Transcription
Even if it is the writings of Jesus, even if it is the writings of, even if all that is unadulterated, it's not been altered by human beings, it's still put together by people, written down by people.
You ever, uh, you ever do that thing? It's very different than the Old Testament. They, uh, remember they did this like at Barber College once just to like teach us a lesson or I don't know, but they had this long bench and they sat down all the students.
Our instructor whispered a secret to the first person on the far right, and then they got to keep, yeah, you got to just keep whispering the secret down the line. By the end of the line, it's a totally different sentence, right? That made me never want to like check out the Bible anymore.
Yeah, the Bible was, uh, they think it was an oral tradition for hundreds, if not a thousand years before they ever wrote it down. A yeah, yeah, that's a lot of mix-up, could be.
Yeah, for sure, people could have added some in there. You hear this idea all the time that the Bible has been corrupted over time. Joe and his guests are probably, honestly, just repeating some misinformation that they picked up from the internet.
But in this video, what we're going to do is feature a very important portion of a lecture given by Daniel Wallace, who is one of the leading experts in the world on New Testament manuscripts.
He gives an absolutely epic deep dive into the question: how and how badly has the New Testament we have today been corrupted across time?
We're going to break this into two pieces. The first portion, he looks at how many variants of the New Testament manuscripts are there.
Let's get into this. Let me start with question number one then: how many variants do we have?
Well, there's one way to measure this that, uh, Bart has been fond of saying, and this is one of the times that he actually understates the situation.
Uh, words in the New Testament, there are approximately 138,000 words in the Greek New Testament. Or if you were Brother Andrew, he would say there are 138,139 words in the Greek New Testament because that's what shows up in our standard text today.
So, 138,000 words in the New Testament. What Bart likes to say is there are more variants in the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
That's a big understatement. The latest figures are that we have about 500,000 textual variants in the main manuscripts, just the Greek manuscripts we're talking about, not other languages.
The New Testament was translated into several different languages. We have quotations by it by people known as Church Fathers, patristic quotations. Just the manuscripts alone, we have far more variants than we do have words in the original.
If this was the only piece of data we had, those of you who are not Christians would be rejoicing; those of you who are Christians would be sliding your wrists.
We have some more information though to tell you about, and the big thing I think that is crucial here to get is that the reason we have a lot of textual variants is because we have a lot of manuscripts.
If we had one manuscript of the New Testament, it wouldn't disagree with itself; there would be no variance. But does that tell you what the original says? No, it's just the one manuscript that we'd have to deal with.
Okay, so you can already see how information around this topic can easily become misleading, and you can understand how when people hear something like there are thousands of variants with the New Testament, you could walk away thinking that what we have today has in fact been corrupted.
But now let's go ahead and dive into really the meat of this video, which is an answer to the question: what kinds of variants are there, and how do those variants impact the transmission of the Bible across time?
Is the Bible that we have today corrupted, as if in a long game of telephone, like Joe and his guest suggested at the top of the video, or is there something else going on here?
Let's dive in. What kinds of textual variations are there? I'll be much faster about the rest of these, but I wanted to talk to you about the variants and the manuscripts.
It's such important evidence to think about. Well, I could break this down into several different categories, but I can simplify it this way: over 99% make virtually no difference at all.
For example, there are spelling differences in the manuscripts that really affect nothing. The author of the fourth gospel, the Gospel of John, was a very creative speller. He spelled the same exact word three different ways within the space of eight verses.
These don't really affect anything; they can't even be translated. There are so many different kinds of things that don't get translated: differences in word order, spelling differences, other things.
And so I have a question for you Greek geeks: how many ways are there to say "John loves Mary" in ancient Greek?
Well, let me give you some issues. Now, if you don't know Greek, you still need to write the answers down because this will show up on the exam tomorrow.
There's word order differences. Greek can put it in any order it wants: "John loves Mary," "Mary loves John," "loves Mary John," "John loves John Mary." It doesn't matter because Greek is a highly inflected language.
You tell what the subject is by the end; you tell what the direct object is by the ending. And the Greek definite article, the word "the," occurs with proper names.
We don't know exactly why. I wrote my Master's thesis on when the article does not appear in Greek. I spent over 1200 hours writing that thesis.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation on when it does appear in Greek. These two works could cure the most hopeless insomniac.
We have the article in the Greek New Testament is far more common than any other word. One out of seven words is "the" in Greek, and we still don't know why it's used with proper names, although there have been lots of theories.
Nothing has compelled scholars to believe it one way or another. So you can say "the John loves Mary," "the John loves the Mary," "John loves the Mary," and it's always translated "John loves Mary."
Then there's differences in spelling. For example, the name in John for John in Greek either has two n's in the middle or one n. Every time we see it, there are some manuscripts with two n's, some with one: "I an" or "IO anes," pronounced the same, spelled differently.
So how many ways are there to say "John loves Mary" in Greek? There's eight different ways. I had to obviously put this in Greek; if I put this in English, it would say "John loves Mary" each time, and so you wouldn't get a sense.
So you need to, I’ll give you a little time to write these down so you have the data. It's not just this number of ways; there's another eight ways to say "John loves Mary," same word for "loves" each time, and it's always translated "John loves Mary."
It's not "Mary is loved by John." Every verse, every sentence, I mean, it's translated "John loves Mary."
And some more ways, and more. I can assure you these are all different. This took me eight hours one day to come up with this, so I hope you appreciate this.
Yeah, I'm anal like Brother Andrew. I know 96 ways to say "John loves Mary" in Greek without changing the basic meaning at all.
But there's also conjunctions that are often untranslated that go along with sentences like this, and I just picked on a few of them.
And so there's some more ways to say "John loves Mary." Hold on a second: 384 ways to say "John loves Mary" in Greek without changing anything.
Now, there's actually more ways, but after eight hours, I felt that I proved my point. These are not all the ways to say "John loves Mary" in Greek.
Other legitimate word orders swell the numbers to over 500, and a different verb for "loves" now mushrooms the numbers to nearly 1,200.
Bart Man said we could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally.
The examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands. He's absolutely right, and if we talked about these, that would cure the most hopeless insomniac.
If we can say "John loves Mary" over one thousand times in Greek without substantially changing the meaning, the number of textual variants for the New Testament is meaningless.
It's a meaningless number. What counts is the nature of these variants. What really is affected?
And the smallest category of variant are those that are both meaningful and viable; that is, they change the meaning to some degree and they have a good chance of being authentic.
That's what we mean by viable. Less than 1/5 of 1% of all textual variants fit this group.
Here's a way to represent it: the big blue box is the number of textual variants we have, and when you hear about 500,000 textual variants, this is the way that most people think about it.
But let's talk about the ones that are actually significant. It's that little yellow box in the corner; that's what we're really talking about.
I am a member of the Society of Biblical Literature. Bart Er is also a member of that. He has given several lectures there; I've given lectures there as well.
And when we have this group of textual scholars to get together and talk about variants, I can assure you we've never talked about this large blue box.
We'd get kicked out of the society for doing something so boring. What we're focusing on are those that do change the meaning of the text to some degree.
So let me give you a couple of illustrations. Here's one of my favorites: Mark 9:29. Jesus' disciples were trying to cast out some demons, and they were unsuccessful.
So he said to them, "This kind can only be cast out by prayer and fasting," or did he just say "by prayer," period?
This is the only place in the entire New Testament where "and fasting" may be part of the original text in the sense of, uh, it's a command or a suggestion that you need to fast to do something.
So maybe if some of you are involved in exorcisms, you might want to hedge your bet and pray and fast, or you might just pray.
Most scholars think the original text ends with "prayer," but maybe it also is "fasting." And of course, just looking at me, you can tell that I agree with the shorter text, but let's not talk about that.
Further question three: what theological beliefs depend on textually suspect passages?
I go back to Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code, and he has Sir Lee Tbing say to Sophie, "My dear, until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet, a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless, a mortal."
That time in history was when the Council of Nicaea met in AD 325. According to Tbing and Dan Brown, Emperor Constantine was the one who convened it, and then he left and came back towards the end of it later in that summer.
So what Dan Brown is saying is that Constantine invented the deity of Christ. We saw that when we already read from M.M. Al Oi.
He believes something similar to that, that it was the Orthodox Church, the one that came out in the 4th century, that finally won the battle against the others that affirmed a view of the deity of Christ that Christians today would hold to.
Remember when I told you an ounce of evidence is worth a pound of prump position? Here's an ounce of evidence: P66.
And that's, uh, the first leaf of P66. Did you see it? I hope you wrote it down.
You can read along with me if you'd like in John 1:1. This is a manuscript dated about AD 200, about 125 years older than, um, the Council of Nicaea.
So here's what it says: I'll read it real quickly for you. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
What P66 says, 125 years before the Council of Nicaea, is what every single manuscript of John's gospel, no matter the date or the language, says at this place: Jesus is unequivocally called God.
The same could be said for the major passages that affirm his deity, his virgin birth, his sinlessness, his death on a cross, his bodily resurrection, and his second coming.
And there are none of these places that deny these things. There are some where the textual variant is, it's not an affirmation, but it's also not a denial.
You see the difference? That's a very important distinction to make.
So we get to our fourth question: in other words, what theological issues are dependent on this? Nothing essential.
Maybe whether you should fast when you're doing exorcisms, but not too many other things.
Has the essence, our final question, has the essence of the Christian faith been corrupted by the scribes?
Sir Frederick Kenyon, who is a paleographer extraordinaire and the principal librarian at the British Museum for many, many years, said this about 80 years ago:
"The general result of all these discoveries, when a lot of these early papyrus discoveries were being made and all this study, is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the scriptures and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable word of God."
I think that's a great statement: in substantial integrity, we have in our hands the veritable word of God.
But it's not just a guy like Kenyon who says that. Listen to somebody whom you already know intimately because he was here last week: Bart Erman.
In his book, Misquoting Jesus, in the paperback edition that came out about six months after the hardback edition, they had an appendix.
And on page 252, the editors of this book asked this question: "Why do you believe these core tenets of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts?"
Notice they're not asking, "Do you believe these core tenets to be in jeopardy?" They're asking, "Why do you believe?"
In other words, the way they read his book is the way hundreds of thousands of college students and others have read his book, namely that Bart Erman is saying that the core tenets of orthodoxy of the Christian faith are in jeopardy by these textual variants.
He even sounded like he was saying that earlier. Here's his answer: "Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variance in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament."
Page 252, Misquoting Jesus, of the paperback version: "Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variance in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament."
And so I conclude by simply saying I agree. I could have put it better myself.
The New Testament text, in all essentials and in the vast majority of particulars, is absolutely certain.
I hope you can see how dramatic this conclusion is, where even one of the leading critics of the New Testament has to admit that no doctrine has been impacted, and we can be confident that what we have today is accurate to what was intended and what was originally there in the first century.
So I find this to be very conclusive, very important, because so many people, again, kind of get this wrong.
There is a need for so much more depth to be given to these subject matters related to the Bible and really for thought about God as well, because I do feel like there's so much baggage in modern American and modern Western culture.
People have very, very much of a straw man version of a lot of these things.
And so that partially to segue into one last thing I wanted to give you guys here is something that I have created for you, sort of an offering.
If you guys are interested in diving into deep topics like this, there's something I wanted to tell you guys about. Here it is: it's called the Wisdom Society.
And what it is, is a growing community of believers from around the world. We meet weekly, discuss tough questions, read scripture, pray.
There's also a book club where we are joined by the author of the book so that we can discuss the book directly with the author.
We have Paul Copan, Steven Meyer, Jay Warner Wallace, Hugh Ross, and other experts that you've seen on this channel in that book club.
I'm trying to connect the experts with you guys in a more intimate capacity. This just launched; it's currently less than a dollar a day for access to everything.
I've put a ton of time and resources into building this, so join today, support the channel, invest in yourself, grow in faith, connect with believers from around the world, and the experts that you see on this channel.
I hope this is a huge blessing to you guys. I hope it's a no-brainer to join based on the way that it's structured, and I hope to meet you there inside of the Wisdom Society.