Has the Bible Been Corrupted? - Ben Stuart // PASSION CAMP

Summary

In this talk by Ben Stuart at Passion Camp, he addresses a common question that has puzzled many: Has the Bible been corrupted over time through translations and copying? Stuart delves into the methods of textual criticism to assure listeners of the Bible's reliability. He discusses ancient manuscripts and their copying processes, tackling claims about the Bible changing like a telephone game. By comparing biblical manuscripts with other historical texts, he argues that the Bible stands on unique historical grounds. Ultimately, Stuart emphasizes that thorough scholarly work reveals the Bible's consistency and reliability, affirming Christian faith and historical trust.

Highlights

• The New Testament has nearly 6,000 Greek manuscripts, compared to fewer than 400 for most ancient texts. 📜
• Textual variants mostly involve minor spelling and stylistic differences. 📝
• Significant textual discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls bridge historical gaps, affirming accuracy. 🌊
• Some critics, like those from the 'Jesus Seminar', lacked scholarly consensus. 🤔
• Despite many manuscripts, essential Biblical doctrines remain unaffected by textual variations. ✨

Key Takeaways

• The Bible has a plethora of ancient manuscripts compared to other historical texts, making it highly reliable. 🧾
• Textual criticism shows most variations in manuscripts are minor and don't affect meaning. 🔍
• Despite claims of the Bible being like the telephone game, evidence supports its consistency over time. 📜
• Many criticisms of the Bible overlook the meticulous scholarly work affirming its accuracy. 😉
• The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls significantly supported the reliability of Old Testament texts. 🌄

Overview

Ben Stuart tackled the challenging question of whether the Bible that we read today is truly what was penned thousands of years ago. With a deep dive into the realm of textual criticism, he uncovers the vast number of ancient manuscripts of the Bible. By highlighting instances like the discovery of Papyrus 52, he illustrates how close we can get to the original texts and that these discoveries align closely with traditional understandings of these sacred texts.

Stuart breaks down the complexity of textual variants, noting that most discrepancies are trivial, such as spelling differences that don't affect the overall meaning. He argues that these minor variations are often sensationalized to discredit the Bible, yet they do little harm to its core messages and teachings. The comparison of the Bible to a children’s telephone game is dismantled as he provides evidence of rigorous historical validation.

Riding on the wave of manuscripts, Stuart dives into a sea of historical texts compared to the Bible. The vast number of biblical manuscripts from various timelines dwarf the number of manuscripts available for other historical documents, like those from ancient Rome. This richness in quantity aids in pinpointing the true text, reinforcing the claim that the Bible holds a special place in historical and theological study.

Has the Bible Been Corrupted? - Ben Stuart // PASSION CAMP Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 well I want to ask and answer a question that at various times has been out there in the Public Square and the question is this how can we have any confidence that what we hold now is what they wrote back then I'm here to try to remove a barrier that was set last night I mean Brad told us that Moses gave us a testimony that he saw the glory of God and we're meant to look for it too and now we're going to see in this text that Peter says we
• 00:30 - 01:00 heard the voice of God Called Jesus his beloved Son that the prophets and apostles are testifying that Jesus is Worthy of your trust and as you're hearing that all this week I think for some of us a natural question will rise okay am I meant to put my faith in Jesus in the testimony of the prophets and apostles well how do I know that what we hold in our hands now is what they wrote back then how do I know that these words I mean wasn't this translated like multiple
• 01:00 - 01:30 times wasn't it written by hand like how do we have any confidence that what we're holding here even remotely resembles what was said by a guy named Jesus 2000 years ago like didn't Constantine change it in the 300s A.D and then King James got hold of it oh my gosh he just rewrote it how do I know that what I have now is what they wrote then and you'll hear some people present it kind of like the telephone game I don't know if you remember that game you played it as a kid they would line you up in elementary school on the line and what would happen
• 01:30 - 02:00 the first kid would come up with a sentence whisper to this kid and they would whisper down the line and at the end of the line what was the big joke of the telephone game that what you heard on the other end didn't even remotely resemble what was said at the beginning and there are some critics that say is that how the translation of the Bible happened that it has changed in form and content as it's been passed down through the centuries how do you respond to that and this issue's really been pushed forward in different times in the Public
• 02:00 - 02:30 Square like I remember for me when I was in college I had a buddy that had come to Faith In Jesus was growing in his faith and then he called me in a panic because he had just saw a magazine in a grocery store that every Easter time Newsweek all these different magazines would put out stories about Jesus and he was like oh I love Jesus and he grabbed the magazine and read it and the magazine said that Premier biblical Scholars called the Jesus seminar are voting on what passages in the gospels really go back to Jesus and they would get a bucket out they had
• 02:30 - 03:00 different colored beads and they would redverse and then throw a bead in the bucket indicating if they thought that really went back to Jesus or not a red bead meant Jesus really said it pink bead made meant he said something like it or a gray or a black bead meant it doesn't go back to Jesus at all and by the time the Jesus seminar was done voting only 18 of the gospels they said went back to Jesus one sentence in the Gospel of John and it wasn't even a good one it was like and Jesus was like what you're like that
• 03:00 - 03:30 was it and my buddy called me and was like is this true like dude I've built my life on this and Premier Scholars are saying that it doesn't go back to him how do you respond to that or I remember when I was in college a book came out called The Da Vinci Code which you probably haven't read and that's fine but I remember sitting around a campfire in Beeville Texas with some of my dad's friends and they had read The Da Vinci Code and there was a character in it that says the Bible has evolved through countless translations additions and revisions history has
• 03:30 - 04:00 never had a definitive version of the book and I remember sitting around with these men and they're like well that makes sense to me I mean I guess it changed through time and suddenly we start talking about ancient church councils and textual reliability around a campfire in Beeville Texas what do you say or over the last few years a man named Bart Airman has been on various television shows Stephen Colbert and others talking about these different issues of textual transmission the Bible being translated throughout time because
• 04:00 - 04:30 the Jesus seminar to be quite honest you can really dismiss like Premier biblical scholar is a bit of a stretch I mean it included the director of such hits as Robocop and striptease really so I don't know about that title and uh The Da Vinci Code he was a fiction writer and so even liberal Scholars that don't believe the Bible's a word of God at all say like dude that dude was straight making stuff up right so we're not worried about The Da Vinci Code either but Bart Airman is a real textual critic textual critics look at all the ancient manuscripts that the Bible was translated down through and
• 04:30 - 05:00 they study them he's a real Biblical critic and he wrote a book entitled misquoting Jesus who changed the Bible and why and he went on shows like Stephen Colbert and he would say things like this I'll quote not only do we not have the originals I mean the original writings of Paul and Peter and the like he said we don't have the first copies of The Originals and that's true but we don't have the copies of the copies of The Originals or the copies of the copies of the copies of The Originals which he can't know that
• 05:00 - 05:30 and yet as you win on these different shows his book misquoting Jesus hit the number one book on all of Amazon right and you may not have read that book either and yet those ideas have kind of permeated into the intellectual atmosphere some of you have maybe encountered them on Tick Tock or you will when you get to College the question is hey how do we understand this he'll go on to say not only do we not have the originals we have these copies and these copies disagree with each other and he says there's more textual variations differences in these ancient manuscripts then there are
• 05:30 - 06:00 actual words and so the Washington Post from my hometown said this about bart Airman he's a fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether the Assumption being there is that if you really honestly looked at this you would realize it's not true what do you say to that well let me say we've got to avoid two extremes one extremes is totally despair you can't know what the Bible says or what Jesus said but the other is kind of an ignorant confidence like well if the
• 06:00 - 06:30 English Bible is good enough for Jesus it was good enough for me you're like wait wait a minute uh somewhere between there there's some intellectual confidence and that's what we're going to get to today by asking and answering three questions question number one is about quantity are there scribal alterations in the different manuscripts we have of the Bible which is true I mean before the printing press the Bible was was written by hand by different people in textual critics count the number of differences
• 06:30 - 07:00 between these different uh manuscripts as they pass through history the premier textual critic in the country actually taught in my Seminary and they count every scribal alteration in every manuscript that exists they know the exact number these guys are huge nerds so we're going to look at the quantity of scribal alterations right that's a quantity question then we'll look at the quality question okay but if there's differences how big a deal are they what
• 07:00 - 07:30 are the differences and then last we've got to look at Orthodoxy do they change Doctrine are there ancient manuscripts that say Jesus didn't really die from the dead like what do we rise from the dead what are we looking at here and let me just say this I'm getting this an outline largely and in content from Dr Daniel Wallace he's the executive director of the center for the study of New Testament manuscripts his Greek textbook is used by two-thirds of seminaries in this country so this isn't just Ben's little research I'm keying
• 07:30 - 08:00 off of the Premier textual critic in the country so let's ask a preliminary question do we have the original New Testament the original writing of the Apostle Paul Peter and the like the answer is no all 27 books of the Old New Testament were written on Papyrus Papyrus is a fragile material it's made of plants that were mashed together and they would write on it it has the consistency of like a grocery bag so after about a hundred years they would disintegrate here's the crazy thing we actually have Papyrus because
• 08:00 - 08:30 they've survived in certain very dry climates like Egypt uh qumran by the Dead Sea and uh Pompeii at the base of Mount Vesuvius dry climates high salt content that they've been able to preserve some manuscripts and yet many of them made with this fragile material disappeared and so we have copies when you had the original people would copy them and all around they would copy them and when people would copy them which it's not like the telephone game you had multiple people copying a single manuscript as they
• 08:30 - 09:00 copied them these manuscripts would disagree with each other some two of our earliest p75 which stands for papyrus 75 and b or codex vaticanus disagree with each other about six to ten times per chapter there's 260 chapters in the New Testament so that's about 2 000 differences between two of our oldest manuscripts okay so so there are some differences when they're writing them down right and that's just among two of them and as you add more manuscripts you get different variations
• 09:00 - 09:30 and so you get a job called textual critic which analyzes these different texts so with that said let's look at the quantity of variance how many variations are there between these ancient manuscripts well the number of words in the Greek New Testament let's start there there's one thousand there's 138 162 words in the Greek New Testament okay don't ask me why I know that but I do about 140 000 words in the Greek New Testament how many textual variations differences between ancient manuscripts about four
• 09:30 - 10:00 hundred thousand about four hundred thousand so about two and a half variations per word and if that's all we knew that's a pretty discouraging sentence and let me say this when Bart Airman would go on TV and do interviews he would say that and leave it there and it gives you the impression that I the Bible's been translated in a variety of different ways he doesn't mention the quality issue in any of his uh interviews and we'll get to that in a minute but here's the reason why we have so
• 10:00 - 10:30 many variants it's because we have so many manuscripts if you only had one ancient copy of the New Testament you'd have no variations there's nothing compared to right but as soon as you get two there'll be a couple little differences as people wrote by hand right and so as you get more and more of them you'll get some differences and here's a good thing as you get more and more documents it's actually good to get them because let's say you were writing the New Testament by hand and let's say you scribble a letter and it doesn't quite look we can't make sense
• 10:30 - 11:00 of it if I have 10 other ones that I knew copied from you and they all have that same squiggle we go okay now we can track the genealogical chart of some variations in spelling right and so it actually helps you to have a variety of manuscripts so you can even track where some differences took place we have what Dr Daniel Wallace calls in New Testament study an embarrassment of riches so here's the question how many ancient copies of the Bible do we have from before the printing press before you
• 11:00 - 11:30 could print how many handwritten copies of the New Testament do we have in Greek the language It Was Written in we have over 5 800. 5 800 that exists today actually 5856 they're cataloged in Munster Germany you can go look at them right most of them don't have the whole new testament 61 do but that doesn't mean they're small the average size about 450 pages right and so we have over 5 800 Greek copies handwritten copies of the New Testament
• 11:30 - 12:00 then if you look at Latin Latin kind of took off in the second century by the fourth Century it was kind of the language of the Roman Empire when the emperor moved uh his Capital East to Constantinople you know now it's Istanbul was Constantinople it was Istanbul now it's constantly so you know when he moved the capital there Latin kind of took a preeminent place of the language of the Empire we have over ten thousand handwritten copies of the Bible in Latin but even if we lost the Greek and the Latin there were other ancient languages
• 12:00 - 12:30 you would translate the Bible into like Coptic or Syriac or Arabic or Hebrew and we have over 10 000 of those handwritten copies of the New Testament before the printing press so if you add those together that's over 25 000 ancient manuscripts of the New Testament 25 000. but let's say we lost them all let's say we were like dude where did I put those 25 000 manuscripts would you be without a new testament no because the church fathers ancient
• 12:30 - 13:00 Bishops and deacons would write letters and they would quote the Bible a lot like Ignatius who died in 107 A.D quotes Matthew and there is an organization in Germany that counts biblical quotes in ancient Greek manuscripts again huge nerds and they've counted over a million quotations of the New Testament in ancient manuscripts there are 7941 verses in your new testament
• 13:00 - 13:30 exactly and there's over a million quotations in the church fathers so we have the New Testament over and over and over again written out throughout history by these Church fathers okay so some of y'all hear that and go um good like I don't know what to compare this to so let's compare it to something let's look at other ancient writings so let's look at Rome you know some things about ancient Rome how do you know anything about ancient Rome uh
• 13:30 - 14:00 there are three main ancient authors from whom we get most of what we know about ancient Rome Livi tacitus and suetonius they lived in the first century in Rome most of what we know about ancient Rome came from these three guys how many surviving manuscripts do you think they have Livy 27. tacitus a senator from whom we know the most that we do about ancient Rome how many ancient copies of tacitus do you think we have
• 14:00 - 14:30 three and the earliest one we have was from 800 years after he died suetoni is about the same the first one we have from him is about 800 years after he died now we don't go well then I guess I can't know anything about ancient Rome and yet you look and you go that's a surprise amazingly small number now if you add them up along with the acidities and Herodotus ancient Greek authors most of what we know about Greece comes from those guys the fathers of historography
• 14:30 - 15:00 if you add up all the ancient manuscripts we have of theirs you get less than 400. less than 400 upon which you base the majority of your textbooks about Greek and Roman culture right and they're all from 300 years at least after these guys lived less than 400 the New Testament we have almost 6 000 in Greek ten thousand in Latin ten thousand in other languages a million quotations it's kind of crazy if you took the average Greek author
• 15:00 - 15:30 there are less than 15 manuscripts of their writing in existence so to compare it if you took an average ancient author and stacked up all their ancient manuscripts it would be about as high as this podium how high do you think the New Testament manuscripts would be I think the roof a mile that's four and a half empire state buildings there's a technical term for that
• 15:30 - 16:00 bunches we have Bunches of copies and listen to me in a way that is so different from every other writing in human history it stands in a class on its own it's odd and you go well then how close to the originals do we get these guys are 800 years 300 years how close do we get well here's the fascinating thing with the New Testament documents we have it's within less than a decade of the original authors let me tell you a story
• 16:00 - 16:30 oldest published Greek New Testament we have is p52 papyrus 52. all right we got a picture of it up here don't we Papyrus 52 it's about the size of a credit card there it is a lot of them are bigger but that's the oldest one we have it was discovered in 1934 1934 in 1844 there was a scholar named FC Bauer who had studied under Heigl and he'd studied the hegelian dialectic you don't need to remember this but FC Bauer as he stuttered the hegelian dialectic said hey there's a thesis and that must be the Jewish Author Peter there's an
• 16:30 - 17:00 antithesis that was probably Paul and then you synthesize them that was the book of Acts and then later the Gospel of John so he said hey based on my theory the Gospel of John could not have been written before 8170 8170 all the apostles were dead uh by 80 90. he said the Gospel of John wasn't written until 8170 and that idea held sway in scholarship for 90 years and then a college intern
• 17:00 - 17:30 was in the John C rylands library going through ancient Papyrus for his boss in the basement and he came across this little credit card sized piece of paper and he realized it was a codex because the entire New Testament was written as a book there's no New Testament Scrolls we were on The Cutting Edge of books and so he was looking at this and going wait a minute this is John 18 on both sides and so we sent that piece of paper to the three leading papyrologists study of ancient paper in the world he sent them to Schubert and bell and Dyson and Wilkin and several others and they all
• 17:30 - 18:00 independently wrote back and said this copy of John that you have cannot be dated later than 8150 probably closer to 8 100 diceman said A.D 90. that the copy in your hand is from ad90 now to review Bauer said the original was written in 8170. the intern is holding a copy from 8190. now I'm no paperologist however it seems
• 18:00 - 18:30 to me that copies are supposed to come after Originals so if you have a copy from ad90 that means the original was written earlier around the time of the life of John the Apostle and so suddenly a hundred years of hypothesis went up in flames because an ounce of fact destroys a mountain of presumption and here's the crazy thing
• 18:30 - 19:00 if you want to know what the text said on that little piece of paper in case it went too fast you couldn't read it it says John 18 37 I have come into the world to Bear witness to the truth and everyone who's on the side of Truth listens to my voice isn't that crazy how about that so we have a lot of manuscripts and that gives us confidence that what we're seeing is the original all right now let's I'm going to move fast let's move
• 19:00 - 19:30 to the quality of the variants okay because you said hey we have a lot of variants because we have a lot of manuscripts but if there's variance that means there's differences then what kind of differences are we talking about seriously you've kind of got me stressed how can you answer that well let's get to number two what kind of variations are there when you talk about difference in ancient manuscripts you use two words uh are they meaningful and are they viable are they meaningful meaning like if you copied a new testament by hand and so did I and yours is different than mine is your difference does it contain meaning is it a word that means something or is it just like a misspelling and so you look at is it
• 19:30 - 20:00 meaningful and then you look is it viable is there any proof that shows that this might actually be an original so when you're when you're sort of assessing a variance you've got to look at are they meaningful do they impact meaning and are they viable is there any chance they're the original and when you do that you kind of break these different manuscripts into four groups okay group one is entitled spelling differences spelling differences
• 20:00 - 20:30 so every variant where two manuscripts are different they count them they count them all you can actually get copies of the Bible that have every single variant listed it's amazing I have a few copies again they're for nerds as you're looking at them the most common variant is called the movable new a new in Greek is the word n and you can add it to the end of the word if the next word proceeds with a vowel or not it's really a style Choice it's up to you it's like when British people put a u in the word honor and
• 20:30 - 21:00 we're like there's no you and honor well it is over there and it still counts as English it's fine it's just sort of something you can do that's the most common one okay of textual variants and ancient manuscripts of the New Testament how many do you think are spelling differences 70 percent 70 percent not spelling errors differences Bart Airman never says that in an
• 21:00 - 21:30 interview he says well there's more variations than words and you're like yeah but 70 are spelling differences why would you not point that out because you don't sell books when you say something like that group number two alterations that can't even be translated into English because Greek is a highly inflected language and so there are ways to write in Greek that when you translate into English will always translate the same way so if you take a sentence like Jesus loves Paul let's try that sentence in
• 21:30 - 22:00 Greek you can change the word order however you want because which word is the subject and which word is the object is based on the ending you put on the end so word order doesn't matter so you could say things like Jesus loves Paul Paul loves Jesus loves Paul Jesus loves Jesus Paul you can write in all these different orders but it would still translate into English Jesus loves Paul because you would look at the endings of these words and you can also add in the definite article which is often put in front of proper names it's a decision you can make it's up to you stylistically if you
• 22:00 - 22:30 want to put in the definite article the definite articles the word the my Greek Professor did his entire doctoral thesis on the definite article the word the in the Bible huge nerds so you could add the word za in and still not change the meaning so you could write Jesus loves Paul Jesus loves the Paul V Jesus loves Paul V Jesus Loves Me Paul Apollo Jesus loves deep Paul Jesus loves Paul D Jesus loves thee Paul thee Jesus loves you can keep
• 22:30 - 23:00 going and I haven't even gotten into synonyms I had a professor do this and he got to over 500 before he stopped variations that would always be translated into English Jesus loves Paul and so when you realize Greek has that much dynamism and yet we've only got 400 000 variants they suddenly don't sound very different you can go buy a critical New Testament manuscript that has every single one of these and when you do how many variants between ancient manuscripts do you think
• 23:00 - 23:30 have no meaning changed and are not viable how many do you think you land in these two groups they don't impact meeting and they're not viable they're just little spelling mistakes or spelling differences what percentage of the variance do you think those are 99 percent 99 percent Bard Airman never says that in interviews and I think he doesn't say that because he wouldn't sell books and frankly I look at that as dishonest and it bothers me
• 23:30 - 24:00 group three are meaningful but not viable meaning they change meaning but they're probably not original I'll give you one example on this one first Thessalonians 2 7. first Thessalonians 2 7 Paul says we were gentle among you and yet some translations say we were little children among you and it's a little bit difficult because in the Greek it's the difference between aganatha and apio or naganathianapioli do you see it it's a problem and so that that's one of our major kind
• 24:00 - 24:30 of textual issues is gentle among Europe as a little child among you which is it but there's a 14th century document it's a 14 centuries later that says again hippily we became horses among you that's meaningful because the word horse has meaning so that's a meaningful variant but it's not viable nobody thinks they became forces right uh that was some guy
• 24:30 - 25:00 that got sleepy and we don't trust him right but again that's in the last one percent and group four by far the smallest group are those that are meaningful and viable which means they may have a chance of being authentic some of them you see in your Bible like if you look at the longer ending of Mark often they'll put a little tab at the end that says the ancient manuscripts don't have these why is that there well Mark kind of ends abruptly and so later Scholars kind of added this ending which was kind of a pulling together of Matthew and some of
• 25:00 - 25:30 the other gospels as they were Distributing the Bible to kind of help people get some handles at the end if they only had the gospel of Mark but we're aware of that because when it shows up there's different passages like that where you see these editions and we kind of see where they come from we can get into several of those like Mark chapter nine Jesus talking about casting out demons says this kind can only be cast out by prayer and some translations say prayer and then right next to it and fasting because that's what shows up in some of the other synoptics but Paul just or Mark just had prayer so when some people adds and fasting that's
• 25:30 - 26:00 that's two meaningful variants that have some viability that's something we have to study so if you're exercising demons maybe throw some fasting in just to cover your bases but but the idea is there's nothing significant being changed in that about the nature of who Jesus is what the gospel say about him or essential theology I'll give you one major meaningful viable variant are you ready it's from one of my famous favorite textual critics his name was Constantine
• 26:00 - 26:30 vonteschendorf which is just awesome I don't need code names to check into a hotel but if I do I'm going with Constantine van tischendorf how cool is that the introduce yourself in parties what's your name um Bob Jones hey Bob what's your name Constantine Foundation what Revelation 13 18. says let the one who has Insight calculate the beast's number for it is the number of a man and his
• 26:30 - 27:00 number is 666. we all know this class what's the number of the Beast what's the number of the Antichrist it's 666. not so fast because Constantine vonteschendorf uh was studying in 1834 a a a fifth century copy of Revelation and as he was studying it he saw that it says Revelation 13 18 says it's not 666 but it's six one six I love it Dr Wallace when he taught this he said most people know 666 is the
• 27:00 - 27:30 number of the bees 616 is the neighbor of the Beast and I had trouble listening to the next several sentences I just thought the neighbor of the Beast was the funniest thing I'd ever heard I'm on coffee hey Beast most people say okay there's nothing to that and yet there's a a little scrap of Papyrus right now at the Oxford University in Ashby and uh in that little scrap of paper is revelation 13 18 and it says 616. so now there's a second ancient manuscript that has 616. so now we have to take this seriously this is Meaningful and viable it's
• 27:30 - 28:00 potentially the number of the Beast is 666 or it could be 616 and if that's true so many heavy metal bands as you can have to burn their art it's just worthless now it's live so let me ask the last question does it change our theological position no church no Seminary no Creed ever says we believe in the Virgin birth the deity and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and that the number of the Beast is 666.
• 28:00 - 28:30 no one says that so Orthodoxy let's answer our last question is any of what you believe about the person of Jesus that we're about to study and call you to give your life to is any changed in these variations uh Da Vinci Code character says my dear until that moment in history meaning the Council of nicaea in 325 A.D led by Constantine until that moment in history Jesus was viewed by his
• 28:30 - 29:00 followers as a mortal Prophet a great and powerful man but a man nonetheless and I've heard that before people said oh well Constantine deified Jesus to consolidate his political power you'll hear ridiculous things like that on Tick Tock let me help you the deity of Christ invented in 323 at the Council of nice to see it is that true let me show you a document this is p66 papyrus 66 this is the first chapter of John this is from the second century this is from 200 A.D so this is 125
• 29:00 - 29:30 years before Constantine John chapter one let's read it together because we're about to find out what it really says I don't know what yours says we're about to find out what it really says in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God that's what it says and the word became flesh
• 29:30 - 30:00 and dwelt Among Us and we beheld his glory as of the one and only it did not change it did not adapt what you are holding now is what they wrote back then and the deity of Jesus is something from before history and testified by those who saw him and here's the kicker kids Bart Airman when he wrote misquoting Jesus foreign of the paperback he wrote this
• 30:00 - 30:30 Christian belief is not affected by textual variants in the manuscript of the New Testament he knows better and he had to put it in there in the paperback what you have now is what they wrote then why does this matter let me give you one more illustration and then we're done are you with me class like I said we're calling you up today you say Ben you haven't talked about the Old
• 30:30 - 31:00 Testament well for Generations the oldest complete copy of the Old Testament came from the maseratic text the maserites were a group of people that lived around 8500 so 500 years after the life of Jesus the maserites flourished and they would painstakingly copy the Old Testament and so for the longest time our oldest complete copies of the Old Testament came from the maserites we had the Cairo codex the Aleppo and the Leningrad those are kind of our major ones and they all
• 31:00 - 31:30 come from around A.D 900 A.D 900 so 900 years after Jesus was when we had our earliest copies of the Old Testament that was written before Jesus and that's what our New Testaments were based on until 1947. some Bedouin goat herders were moving through the desert near the Dead Sea and there was a little boy among them Juma and Juma liked to investigate the caves that were high up on the cleft of the
• 31:30 - 32:00 Rocks but before he would try to Scamper up to them he would throw rocks in him just to kind of hear what they said and he would throw rocks and hear him kind of bang around and then he threw rocks and one and he heard a crash that's not a normal sound he didn't have time to go investigate but his little cousin who's 15 went in there to investigate later and he found in there a number of clay pots one of them was filled with red Earth but the rest were filled with these big Scrolls and so he took one and brought it down into town and went near near the town of Bethlehem
• 32:00 - 32:30 and showed it to an Antiquities dealer and they said this is a copy of Isaiah and long story short they gave it to a monastery they began to work with it and so over time they realized we got something here in this cave and so they contacted William Albright he's a scholar at Johns Hopkins University and the leading paleographer in the world and they showed him a copy of this and Albright wrote back my heartiest congratulations on the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times
• 32:30 - 33:00 I would date this no later than the Ascension of Herod the Great I should prefer around a hundred b c B C equals before Christ you don't know that so I think I got some people to help me do I have some people to help me real quick I just need some human human bodies where are they oh here we go come on all right this is important yeah we'll come over here come on come on
• 33:00 - 33:30 what's your name Z can you come here for a second you comfortable right here let's turn to face him for our purposes this is Jesus Christ [Applause] for a very long time
• 33:30 - 34:00 the oldest copies we had of the Old Testament Old Testament written before Jesus the oldest copies we had of the Old Testament before Jesus were from 900 years after the life of Jesus so this is a timeline for the longest time the oldest copies of the Old Testament that was before Jesus that we had were from 900 years 900 A.D 900 years after Jesus but with the Dead Sea Scrolls we suddenly found in this cave in the one place underground where Papyrus can survive and this place we find these manuscripts guess what's happening down
• 34:00 - 34:30 in the dead Seas you have the entire copy of the Old Testament in the Old Testament from the Dead Sea Scrolls were dated from about a hundred BC so suddenly we have a copy of Isaiah from a hundred years before Jesus the oldest copy we had was from 900 years after so if we're playing the telephone game look what we just got to do we just got to kind of grab your hand sister come here we just got to close the gap of a thousand years this is what happened in the 1950s
• 34:30 - 35:00 that suddenly we get to bring together don't make it weird we got to bring together a thousand years at the telephone game we're about to find out how much this text got changed by the time it got here A Thousand Years Later are you ready let me read to you um you'll just sit tight you're doing good let me read to you from scholar R Laird Harris who studied Isaiah 38-66
• 35:00 - 35:30 . he said this text is extremely close to our masoretic text a comparison of Isaiah 53 shows there's only 17 letters that are different between the masoretic text and the Dead Sea Scrolls Isaiah 53 17 letters not words letters that are different 10 are differences in spelling like the honor or honor with a u and produce no change in meaning at all
• 35:30 - 36:00 four are very minor differences such as the presence of a conjunction which is often a matter of style the remaining three are the Hebrew word for light which is added after they shall see in verse 11. so out of 166 words in this chapter over a thousand years only one word is in question and it doesn't change the meaning of the passage at all this is typical of the whole manuscript
• 36:00 - 36:30 why does it matter why does it matter that this was preserved that way for over a thousand years let me close with this so you could hear what it says in Isaiah 53. who has believed what he heard from us and to whom has the arm of the Lord been
• 36:30 - 37:00 revealed for he grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground he had no form or Majesty that we should look at him no beauty that we should desire him he was despised and rejected by men a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised and we esteemed him not but surely he has borne our Grace and he carried our sorrows
• 37:00 - 37:30 we esteemed him stricken Smitten by God and afflicted but he was pierced for our transgressions he was crushed for our iniquities upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and by his wounds we are healed all of us like sheep have gone astray we have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all why did God supernaturally
• 37:30 - 38:00 preserve this word like no other book even comes close throughout history I'll tell you why he did it so you would know him the glory of the one and only full of grace and truth Bruce Metzger was Bart airman's Professor Bart Airman
• 38:00 - 38:30 dedicated his book to him calls him Dr father Metzger was asked in an interview did his study of the foundations of Christianity rattle his faith actually the interviewer said all these Decades of scholarship delving into the minutia of the New Testament text what has it done to your faith this is what Metzger said it is increased the basis of my personal faith to see the firmness with which these materials have come down to us the
• 38:30 - 39:00 multiplicities of copies some of which are very ancient so the interviewer said so the scholarship has not deluded your faith Metzger said no it's built it I've asked questions all my life I've dug into the text I've studied it thoroughly and today I know with confidence my trust in Jesus has been well placed very well
• 39:00 - 39:30 [Applause]