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Chester Van Clark, III

Living the Word

Chester Clark

If Need Be

The Inevitabilitiy of the Word

The Relevance of the Word

The Urgency of the Word

The Stillness of the Word

The Disobedience of the Word

Well, we've been talking together about the Word of God and this morning we're going to continue just with a little bit of history about the New Testament and its authenticity.

You remember last we were talking about, or last time we were together, it's been 2 weeks since I was here, we were talking about the discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus and how in the musty library, if you please, The Piles of Old Manuscripts there in St.

There was discovered an ancient manuscript which contained the entire Old Testament and New Testament.

The most complete of all the manuscripts and what was believed to be 1 of the most ancient.

And as further study would reveal, the Codex Sinaiticus, we now believe, was 1 of those manuscripts that were commissioned by the Emperor Constantine in 331.

And along with the Codex Vaticanus, these manuscripts exist as the earliest of the complete, I guess you would say, copies of the Old and New Testament.

However, even though this compared favorably with the rest of the manuscripts that were in existence then, even though there was good evidence from the Codex Sinaiticus that the Bible hadn't been tampered with by rash and dishonest hands.

There were still the critics who said, wait a minute, that would have been in the fourth century, 331 when Eusebius was commissioned by Constantine to make these 50 copies of the New Testament or the Bible.

What about between the 1st century when the Bible was supposedly written and all the way down to the 4th century when these earliest manuscripts have been found.

If they were indeed written by the apostles, perhaps they should be discovered.

Manuscripts earlier should be discovered.

And so the question was, the challenge for the Christian believers in the Bible was to produce the merest fragment of a manuscript between the first century, and you can fill that in if you're following along in your little note sheet here, between the first century and the fourth century when these various codexes were supposedly written.

Now the critics had something on their side, it's called science.

They believed that this was rather impossible that a mere fragment even of the New Testament would be Discovered even if it had been written by the Apostles the disciples of Jesus as the believers Insisted it had been the reason was because in the fourth century the material that was that was being used was sort of like a leather type material we called vellum.

And vellum was very durable and it would last through the centuries.

V-E-L-L-U-M was the name of this material.

But the earlier manuscripts would have been written not on vellum, but on papyrus.

Now papyrus was a more plant-based material and it was like paper you would consider today.

And you know how paper is rather fragile, right?

Even the books that were written, I have a love for books.

And in my library, I have many books that were written in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

And so they're dating back not far, I mean closer to the time when the printing press and modern paper was invented.

And what we didn't realize was that there was, in many papers, there was acid and the pH of the paper would determine the fact that over time that paper would sort of self-destruct.

So some of my old books you have to be very careful with because the paper is very fragile.

Well, imagine paper lasting for 2, 000 years.

And so, the critics knew that papyrus was not likely to have lasted from the first century all the way down to the 19th or 20th century when they were making these claims.

Now, as we look at history, however, we can see that step by step, older and older evidences were discovered that would lead us today to conclude that the Bible, in fact, is reliable.

And we're going to look at some of those steps yet this morning, talking about the New Testament particularly because we already talked about the Old Testament in previous visits together.

The first discovery after 1859 and the discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus.

Now they are interesting people because they were both Orientalists.

They were both professors at Cambridge, Cambridge University.

They were professors in Oriental Studies.

And they were working together, they were professors together, and they were doing research together.

Now they went all the way to the Sinai Peninsula to the monastery there at St.

Catharines and they began to try to get access to those mountains and mounds of moldering manuscripts.

Tischendorf had borrowed the Codex Sinaticus and then not returned it, given it instead as a gift to the Tsar of Russia, the monks at St.

Catharines were not that interested in letting the Westerners come back in and take their manuscripts.

And so it took 2 twin sisters to break down the barriers that had been erected, and eventually these ladies won the confidence of these monks, and they began to go through those manuscripts again.

The first thing they found was not actually a copy of the whole Bible, but it was a partially erased Syriac copy of some of the Gospels that all the experts agreed had to have been written before the year of 200 AD.

Now that's backing us up 131 years at least from where the Codex Sinaiticus was.

This is a copy of the Syriac New Testament or Gospels that these 2 sisters, these twin sisters found in St.

Now before the world hardly had opportunity to react to these sisters' discovery, Dr.

Ezra Abbott made another discovery, and this was a commentary of the 4 Gospels in Armenian, which, again, the experts were forced to agree, had to have been written around the year or even before the year of 170 AD, 170 AD.

Now, this commentary was actually, we know now, was a translation into Armenian of a commentary that had originally been written in Greek.

And so a few years later, well, a number of years later actually, we come down to 1920.

And in 1920, a group of British Army officers made a discovery at Dura which was right on the banks of the Euphrates River.

They found an ancient Roman fort and The Romans had actually built this fort, as I recall the history, they had built the fort from ruins of a church.

So they were sort of excavating down through the different civilizations.

There had been, the Roman ruins were the most obvious, but as they continued excavating, they found the ruins of a Christian church.

And in the ruins of the Christian church, they found fragments of this original Greek commentary, the same 1 that Dr.

They found this commentary, or pieces of it, in Greek, the original language they believe it had been written in.

Now from the basis of this excavation of the old church, they could date this Greek commentary all the way back to the year 150.

So this pushes it back another 20 years from the Armenian text.

So the time is marching backwards piece by piece.

It's not looking so good for the critics of the New Testament because this is the point that was being made.

If there was a commentary on the banks of the Euphrates, on the Gospels in the year 150, that means that the Gospels themselves had to have been written before that, right?

And that means that they had to have been written long enough before for them to have been circulated and for the commentaries to have been written.

It also means that they had to have been written long enough before for them to have been circulated and for the commentaries to have been written.

It also means that they had to have been around long enough for those Gospels to be considered authoritative, to be respected, and to be commented upon, right?

These weren't just ordinary letters that someone may have found along the way.

These were books that scholars were commenting and writing commentaries on.

Now moving a little bit further, we find more evidence being amassed.

We see in 1930 a large library of biblical papyri.

While the experts thought that the papyrus would not survive the centuries, God preserved various pieces of papyrus in different ways.

In this situation, he preserved it through the dry, arid conditions of the desert in Egypt.

The desert sands kept this papyrus, this delicate material, intact for those centuries.

And in the Egyptian Coptic graveyard, how do you like finding manuscripts in a graveyard?

In 1930, a large library of biblical papyri was discovered in an Egyptian Coptic graveyard near the Nile.

And this is known today as the Chester Beatty Collection.

And as I recall, it is actually owned and preserved today at the University of Michigan.

And so if you wanted to take a look at this collection, it's not that far away from us today.

I believe there were 8 from the Old Testament, 3 from the New Testament.

These manuscripts included the Gospels, Acts, and all of Paul's letters.

And it is agreed that these would have dated back to around the year 8200.

Now, I realize that's a little after 150, but again this is showing that all the way in Egypt where the Christian church was, not just in what we would today call Iraq, but throughout the entire region the Bible was being disseminated, being spread.

06.05 And that takes time to happen when it's all being done by hand and being carried by hand.

It gets from 1 place to another very quickly.

We now know these books were being revered long before the critics were saying they'd even been written.

But perhaps the most interesting, the oldest fragment of all, it wasn't even preserved by Christian hands at all.

To me this is an amazing story Because I can imagine some sacrilegious person who didn't believe in the Christian faith at all was taking these sacred scriptures of the Christians and Tearing them into pieces and using them for trivial ordinary pursuits.

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Series

Living the Word

The Disobedience of the Word

Transcript

Parent Series

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