Israel had, you know, foreign armies coming through constantly. During the time from Alexander the Great until about is approximately 165 BC. So, you know, 332 to 165, that period of time, Israel switched which nation it was under 12 times. So armies shifting back and forth.

Then they battled with one of the Greek kingdoms to actually gain their freedom in that period around 165 BC, and that event is the origin of our understanding of Hanukkah. Hanukkah comes from that battle they had between the Testaments. And so then they had a hundred-year period until 63 BC when the Romans came in and took over. They had a hundred-year period of time where the Jews were in charge of themselves. Other than that, it was constant back and forth. Even with that, the Romans for a short period of time lost control of Jerusalem. to the Parthians in 40 BC. So there's another back and forth.

So what they would do is, in answer to your question, you know, how come these things were hidden in caves? They would say, look, these are exceedingly valuable. We may come and go. We don't want God's word to. And so they would put these in caves that were difficult to get into. They would put them in caves that were remote. They would put them in caves out in the Judean desert, a very dry area. And they would put them in clay pots with lids. And so that's the condition that they found them in.

A number of caves, a number of copies. I mentioned from 1947 into the 50s, numerous discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And they were distributed among numerous places. Several copies of the Book of Isaiah included in that. They didn't just hide one copy, they hid several. Almost every book of the Old Testament was included in the set that they found.

So it was just, we do not want to see God's Word get wiped out. And it's unlike our situation where we can go and print up a whole bunch of them and order them from some Christian publisher by the box load. These were something, we're going to take great care to copy them. Our quality control efforts will be ultimate and therefore we do not want these destroyed.

Yes? No. The Gospel of Thomas was a few centuries later. The Gospel of Thomas is late 2nd century. The Gospel of Thomas is about Jesus and the disciples, and it was found in Egypt rather than in the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are 114 verses, and one of the things we mentioned last week, the last verse of the Gospel of Thomas says that if a woman was to be saved, she must first be a man. So anyway, a very strange thing, and I can't imagine the Apostles teaching that. We don't find that in Scripture. Somebody else cooked it up. Yeah, Tom?

It's interesting that the initial character of the disciples was, yeah, this is not really for women or children to look at, Yeah, there was among, and this is an odd thing, we'll get into this with the Da Vinci Code, there was among the Jews an unscriptural male bias, this is why they brought the woman in adultery to Jesus, and the Old Testament said bring the woman and the man, it only brought the woman. There was also among the Gnostics a very strong male bias, even to the point that you would have verses like that be read and considered So, that's rather odd. Yeah, a very strong male bias and Scripture doesn't convey that. So that's one of the reasons we know it's not Scripture.

Yeah? To marry first. And here Paul writes, you know, neither male nor female. That's not the issue. Position in Christ does not differ by that. And then so I'd have the gospel of Thomas turn around and then say, if a woman is to be saved, she must first become a man. That's entirely contrary to scripture. Inconsistent.

So anyway, yeah, Art? This may be a little not the place, but Peter, has Pentecost certainly spoken in the Hebrew, but why was it recorded The book of Acts altogether was written in Greek entirely. There are places where it reflects other language backgrounds in different places. It'll be brought forward. But Greek was the normal spoken language throughout the area that was concerned there. And then there's another point which I think is at this point in time has good support but is still debated.

A fellow by the name of John Mock just in 2001 proposed that Luke submittals to Theophilus, otherwise we don't know anything else about Theophilus, that he was a Roman legal official reviewing Paul's case, and writing in Greek would have been fairly normal. Writing in the language that they... Peter may have spoken in Aramaic, and if writing in that language would not be something that a Roman official would know how to read, So you have at least a partial answer. The standard language would have been Greek in terms of any commercial or legal language. And then a possible additional point would be if it was indeed Luke's legal submittal on behalf of Paul, that would further underscore the need to write in Greek. It would be almost certain that he would. that would be the normal manner of speaking. Okay, flawed copies were to be destroyed. We brought that point out.

Here's the Dead Sea Scrolls, here's one of the jars. By the way, these jars would be specially made because they ordinarily wouldn't have a lot of jars like these around, but they would be scroll protection jars that they would make especially for protecting the scroll because it would be long and have a cap on the top and you'd want to look at that was the best that they could come up with in those days so far as preserving the scrolls. Here's some of the caves that you see there, and you see they're not something you're going to walk into. You've got to do a little bit of gymnastics and rope climbing to get in and out of there.

Here's the Isaiah scroll, one of them. You can see it's very well preserved. You see the columns where they were very careful with that, and you also see the seams. They took great care in putting this together. Here's some of the Qumran excavations, which was believed to be the community associated with the scrolls. Although some will debate that, but nonetheless, that's the accepted view. Okay.

The Masoretic texts, they have the entire Hebrew Old Testament copied by the Masoretes or Masoretes. After the scribal tradition is in Mark 2, 6 and 7. You can take a look at that if you want. We won't have time to cover that this morning. Dead Sea Scrolls, one or more copies of the entire Hebrew Old Testament, except Esther.

Very interesting. And Isaiah was one where they had several copies, and we have at least one of the scrolls, and you saw a picture of one that was in very good condition. Samaritan Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, basically the first five books that were copied, and we have copies of that. The only difference being it was edited to allow them to have priests who were not descended from Levi, and they were also edited in the Samaritan scrolls to allow them to have their temple in northern Israel instead of Jerusalem.

Other than that, very similar. And there's also the Septuagint. You'll see it called the LXX, which is just Roman numerals for 70. And that's the Old Testament translated into Greek about 200 BC. Most of the New Testament quotes, if you sit there and look at your Bibles and you say, well, wait a minute, that's a little bit different from what I see here. One of the reasons for the difference is because the Septuagint was a translation from Hebrew into Greek and then copied over into the New Testament. And then that's brought over into English. So you have an additional step in the translation. And that's one reason why you'll get differences between what you see, and here's the quote, and here's the Old Testament passage.

These were some of the main forms that you would find things. Papyrus was most common, especially in later years. If you wanted to get something and you didn't want to pay an arm and a leg for the sheepskin, you could copy it onto papyrus. And that's what most of the New Testament and the earlier copies was done on, is papyrus. Vellum would be the animal skins like you saw the Isaiah scroll.

They would also have stone tablets, although over time that tended to fade. Really hard to carry those around. Can you imagine the book of Isaiah on stone tablets? Real tough. So what we found in later years, you would have people would carry around stone tablets or even pottery sherds with little verses on them. So it'd be, here's my memory verse, okay? And they'd carry around things like that, but not whole books because, you know, Genesis or Isaiah or something like that on pottery sherds or clay tablets just gets really nasty to carry.

Okay. Here's what papyrus looks like. There's a reed and they tend most of it to come along the Nile in Egypt and what they discovered is we take that and strip it and put the strips crossways and they'd beat it and It would it would kind of glue them together and going cross fiber like that. It would keep them from curling up too crazy They would not be standard size quite often So if you were to light like if Paul is writing a letter to the church at Ephesus It wouldn't be some nice thing with a little trim sides and all sewn up on one side. It might be a stack of of these papyrus documents of different sizes and shapes. It just depends on how they happen to cut them. So you might have a stack of these things, different sizes and shapes. Here's Paul's letter to the church at Ephesus. There's your stack.

Here's the way a papyrus paper looks if you look at the cross grain a little closer, and that's what they would do their writing on. Here would be a writing kit. A scribe would see these little pens would be carried inside there and then they have a little inkwell at the end. And that inkwell would typically be real heavy and thick so it wouldn't run all over the place. You would get it freshly wetted when you're ready to start writing. And then they would slide a cover on it so that way you could have a scribe carry his writing kit all over the place. Paul would say, you know, bring me my, you know, writing stuff so I can write a letter. And somebody would bring, you know, a kit like this and they'd bring some fresh pieces of papyrus.

Yeah, Art? The ink was typically made of, you know, charcoal that would be, you know, ground down very fine. And they would use sometimes water, sometimes olive oil, sometimes a few other mixtures of substances in order to be able to, you know, dip it in and write with it. So it varied, but typically the base black material was just ground up charcoal most of the time. Yes. Yes.

Typically what they would do is the thought was that I'm sitting there putting the pen into the ink and on the paper and into the ink and on the paper and into the ink and on the paper and what am I doing? A part of what I'm doing is this pen that I've been using to write with has gotten you know, stuff off the scroll. And so I've gone back and forth with it and the ink is then not pure. So what they do is they start with fresh ink and then they'd write in the name of God in each of those locations where they left it blank with fresh ink that had not been dipped back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

Okay. Yeah. Other questions? All right, let's move along. New Testament documents, we pointed out last week, there are at least 5,309 surviving hand-copied Greek documents that contain all or part of the New Testament. The number keeps growing. So this number is from a few years ago. There's almost certainly a higher number now. Because they keep finding them. They continue to find additional copies.

When all languages are included, that means you're getting translations into Aramaic, translations into Latin, translations into Coptic. When all those handwritten copies in various languages are included, 24,000 handwritten copies are the number of New Testament documents that we have hand copied. Here is the Codex Sinaiticus. When we say a codex, a codex is a set of documents bound on one side like we have a book. It would be, like with these, they would call this a codex because it would be bound on one side.

None of the apostles or none of the authors of any scripture ever saw a book like this. They never did. One of the questions that came up recently when I was kind of reviewing the Old Testament with the ladies on Tuesday night, was, you know, how do we get this order that we've got the books in? Well, until they did this, it never really mattered, okay?

Because you'd have a pile of scrolls, and this one says Genesis, and this one's Daniel, and this one's Isaiah, and you've got your scrolls piled up, who cares what the sequence is, see? And so it was only when we started putting things into books that you have any question even about what the order is. So the question of the order, that really came later when they started doing things in this form. Typically they would call them a scroll or a writing. And you'll find even reference to that in the New Testament and in the Old Testament. Yes? His question was, when did they start calling them books rather than scrolls?

We'll have the word book or books in the Bible, but the truth is no biblical author ever saw anything like this, because it wasn't until the end of John's life So it was later on that they started calling them books, and our English word book is relatively recent, way after any of the time of this hand copying. You would, for example, with John Wycliffe writing, he would write and he would put down book, but it would have the sense to them like we do with book, but it was basically centuries later. before the idea of a book, and our word book, ever occurred in English. What's very interesting is that the Romans came in with Latin. They had, from the outset, a very high regard for Greek.

They said, we want to control things militarily and economically, but we think these Greeks are great. So that they wanted to preserve, for example, the philosophical things that were in Athens, which was kind of the head of Greek philosophy, even to the point that Herod the Great, who he was the one who was the ruler in Israel during the time of Christ's birth, He was the one that the wise men, the magi, went to see.

During that time, the emperor, the Roman emperor, said in Greek, it's recorded that he made a play on words, because Herod treated his sons very poorly. He made a play on words, he said, it is better to be a pig than one of Herod's sons. And it's only a play on words in Greek, not in Latin. So he said that in Greek and spoke it. So here it is, we have even before the New Testament era, even before the New Testament time had begun, the Roman Emperor speaking Greek and making a play on words in Greek. So Greek was actually highly regarded. Latin didn't take over until the Roman Empire was falling apart. It's very strange. And Greek didn't really take over until Alexander the Great was out of, you know, gone and out of power. So real interesting. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes.

There are additional documents, but what they're looked upon as commentaries, and just like we would have a commentary, that commentary is looked upon as possibly insightful. It tells us things about their culture, but it doesn't hold the status of inspired scripture.

Josephus wrote, towards the end of the New Testament era, he said, since the last prophets died out, and of course the last one was Malachi, nobody has dared add to our scriptures. And so they had commentary, the Jews continued to write their traditions, and what we now have is the Mishnah and the Talmud, those writings. They would have writings, but they would not consider those inspired. So, they weren't added, and even the Jews who wrote them were not considering them inspired. They just were things worthy of note and record, but not inspired scripture.

Okay, let's look down here. New Testament copying quality was more variable from one to the next because they didn't carry on the tradition. So there is more variation in the New Testament documents than what we found in the Old Testament. It's not insurmountable. but there is more variation.

This science, this is a science called textual criticism, and I want to make one comment. It's not pure science in the sense of like physics and chemistry. We can't repeat these documents in their production. It is a collection of scientific tools, however, in terms of, let's, for example, do a carbon 14 date on some of the document or some of the things found with it. let us do an analysis of the ink. So there are ways to scientifically analyze the writing. And so that's why it's called a science, not that it's a pure science. Yes? Right, right. Yeah, the question that you ask is a bit complicated to answer, okay? But it is, I would put at this point, it is helpful. It is helpful, okay?

Especially if I have something that I can actually put a solid date on because of what the content is. We know, for example, if Herod died in March of 4 BC, there's something we can put a fairly solid date on. We get some record that records that and then do a carbon-14 date on it, we've got a cross-check. And any other documents with it then also have a good cross-check because we know that the environment for preserving carbon-14 then is consistent. That's a quick answer to a complicated question, but anyway.

They'll go through and, you know, it's interpreting languages, looking at the documents, the preservation, the copying. How are the letters written? One of the things that happened after the time of the Bible is they started writing what are called unshuls, single, size, all caps. And typically these are written without a lot of punctuation. So studying it gets to be a fairly technical thing.

This isn't the nature of textual criticism, just so you know. So it's not, when they say textual criticism, it isn't, boy, I sure don't like that document. No, I don't like this one either, okay? It's not about that. This is the criticism in the sense of looking at things and critically analyzing it, but not in the sense of being critical in a negative way.

Here you have, and I think this table I've got reproduced in your handout here. This is a kind of a listing, and note that this is back in 1986, so that some of those numbers, because of subsequent discoveries would be bumped up, but nonetheless, it gives you an idea of the distribution. The papyrus documents, here are some of the numbers that we have of the different centuries. And then you go into the unshulls that I mentioned, where they go into all caps and typically a different kind of document, and they started also binding them. And so you see some of the different distributions of those numbers. I'm trying to figure out where you're at. Oh, all right, now I get what you're talking about.

What they would do is they would have lectionaries, we'd say dictionaries, this would be a lectionary, and the lectionaries would be the sort of thing, because in a church instead of having Bibles in all the pews and everybody brings their own, Frequently, you would have not a lot of scriptures, so they'd have a lectionary copy up in some place like this, and the lectionary would be broken down by, this Sunday you read this, next Sunday you read this, this next Sunday you're going to read this. And so the lectionaries would have the content of scripture, but be broken up so that you would have, you know, Sunday by Sunday readings. Okay? Yes, and then you'd have a lectern. So these lectionaries, are an additional source for what's the content of Scripture.

And you see a number of copies of those. Yeah, Tom? Well, you can imagine if you hadn't heard, you know, like the book of Daniel, and they stop right in the middle of this thing, and all of a sudden, are they going to go in the fiery furnace or not? Yeah, this is the ancient version of a soap opera. Okay, here we go. The other thing is, this is a generalized picture. There would be an initial original, and then they'd have somebody copy from those.

Imagine you're in Ephesus, and you just got Paul's letter. Somebody's visiting from Troas, and they say, man, I want a copy of that. So he's going to go and copy down his copy, and he's going to take it back to Troas. And then Troas, somebody gets it and says, man, you got a copy of his letter to the Ephesians? Oh, let me copy that.

And so you go on and on like that, and you get generations of these manuscripts that way. This is, and you've got a version of this on your handout, this is a generalized, in other words, it's not intended to be specific, but it gives you a conceptual idea of how this copying would be done, explain why we don't have all the copies of everything ever copied. For example, here's these copies, and they have one there, the Decian Valerian persecutions. You notice they kind of took an eraser and erased out various ones.

Why? Because the Romans, they would say, have you got a copy of the scriptures? And if you said yes, and turned them over, they'd destroy them. If they came up and to your front door and they said you got a copy of the scriptures and you said no, then they would destroy the scriptures and you. So either way the scriptures got destroyed. So it was the ones that survived that that were made into additional copies.

The ones in Alexandria, that is over in Egypt, that is the source for what's called the critical text That's what a lot of the modern Bibles will use. The New International Version goes entirely by that critical text. The text tends to come from the area around Alexandria, Egypt. The King James and the New King James uses what's called the majority text or the Byzantine text, which is a different kind of textual tradition. find people saying, you know, this inspired, you know, version is, you know, the right one. You know, they're trying to lock on to it's that family of texts and say, you know, that's it. So anyway, those are kind of different sources. Are there any differences between them? Yes, there are some differences. None of the differences, however, make any difference in terms of what does the Bible teach, okay? Does that include the Catholic version of the Apocrypha? The Apocrypha was not considered scripture. It was considered some historically interesting and possibly helpful documents. Just like we'll go to a Christian bookstore and it's not all Bibles. Is there something interesting, possibly spiritually helpful? Yeah. Is it inspired?

No. And so it really wasn't until the 1500s that the Catholic Church added the Apocrypha to the scriptures. Many of the earlier versions are found with copies of the Apocrypha or portions of it, but it was not accepted as this is fully inspired scripture, just additional helpful works. Okay. Autografa, up at the top, just to clarify, those are the original documents.

That's what that is intended to convey. Now, text variations, changes in writing style. Here's the uncials that I showed you or talked about before. You notice they're all the same size and they're all capitals. What we have in our pew racks here are not uncials, but ones where they are written in a Greek style that shows lowercase, not all caps. A different writing style, of course, here would be, got an example, here's this large P in the, you know, Timotheus and servants of Jesus. This is from the 1611 King James, okay? So these are differences in writing style. There's another local variations in spelling or meaning.

Now, here's a question, did they have dictionaries to look the spelling up in? No. They had no dictionaries and so as a consequence, you would have a lot more tendency towards variation in spelling, but the differences would be things like theater and theater, savior and savior, dinner, supper, lunch. Yeah, Randy? Yet coming up with a consistent spelling was something that it took a long time to get to and it's only been in the last less than two centuries that there's been a sense of here's a dictionary, look it up, here's the standard spelling.

It's kind of amazing even though printing had been around for a few centuries. That's true. Thank you. Tell you what. plum out of time and I still got more ground to cover here. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do, but you've got these definitions here in terms of different terms that you might run across and I'll let you catch up with that.

Some questions about the variations. The New Testament has approximately 20,000 lines of which about 40 are in question because of the variations. Okay, out of 20,000. Only one-eighth of the New Testament variants amount to anything more than a stylistic difference or evident misspelling. Have you ever read through a book and you say, well, they meant to say this, a typo?

That kind of thing. So you have out of 20,000 lines, only 40 lines are in question, and most of those are insignificant. None of any of the variations out of all these massive number of copies make any difference in the big picture in terms of what does the Bible teach doctrinally. No difference.

Here would be an example, Codex Sinaiticus from the 4th century. See how it's bound on one edge? That was a codex, what we call a book, bound on one edge. And they would include in that, and it was only when they started doing that, that the order of books mattered at all. Nobody worried about what the order was because you couldn't keep them in any order.

Here's a comparison, and we showed this last week, with a number of ancient documents. And the great number of documents we have of the New Testament and how close they are to the original writing versus what's typical for ancient documents. Notice that none of the other documents that we have there listed that is used to write the history books are any closer than a thousand years to the original. And with the New Testament, we've got a portion of the Gospel of John that's only a few decades after it was written.

Here is Sir Frederick Canyon's quote. I won't, for the sake of time, deal with that. Translation, we've got, I need to say a little bit about that even though I won't have time to go into it all. Here is the key point in translation. The key point, and this is the fourth link, the key point is this, that it is possible for us to get the understanding of the original author even though It's in a different language.

The Lord has made Scripture and given us the Holy Spirit so that we can understand what Scripture is saying even though we may not speak Greek or Hebrew. That idea. And those who are in the position of translating Scripture, say Wycliffe Bible translators, something of that sort, those who are in the position of translating Scripture even today into new languages face these very things. And some of their stories are amazing, phenomenal. You run into different figures of speech. You run into different understandings.

Here's one thing, you know the genealogies in Scripture, you look at that and a lot of people's eyes glaze over. In one Asian country, they gave them copies of the Gospels with the genealogies taken out. and they read it and said, well, that's interesting. Later on, they showed them a copy with the genealogies and the people said, you mean these are real people?

To them, if there was no genealogy, there weren't real people. Boom. Pardon? Yeah, to them it was just, this is a makeup story unless you have the genealogy. All of a sudden you got the genealogy in there, oh, this is real stuff. That astounded them. Their assumption, lacking the genealogy, was this was just a makeup story. and it had no impact on their lives until they saw the genealogy. Isn't that something?

It is possible to convey the truth of Scripture into other languages, and the Holy Spirit adds to and enhances the understanding of people to gain the message that God has put into Scripture. The fourth link. I'll let you catch up with the rest because I've run plum out of time, but I do appreciate the questions and interaction. I think that's been helpful.

Let's pray. Lord, thank you. We have your marvelous word. It has been inspired for our benefit. It has been brought together and recognized for our benefit. You have sought to its preservation over the centuries in numbers that overwhelm the evidence from any other historic and ancient document. And Lord, you have indeed made it possible for us to know what has been written and to understand it in our language and culture and time, because you love us and care for us. We thank you for that in Jesus' name. Amen.