Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Bible Manuscripts and Translations

Thomas Shepherd

01 Are Bible Manuscripts Reliable?

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp, held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

My name is Tom Shepard, and we're teaching this, we're talking about the Bible manuscripts, all right?

Lord, we thank you for this opportunity to study your word together.

And as we look at the wonderful way that you've preserved your word, We pray that you will strengthen our faith and our understanding of your word for us, your care for us, and your direction for our life.

Well, my name is Tom Shepard, and I'm the pastor of the Eau Claire Adventist Church, and I'm what they call the senior research professor of New Testament at the Andrews University Seminary.

So senior research professor means I'm old and I'm officially retired so they don't have to pay me as much.

But I can still do research, I still do some teaching for them, but I'm a pastor for the Michigan Conference at this time.

I teach a class at the seminary called New Testament Textual Criticism and Canon Formation.

And what I'm gonna share with you is some details of that.

Now, I know that you have to come early to get a good seat in the back of the church.

But I want to actually invite you to come up here to the front, because actually during this presentation, I have some show and tell that I'm gonna pass around, which I want to come back to me.

There's 4 pieces and then 4 pieces need to come back to me, but I want you to be able to see the materials upon which the biblical manuscripts were written.

Also, I'll save the last 10 minutes for questions that you can ask.

I was a little surprised that they put this class here in this big room.

Usually they have me over in the chapel and that's about the right size it seems for what we do.

All right, so we're talking about Are the biblical manuscripts reliable?

Now you know the Bible is at the center of our faith.

And when somebody attacks the Bible, they're really attacking our Christian faith.

And that, you know, that can kind of make you uneasy, if they're, especially these really smart people from big universities and places like that.

There's a famous scholar, I've heard him speak.

He wrote a book titled, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, of the New Testament.

The Orthodox Corruption of the New Testament.

And then he made a popular copy of his book, it's titled, Misquoting Jesus.

You know, he really, he actually started his career at his studies at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which is a very conservative Christian school.

But eventually he left all that and now he's an agnostic, but he still teaches in this area and does research in this area.

All right, so let's go ahead and look at some of these things here.

What is it about the Bible that garners such criticism for people?

This doesn't happen too much with the historical writings of Josephus or the philosophical writings of Philo, both writers in the first century AD.

1 is the claims that the Bible makes on our lives.

See, if the Bible is true, then there's some serious things that we have to think about in terms of our life.

They are mighty claims, mighty claims that the Bible makes including the following.

He created our world and everything in it.

Humanity has gone astray and that God sent his son to redeem the lost.

The Creator and Redeemer has a claim on your life." Boy, just think about that, all right?

If we reject his offer of forgiveness, we have only ourselves to blame for the fatal outcome, and we are called to obey his will and give our lives in service for others.

These are some of the reasons why people attack the Bible.

So we shouldn't be surprised that they seek to undermine the Bible.

Also, we can speak of the great impact that the Bible has had and continues to have on our culture.

If you're old like me, you know there's been a big change that's happened since we were young people.

Now young people don't realize that, you know, they haven't experienced that long a time.

For them, anything that happened before 2000 is history books, you know, but not for most of us here.

We remember where we were when such and such happened.

So the Bible has had great impact on our culture and still continues to do even though our culture is becoming more and more secular.

Think of phrases like the handwriting on the wall.

That comes from the book of Daniel chapter 5, the story of the fall of Babylon, or a little less known these days, but escaped by the skin of his teeth.

Also a phrase, I think, from the King James Bible.

There are also the great truth claims that the Bible makes regarding history.

The creation of the world, that God created it in 6 days, rested on the seventh day, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that God is guiding history toward a grand conclusion, that patriarchs and prophets were real people, that prophecy is true.

All right, so these are great truth claims that are denied by so many people who are secular or who have a different perspective.

We should not be surprised that the Bible comes under attack in a culture moving further and further away from its worldview.

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

So, you know, won't be able to answer everything.

But like I said, I am gonna leave 10 minutes at the end and we're gonna have a microphone so that you can ask your question and they can hear what it is and then, You know, I can try and answer.

If I don't know the answer, then I'll say, you know, that's a good question.

So it's not possible to answer all the questions, but we will focus on 3 issues related to the Bible's reliability.

Do we have the text as the authors wrote it?

Do we have the text, right, as the authors wrote it?

And are our translations of the Bible accurate?

All right, our first sessions, now I said 3, I actually have 5 presentations for 6 days.

So, you know, we'll kind of see how the time expands and how it goes and what your questions are.

It's Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Yeah, we have 6 days of, and then comes the Sabbath.

So since I'm a New Testament scholar and teacher, and I teach a class on this subject, I will focus on the New Testament, but with some reference to the Old Testament as well.

Actually the questions about the Old Testament and the text of the Old Testament are a little bit different than that for the New Testament.

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

We will look at how scholars categorize variants in the many manuscripts, and we will talk about how we can judge which variant is the original.

In our fourth, maybe it'll be fifth session, we will look at how books got into the Bible.

Why are these books in and those books are not?

02 What Variants Do Our Manuscripts Have? Part 01

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

Lord, we thank you so much for your word.

We thank you for its power in our life, for the wonderful promises that are there.

We pray that you'll help us to understand things better today as we study the manuscripts in Jesus' name.

Now, I know, like I said yesterday, you have to come early to get a good seat in the back of the church.

But I wanna invite you to come up closer.

I'm actually gonna hand out, again, if you weren't here yesterday, I'm gonna hand around again, not hand out, but hand around some samples that show you what the New Testament documents were written on papyrus.

Now these, of course, these aren't old, but they do give you an example, and I want you to be able to feel it with your hands, tactile.

There's nothing quite like having an example in your hands, okay?

So just he'll hand it around and then of course those come back to me because I show them to my students and whoever else we talk to.

Now yesterday We were talking about the different manuscripts, particularly of the New Testament.

We'll talk a little bit more about the Old Testament in the next lecture.

We're almost done with this 1, but this is where we ended yesterday.

And it's an amazing slide showing, well, not the slide, but the things that are in the… that it refers to, that we have documents that go back to the 2nd and 3rd century.

And we have large portions of the New Testament in these documents.

I mean, This is fantastic because it shows us that we can see the words that were written back then that are in our Bibles today, you know, translated into our Bibles today.

Now, These manuscripts are so early, and the autographs, do you remember the definition of autograph?

The original documents written by the apostles.

So in textual criticism, we call those documents the autographs.

We do not have any of the autographs today.

All the autographs have worn out, disappeared.

So that discourages some people, but don't be discouraged, because I've got a lot of good stuff to tell you about this.

These manuscripts, these early ones from the second and third century are so early and the autographs may well have still been in existence when these were copied that the Exemplars could possibly be the autographs themselves.

So everything was copied by hand in the ancient world.

So what they would copy from, the document that they had in front of them that they were making a copy of, that document would be called the exemplar.

So if we had the autograph and it had to be the exemplar of some documents, then those documents became the exemplar of other documents that were copied, and then those became exemplars of other documents that were copied.

But if you look at this papyrus and this parchment, you see it's really solid kind of paper, isn't it?

It's not cheap, flimsy stuff like we have today, that you can tear easily.

You couldn't tear that very easily, right?

Those kinds of documents lasted a long time.

I mean, like I just showed you, we have ones that go back to the second century, like 1900 years ago.

Do you have any books in your library 1900 years old?

I mean, You get a 200-year-old book and it's pretty fragile, isn't it?

Now, I'm not trying to say that these pieces of parchment and of papyrus that we have from the second century aren't fragile.

Sure, they're fragile because they're so old, but they've lasted that long.

So these manuscripts are so early and the autographs may well have still been in existence.

They may well have been in existence when these were copied.

That the exemplars could possibly be the autographs themselves.

Now, here's something said by 2 people, Kurt and Barbara Alland.

Now I have with me, I brought with me today, if you want to see it sometimes, I brought with me my Greek New Testament.

Well Nestle was a guy back in the 1800s and into the 20th century who put together these kinds of hand copies of the New Testament.

Kurt Allen was the guy that became follow-up on Nestle.

So Kurt Allen, 1 of the greatest textual critics of the 20th century, all right?

1 of the greatest textual critics of the 20th century.

So here's what he says, even apart from the lectionary.

You know, you say, well, what, wait a minute, what's a lectionary?

Well, a lectionary is they would take and copy parts of the Bible and they would put it into a book and they would read it in church.

So they would read these in church and we have any number of these lectionaries as well, all right?

So even apart, he says even apart from the lectionaries, there is still the evidence of more than 3, 000 manuscripts of the New Testament text, not to mention the early versions and the patristic quotations.

The church fathers were quoting the Bible all the time.

No, actually I think the emphasis is supplied.

We can be certain that among these there is still a group of witnesses which preserves the original form of the text, despite the pervasive authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the prestige of the later text.

Ecclesiastical tradition, that's the church.

Now, if the church came across something in the Bible that it said, no, that's not what we teach, there might be some kind of a push to change the text.

He says, despite the pervasive authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the prestige of the later text.

Most of our manuscripts are from a later period and the prestige of that text became important.

03 What Variants Do Our Manuscripts Have? Part 02

Lord, we thank you for this promise from Jesus.

We thank you for his presence in our life.

We pray as we open your word today, as we look at different texts, that you'll bless and guide our understanding.

Alright, remember that we said that the New Testament is the best attested document from the ancient world.

If we can know anything from the ancient world, it is the New Testament.

And that the original text of the New Testament is still there, even though we do not have the autographs.

You remember what the autographs are, right?

The autographs are the original documents written by the apostles.

They were copied and copied and copied, and so we don't have them anymore.

But we have manuscripts that go back to the 2nd and 3rd century AD Amazing and so much of the New Testament that we have in these early Documents.

So What we're talking about now is unintentional variants that slipped in to manuscripts along the way.

Now remember, because we have so many manuscripts, when these variants slip in, we can say, well, that's there and this 1 here, but we have these earlier manuscripts that don't have that, so that's probably not the original.

We'll talk actually in the next lecture, which we'll start today, we'll talk about how textual scholars make the decisions about which 1 is likely the original text.

And so you're going to become textual critics with me today.

Now when we use the word critic, we don't mean critical.

We mean somebody who applies careful rules, thinks carefully, thinks logically, critical thinking they call it.

It does careful thinking, applying important rules and coming up with good answers.

Alright, so you're going to join me with that today, we're going to have fun.

Alright, so here's another kind of change that took place with some of our manuscripts.

A word with a similar meaning is substituted for the original word.

Sometimes you have people who say, that's not a most, that's not enough high level word, you know, we need a $5 word in there instead of a 25 cent word or something, you know.

Okay, so, here's 1 Corinthians 5, verse 2, and you are arrogant, ought you not rather to mourn?

Let him who has done this be removed from among you.

And in some manuscripts, instead we have, and you are arrogant, ought you not rather to mourn?

Let him who has practiced this be removed from among you." Well, as you can see, it doesn't make much difference in the interpretation.

This 1 is actually probably the original reading.

Then we have sometimes variation in the sequence of words.

Now this is interesting, a word or phrase is reversed in order.

Sometimes this is done for theological reasons.

Of course, you see, Greek is different than English.

In English we have very set rules of how a sentence has to be constructed.

So if I said to you, I went to the store, I couldn't say, I to the store went.

Or you would say, oh he doesn't come from the US.

Or maybe he's been, maybe he's Yoda, you know, I to the store went.

To the store I went, you know, something.

The subject has to be first, the verb, and then the object of the verb, unless it's a question and then you reverse it.

We put the verb first instead of the subject.

The reason we have to do that in English is because our language is not an inflected language.

The 1 that serves as the subject, the 1 that serves as the object can look exactly the same.

They didn't have that in Greek because it's a highly inflected language.

You could put the subject at the very end of the sentence.

You could put the object at the very beginning of the sentence.

So sometimes we have variations in the sequence of words.

Matthew 4 verse 1, then Jesus was led up into the wilderness by the spirit to be tempted by the devil.

But in some manuscripts we have, then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Then Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil.

Or, then Jesus was led by the Spirit, up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Yeah, so the phrase led by the Spirit and into the wilderness are reversed.

Now, you might ask the question, why would they reverse that?

Well, It might just be a slip, you know, that they slip the words between like this.

But if you look at this 1 here, what is very close to the word spirit here?

You really want to have the Spirit next to the devil.

So that might be a theological reason somebody said, let's get the Holy Spirit further away when we talk about the devil.

So then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, okay, into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, to be tempted by the devil.

So the Spirit of course leading Jesus into the wilderness doesn't mean that the devil has to tempt him there.

The devil has to make a choice, and he does.

Because as we say, as Mark Finley says about the book of Revelation, the message of the book of Revelation is Jesus wins and Satan loses.

There's another way to show that book of Revelation.

All right, there's another way to show that.

This is the story of the book of Revelation.

The wicked are up now and the righteous are down.