GYC Conference 2024: Wherever He Goes

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

Tom Shepherd

01 Are the Biblical Manuscripts Reliable?

02 How Many Variants Are There in the Biblical Manuscripts?

03 How Do You Figure Out Which Variant Is What the Apostles Wrote?

04 How Did Books Get into the Bible?

05 Which Bible Translation is Best

I'd like to begin with prayer as we begin these discussions.

Our gracious Father in heaven, we thank you so much for your word, its power in our life, and its reliability.

We pray that you'll guide us as we walk through some of these discussions in the coming days.

Well, I'm told that you can see my slides.

The first session is about are the biblical manuscripts reliable?

All right, so the first question we want to ask is, why do people attack the Bible?

What is it about the Bible that garners such criticism?

This actually doesn't happen too much with most people, with historical writings such from the first century, such as Josephus, and the writings of Philo, both Jewish writers from the first century.

We don't hear discussions about them too much.

Well, there's several reasons that come to mind.

The first is the claims the Bible makes on our lives.

The Bible claims that there is a God who rules the universe, that He created our world and all that is in it, that humanity has gone astray, and that God sent His Son to redeem the lost, that the Creator and Redeemer has a claim on our life, and that if we reject his offer of forgiveness, we have only ourselves to blame for the fatal outcome.

Furthermore, that we are called to obey his will and give our lives in service for others.

Then there's the great impact that the Bible has had and continues to have in our culture.

Because American culture goes back quite a long ways and has linkages into Europe and linkages into the rise of Christianity, we do not often recognize how strongly Christian faith has impacted and influenced our culture and continues to do so, and some people aren't happy with that.

Then there's the great truth claims that the Bible makes regarding history, about the facts of creation, about the facts of Israel's story, about the facts of the life of Jesus, his ministry, his death, his resurrection and ascension, and the early church.

So there's lots of claims, historical claims, that the Bible makes.

So we should not be surprised that the Bible comes under attack in a culture that is moving further and further away from its worldview, from the Bible's worldview.

So it's not possible in this seminar to answer all the questions raised about the Bible's reliability.

But we will focus on 3 issues related to the Bible's reliability.

The first, do we have the text as the authors wrote it?

Right, do we have the text as the authors wrote it?

Second, how did books get into the Bible?

And third, are our translations of the Bible accurate, and which ones are the best ones?

All right, so we're going to look at those 3 questions.

Now the first 3 sessions of the 5 that we have together will deal with the first question about whether we have what the authors wrote.

We will ask if we can be sure that the text as we have it goes back to the Apostles.

We will also look at how scholars categorize variants in the many manuscripts.

Since I'm a New Testament scholar I'm mainly going to talk about the New Testament, but I will say a few things about the Old Testament text as well.

And we will talk about how we can judge which variant is the original in any 1 text of Scripture.

In the fourth session, that will be tomorrow, we will look at how books got into the Bible, a fascinating story.

And in the fifth session, we will look at various translations of the Bible and ask how they can best serve us in our Christian life.

I will preserve, my plan is to preserve the last 10 minutes of each session for questions from the audience, and you may want to jot them down for reference as we go along, because I'm going to cover a fair bit of information, and then I think Gwen will have you step up to the mic.

I like to see the people I'm talking to, So hopefully I'll be able to see you and we'll be able to do that.

But if it's just your voice that I hear, that's okay too.

All right, so how were ancient books made?

Think about how we produce and transmit data information today.

Okay, there's of course little computers and phones on the 1 side, there's a computer keyboard and a computer, and then there's a printer.

Interestingly enough, all these events, all of these inventions that you see here, have been created in my lifetime.

But actually, you see, cell phones weren't invented until maybe the 80s, and computers, personal computers, actually computers go back longer than my lifetime.

Yes, I'm old, but I'm not that old, but personal computers were not developed until after I had been around for a while.

And the printers, boy, I can tell you stories about how we used to print things back in the old days and run them off on machines and stuff like that.

So, the printing press, of course, goes a long further back, but these inventions that we have right here were not there.

So I want you to think back to a time before there were cell phones, before there were computers, before there were copiers, before there were telephones, before there were televisions, before there was electricity, before there was even a printing press, back to a time when the only way to communicate with someone at a distance was to write a letter and send it to them.

And ancient paper came in 2 forms, parchment and papyrus.

Now actually, I think paper was around in Asia, in the Far East, in China, this is where it was invented.

But in the first century, when the New Testament was written and some of the old documents even before that they did not have that they had either papyrus or parchment.

This is a picture of a papyrus plant and parchment was invented at a place called Pergamum.

And actually the story about it being developed was that the Egyptians made a, They stopped sending out their papyrus paper to some places.

And so, Necessity is the mother of invention.

And the people over in Pergamum said, we can make our own paper.

All right, so we'll look at how these were made.

Papyrus was manufactured on a board with water from the Nile River.

They took the papyrus reeds and they cut them thin and they laid them out on strips as long as possible.

They square them off and then they put horizontal strips across them to complete the paper.

Then the sheets were pressed and dried in the sun and joined together.

So multiple sheets for a document were used.

Writing was normally done on the vertical script.

If I was with you there, I would pass around, I have some papyrus.

This is a piece of papyrus, and I don't know if you can see it very well.

It's got the beginning of the gospel, a mark on it.

This is not old, this is quite new, but it's really kind of a strong, firm kind of a paper.

And I got this at a university that studies these texts and everything.

And if you've ever gone to like the post office and you bought 1 of these envelopes that's this kind of, I don't know, real, real strong paper.

If you try to rip it, you can't rip it, can't tear it.

Not that you couldn't tear the papyrus, But it's a lot heavier than the paper that we have today.

A lot heavier, a lot stronger, which is actually a very good thing.

So writing was normally done on the horizontal strips.

And this side of the papyrus paper was called the recto.

The other side where writing was not usually done was called verso, so recto and verso.

They did have some documents that would have writing on both sides and that was called an opisthograph.

Actually, if you read the book of Revelation, chapter 5, you'll see that God the Father hands to Jesus the scroll that's written on both sides.

It's an epistagraph, but that was not the normal way that they wrote these papers and these books.

So here's a picture actually from a painting in Pompeii.

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Series

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

01 Are the Biblical Manuscripts Reliable?

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Bible Manuscripts and Translations

02 What Variants Do Our Manuscripts Have? Part 01

57m

Bible Manuscripts and Translations

01 Are Bible Manuscripts Reliable?

1h 3m

Bible Manuscripts and Translations

05 How Did Books Get into the Bible?

1h 2m

Bible Manuscripts and Translations

03 What Variants Do Our Manuscripts Have? Part 02

1h 2m

Seven Trumpets and the Role of Islam

Seven Trumpets and the Role of Islam- Part 3

1h 9m

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

05 Which Bible Translation is Best

1h 18m

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

04 How Did Books Get into the Bible?

55m

Bible Manuscripts and Translations

04 Which Variant is Original?

1h 1m

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

02 How Many Variants Are There in the Biblical Manuscripts?

53m

Sound Doctrine