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?

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.

02 How Many Variants Are There in the Biblical Manuscripts?

You for the opportunity to talk about the Bible and its reliability.

We thank you so much, Lord, the way you've preserved it.

We pray that you'll help us to understand things better as we go through these times together.

All right, So I'm sorry I'm not there with you.

I'd like to be there, but my wife's health is kind of frail, and so we're doing this from home.

And there was a question that was raised, a couple questions, about the Apocrypha.

I went back and looked a little bit up about that.

The story of the Apocrypha is a little more complex than the way I stated it.

Actually, Luther in his Bible included the Apocrypha between the Old Testament and New Testament.

They were kind of taken as what we call deuterocanonical books, or books that were taken as valuable to read but not the source of doctrine, and that became more and more settled in Protestantism over time.

So that's a little more, but you can go read about the Apocrypha and find more about it.

All right, so we're now looking at what variants do our manuscripts have.

There are thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament, thousands of them, right, and no 2 of them are exactly alike.

Okay, so, oops, I gotta click on this so I can make it.

So what we concluded last time was the autographs of the New Testament text probably survived for hundreds of years because of the high quality of the writing material.

If I'd been there with you, I would have passed it around.

This is modern papyrus, but it's made in the same kind of way that they made it.

And then this is parchment, and it's made from animal skin, poor animal, animal skin that is treated especially, and then you can write on it.

So that's what these documents were made from.

Our earliest manuscripts in the New Testament go back to the second and third century.

We talked a little bit about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls come from the like the second third century BC to the first century AD, and our earliest New Testament manuscripts go back to the second and third century AD, which is very very old.

So we can recover the original text of the New Testament from all these manuscripts.

Our test today, now in this lecture, is how many manuscripts do we actually have?

Are there checks on what the manuscripts contain?

And what kinds of variants are there in the text of the New Testament.

All right, so the process of forming the Old Testament, so this is now we're going to take a little bit detour and talk about the Old Testament for a while.

The process of forming the Old Testament canon, the Old Testament books that are our Old Testament today, was different from the way the New Testament was done.

The oldest Hebrew Bible until the mid-20th century came from about 81, 000, the Aleppo Codex.

However, between 1946 and 1956, a group of ancient scrolls was found in the Judean desert near the Dead Sea.

That's why they're called the Dead Sea Scrolls, near a place called Qumran.

I haven't gone up in the caves where they found these.

These scrolls and fragments found with them have been dated between the third century BC and the first century AD.

That's approximately a thousand years older than the next oldest Hebrew Bible.

Portions of all the Old Testament books except the Book of Esther have been found in these caves that were near this settlement, probably in Essenes.

They were a group of Jews, you know, referred to Pharisees and Sadducees, while the Essenes were another sect or, you know, grouping of Jews in that time period.

And they probably were the ones who made these scrolls and they put them up in the caves.

Now the settlement at Qumran was wiped out during the Jewish war, which was some AD 66 to 73.

So probably maybe shortly after Jerusalem fell, they went down, or it may have been before that, and they wiped out the settlement at Qumran, or the people ran away.

What the Romans didn't know was that this group which had copied these scrolls had preserved a number of them and put them up in these caves.

And nobody knew about them for like 1900 years.

And then there were these Bedouin boys were taking care of the sheep and they threw stones up into these caves, you know, little boys having fun.

So they climbed up there and that was the first discovery of these scrolls.

And the story of how they, you know, ended up being preserved and well ended up in museums is a fascinating story.

Well, if you haven't read the book of Esther lately, Esther is the only book in the Old Testament that does not have the name of God.

There's no mention of prayer, there's no mention of God.

Now, some people will say, well, didn't she pray before she went into the king?

She fasted, but there's no mention of prayer.

Of course he was, but he's kind of in the shadows.

So the Essenes didn't like that, and so they didn't include Esther in their book, but all the other books of the Bible, plus other books as well, besides.

So what the scrolls show is that there was careful transmission of the Old Testament text across that 1, 000-year period with remarkable agreement with a standard Masoretic text that became what we have today.

Of course, there are certainly some differences, but some of the scrolls differ more from the Masoretic texts as we have it, and that's something more that Old Testament scholars deal with.

But these scrolls are our oldest witnesses to the Old Testament.

And like I said, there's this remarkable parallel to the Masoretic text which gives us encouragement about our Old Testament.

So this gives us confidence in the text of the Old Testament as found in our Bibles.

Now in contrast to that 1, 000 year gap between manuscripts of the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The New Testament has a wealth of manuscripts over a 1500 year period.

Far and away, the New Testament is the best attested document from the ancient world.

Over on the left it says the document, and then when was it written, the number of manuscripts we have testifying to that, and the earliest manuscript, the date of the earliest manuscript.

So the New Testament, it was written in the first century.

So that would probably include the lectionaries and some things, but not versions.

The earliest 1 of those manuscripts, we saw a picture of it last time, comes from the second century.

So, you know, a little more than, well, for the text that it has, it's like 25 years from that time period.

Tacitus was a Roman historian of the first century AD.

We have 1 copy of some of his, I think like 6 of his animals, 1 copy from the 9th century, nothing in between.

Euripides, 1 of the famous Greek tragedy playwrights of the 5th century BC, We have about 330 copies of his plays, some of them anyways, and the earliest ones come from the 4th century AD.

Villius was a Roman historian and wrote in the first century BC to AD.

And we have 1 copy from the 17th century.

Now look at the amount of time from the time when it was written.

Now this isn't all material from the ancient world, of course, but this gives you some picture.

Our oldest document of his is from the ninth century.

I mean, that's like 800 years between when he wrote it and our earliest copy.

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

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for your word.

We thank you for its power in our life, for the mercy that you've poured on our world, both by our Lord Jesus coming and by the scriptures that you have so graciously inspired and given to us that we can study and learn more about how to walk like Jesus.

We pray that you'll be with us this morning as we talk about the text of the New Testament in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, so which variant is the original?

Let's just review a little bit about what we've already already...

This is the third presentation by Tom Shepard and on the reliability of scripture.

This third 1 is called which variant is the original.

Okay, so what we have already established is that the autographs, that is the original documents written by the apostles, likely survived for several hundred years.

The reason that they survived so long is because of the quality of the paper that they were written on.

Like I said, if I had been there, I would have been handing it around.

It's not old papyrus, but it's modern stuff that's been made like the ancient papyrus.

If you felt this you would say, wow, that's really strong paper.

The other kind of paper that they used in the ancient world, in the Mediterranean world, was parchment.

It looks kind of similar to the papyrus paper, but it's actually made from animal skins.

And as you can see, it's written on there, the letter to the church at Pergamon.

We said they didn't have any course phones or electricity or computers or any kind of mimeographic machine or anything.

So the only way they could do it was to write letters on either papyrus or on parchment.

And that took a lot of work to make those.

So it wasn't an inexpensive kind of a procedure or a simple job.

So because the paper was so high quality in that sense, the New Testament documents, let's see, yeah, the autographs likely survived for several hundred years.

Our earliest manuscripts that we have go back to the second century second third century some could actually have been copied from the autographs themselves as we said yesterday the author would often make 2 copies, 1 that he would send and 1 that he would keep for his records.

So we would have the autograph surviving for some time.

The New Testament is far and away the best attested document from the ancient world, with Greek documents, 5, 700 Greek documents.

No other work from the ancient world compares in attestation as much as the New Testament.

So we can know anything from the ancient world, it is the New Testament, which is very encouraging to us.

We have thousands of manuscripts, lectionaries, quotations in the Church Fathers, and a number of early versions.

It was translated into Armenian, it was translated into Slavic, it was translated into Ethiopic, Coptic, Latin.

We have like 5, 6 different languages that it was early on translated into these languages.

So we have those as well and numerous copies of those that we can also refer to as a test.

So we can be sure that the original text is preserved within the vast array of data that we have on the New Testament from the ancient world.

We just have to figure out how to find it.

This is the work of textual criticism, it's called.

Now, the word criticism doesn't mean that we're trying to be mean or critical or something.

It actually means being analytical and thoughtful and careful thinking.

So this kind of work by scholars has been going on for centuries.

And the, the, is actually in like in the last hundred years that things have become more, what should I say, expansive in the kind of work because people didn't realize that there were these huge number of documents that were still, you know, extant or still in existence that they could refer to.

So for instance, when the King James version was made, we'll be talking more about biblical versions this afternoon, they only had the basis for the King James Version was only a few Greek manuscripts, and it was based on the, it's called the Texas Receptus.

We'll talk a little bit more about that this afternoon.

But now we have a lot, a whole lot more manuscripts available to us and data that's very helpful.

So we have to figure out which part, which are the worst, because as we studied yesterday, there were many mistakes that were made in copying.

They would flip words around or they'd put in a synonym or they'd drop a word or they'd drop down a line.

There's a whole variety of what we call variants.

Thousands and thousands of them actually.

Most of them are inconsequential, but some are more more consequential that we have to really work at to figure out.

So this is the work of textual critics, is to give us...we want the original text.

We want to know what the apostles wrote, not what some scribe dropped out or what some scribe added in.

Their goal is to recover the original text as written by the apostles.

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Series

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

02 How Many Variants Are There in the Biblical Manuscripts?

Transcript

Parent Series

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Parts

01 Are the Biblical Manuscripts Reliable?

51m

02 How Many Variants Are There in the Biblical Manuscripts?

53m

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

52m

04 How Did Books Get into the Bible?

55m

05 Which Bible Translation is Best

1h 18m

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