The Credibility and Authenticity of Scripture

Tonight we're talking about the credibility and authenticity of Scripture. There's different ways to actually pursue this. One way, for example, if you want to talk about why we believe the Scripture is credible and authentic, is you can look at all the factual statements in Scripture and see if they line up with archaeology, right? The Scriptures were written, depending on how you date them, anywhere from a period of 1,500 to 1,700 years.

We have 40 different authors, 66 different books, of all different classes of men. You have people who are fishermen, who are tent makers, who are kings, who are shepherds. And they talk about a vast array of places, of people, people with certain titles. They talk about events, they talk about things. And so if the things and the events and the places and the people don't match up with archaeology, then how can we say that we think this is credible?

How do we think it's authentic? And so that would be one way to do it. We talked about this two weeks ago when we touched on the inspiration of Scripture. We talked about Sir William Ramsay, the eminent archaeologist, who started off his career as not trusting the Scriptures. He had been schooled in the Tübingen school of German higher criticism, had been basically brainwashed into thinking that Scripture was written two or three hundred years later than what it was, not by the original authors.

And therefore legend had crept in. And things that were said about Jesus weren't really true. It was full of myths. And as a result, it couldn't be trusted. But the more he dug in the dirt, the more he changed his mind. He found that following Luke's writing of both the Gospel of Luke and also the book of Acts, only confirmed even the most minute details. He would find a relatively minor public official, his name and the title of his office that Luke would mention.

And he would dig up an inscription saying that. That's something that would be impossible for someone who lived two hundred miles away, two hundred years later, to be able to conjure up unless you lived there in that time to know that. They didn't have the internet back then. They didn't have AI back then. So that would be one way to talk about the credibility and authenticity of Scripture. Another way would be simply to look at the prophetic statements of Scripture.

In both the Old Testament and the New Testament, there are hundreds of biblical prophecies. And if those prophecies aren't true, then we can't trust the authority of Scripture, right? Scripture cannot be authentic. Last week Caleb touched on this when we were talking about the infallibility and inerrancy, and Caleb talked about how Christ was the only man who ever accurately predicted His death, burial, and resurrection.

Right? That's one reason why we listen to Him, right? You accurately predict your own death, burial, and resurrection, maybe we'd listen to you too. Right? Only Christ has done that. But what we'll be talking about tonight is the credibility and authenticity of the scriptural manuscripts themselves, the documents that make up the Bible. If you think about the Bible in front of you, how confident are you that this really holds the words that Christ Jesus spoke, like on the Sermon on the Mount?

How confident are you that we're studying Timothy in men's Bible study? That letter was actually written by Paul to Timothy. How confident are you that James wrote the book of James? I know the children are studying that on Sunday mornings.

When you look at popular culture, it seems all kinds of doubts arise, right? You think about Dan Brown and his books that were made into major motion pictures about a cabal of Catholic priests who changed the scriptures to protect their own interest. Right? If you've ever had dialogue with Muslims, they'll say, well, Christ wasn't divine. He didn't claim to be divine. That was added later on in the scriptures.

Well, when someone tells you that, what do you say? You know, I remember — I'm old enough, I was born in '72 — in the eighties and the nineties, there was a lady, a very popular actress. Her name was Shirley MacLaine. I don't know if you all remember her. She was a new age believer. She's still alive, I think she's up in her years. But she used to say that she was God and believed in reincarnation. She said that reincarnation was actually taught by Christ, but it was removed later on at one of the Church councils.

Well, how do we combat that? How do we know that? Well, that's what we'll be looking at tonight, which is that we can totally trust the Scriptures, that they are credible and authentic. So let's look at number one here. Truth claim number one: God preserves His written word found in the Old Testament. God preserves His written word found in the Old Testament.

While we do not have the original autographs — autographs would be the original writings that Moses would have written or the prophets would have written, produced by the prophets — the extant copies allow us to accurately reproduce them. Extant, that's spelled E-X-T-A-N-T. It may be a weird word, but what extant means is an existing document that is historic. It's not something that was created yesterday, but it is a document with history, a surviving document.

The extant copies allow us to accurately reproduce them. Let me reread that. God preserves His written word found in the Old Testament. While we do not have the original autographs produced by the prophets, the extant copies accurately reproduce them. Isaiah 40:8 says, "The grass withers, the flower fades," but what? "The word of God stands forever," right?

Psalm 119:89 — I know many of you love this verse because I've heard you say it before — "Forever, O Lord, Your word is settled in heaven." We can trust God's word because it is enduring. That's the application. We can trust God's word as it is enduring.

Psalm 119:152 says, "Concerning Your testimonies, I have known of old that You have founded them forever." Let's flip over on the back. I want to actually look at some of the history of the Old Testament documents. Under number one on the back, you'll see that there are fewer Old Testament documents by far than there are New Testament documents. That's the case for many different reasons. Part of it is antiquity.

It's age. Old stuff just doesn't stay around. Also it's because of the environment. The Middle East is a very harsh environment. Things decay if they're not protected. Have you ever been to Washington, D.C. and been to the National Archives and seen the Constitution? The Constitution is in a glass case and it's filled with some kind of gases to protect the document. The glass is tinted to protect it from UV light degradation so the ink doesn't fade.

Even with all the precautions we've taken, that document has faded over the years. That document is less than 300 years old. Think about manuscripts that date back centuries. Very few of them exist.

Also they don't exist in large numbers because of what they were actually written on and the ink that was used to write them. Ancient documents, if they weren't carved in stone — which is rare — they were written on papyrus. Papyrus was taken from reeds that would grow in the Nile. They'd be laid and pressed against each other at a 90-degree angle and they'd make paper, basically, out of these pressed reeds.

It'd have one smooth side and then the back side where all the veins of the leaves would be kind of rough. Well, have you ever pressed a flower before? Maybe someone gave you one as a keepsake. It doesn't always last too long, right? They get brittle and they fall apart eventually. They would also write on parchment, which was made from animal skins and also had a smooth and a rough side. Then also the higher-end documents would be written on vellum, which was made from the inner lining of animal skins and was smooth on both sides.

Those types of materials don't last really long. Even today, most of the books that we have — in fact, the Bible in front of you — those copies, if you've had one for a long period of time, what happens? It starts to fall out of its binding, right? Pages get crumpled up. Maybe some chewing gum gets stuck on a page. Things happen, right?

Also look at the second little bullet point. Jerusalem was conquered 47 times between 1800 BC and 1948 AD. That's a lot of times for a city to get ransacked, burned, and destroyed, right? What happens when armies come into an area? They kill people and they break things. They destroy things, right? Including documents. The destruction of the first Temple in 586 BC by the Babylonian Empire — if you remember, Isaiah, around 700 BC, prophesied that because of Israel's disobedience, they were not keeping the Sabbaths.

They were not worshiping God, and that God was going to destroy Jerusalem and send them into exile. And then that happened about 120 or so years after he predicted that. And when that first Temple was burned and destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, what would they have done with all the documents? Destroyed them as well. The destruction of the second Temple in 70 AD, which Christ predicted would happen — His disciples said, "Look at all these magnificent buildings." And He said, "Not a stone is going to be left unturned." And there in 70 AD, it was destroyed in the diaspora. Most of the Jews were killed; the remaining ones were sent all around the world as slaves at that point.

If you look at the scribal rules regarding manuscripts, that also explains the scarcity of ancient manuscripts. The Jewish scribes would copy the text by hand. They did not have printing presses. They did not have Xeroxes. They had rules that they followed that allowed them to destroy a text if it became worn, or if it had an error in it. If they began to copy and they had one error on that page, they would burn it. They would destroy it. Here in America, I don't know if we follow it as much as we used to, but if you have an American flag that is tattered, there's certain protocol for disposing of that flag, right?

Well, the scribes would bury these documents. And burying parchment documents in the sand doesn't last very long, because these were becoming tattered and faded. And last but not least, the Masoretes of the eighth and ninth centuries AD. The Masoretes both preserved the text and destroyed the text at the same time. This would be 500 or 600 years after Christ. Let me explain who these Masoretes were.

These were Jewish scribes who wanted to preserve the Old Testament Scriptures. They were concerned that 500 or 600 years after Christ, Hebrew was no longer being spoken anymore. It was becoming a dead language at this point. So what they did, they took the Jewish copies of the Old Testament — which had all the words as just consonants, with no vowels — and they put little marks above the letters to symbolize vowels, or where the vowels would go, to help you pronounce the consonants and pronounce the word properly. They learned this from their fathers and their grandfathers going back.

So they changed the text in that sense. They didn't change the meaning of the text, but they put in these vowel markings to help us pronounce it and to preserve the text. But what they did with all the other texts that did not have these vowel marks, they destroyed them. So on the one hand, they protected the text to make sure we could pronounce it correctly, but then they destroyed the old ones that did not have those markings. So that's why we have very, very few ancient texts.

Let's look at the second heading, number one on the back: Old Testament manuscripts.

The earliest complete Hebrew Bible therefore dates to about 1000 AD, which is 1,000 years after Christ. We know that the Old Testament was written and completed before 400 BC, probably 500 BC. It ended with Ezra and Nehemiah and Malachi. But the earliest complete copy we have is from about 1000 AD. We do have a copy from the 900s, but it was at one time complete and now is missing some pages.

There are more than 10,000 fragments that date between 500 and 800 AD. So we have a lot of fragments. We also have the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Pentateuch — does anyone know what that is? Five. Yes, the first five books of Moses. The Samaritans, who lived in Samaria and were considered half-breeds, weren't allowed to worship in Jerusalem. They insisted that they could worship God on Mount Gerizim. They had their own version of the Pentateuch.

And it was pretty much similar in most respects to the Pentateuch of Israel, except they had extra additions saying that you can worship on Mount Gerizim, things that they had added to justify their religion. But that dates to about 100 AD. And then we have the Septuagint. The Septuagint dates to approximately 300 to 250 BC for the Pentateuch and about 200 BC for all the others. What the Septuagint is, is this: Alexander the Great, when he conquered the known world around 400 BC, spread Koine Greek throughout the whole known world, which is around the Mediterranean.

If you want to be able to have commerce and get along with the conquering army, you need to speak their language. And so the men at Alexandria, which was an intellectual capital of the world, took the Old Testament Scriptures in Hebrew and translated them into Greek. And that is the translation that Jesus and the disciples used. Eighty-five percent of the time in the New Testament, when Jesus quotes the Old Testament — which He does a lot — He's quoting from the Septuagint.

So we have that witness of the Old Testament going back to about 300 BC for the Pentateuch and 200 BC for the others. And then we have the Dead Sea Scrolls. You've probably studied about this in history class. Around the 1940s, there was a Bedouin shepherd boy who was kicking rocks, like shepherd boys do. One fell into a cave and he went down and explored it. He found all these jars and told the Bedouin elders about it.

And these jars were full of papyri and the fragments of papyrus documents. They went from one cave to the next. And over a series of years, they found a whole slew of documents — over 100,000 fragments, over 1,000 complete documents of all different types. And among those, we have about 600 documents of the Old Testament that were found. In cave one, we found a complete Isaiah scroll. And how did this scroll survive this long, so to speak?

This was a parchment scroll, 26 feet long. It was inside a vase that was covered in pitch, stored in a cool cave — an ideal situation for it to be preserved. Well, when they began to look at this scroll of Isaiah, it was dating to about 200 BC or so. The earliest copy of Isaiah we had before that discovery dated to about 900 AD. So we're looking at more than a 1,000-year gap.

This new discovery put us a thousand years closer to the original document than we had before this discovery. I had a professor when I was in seminary, from whom I learned Greek, who was a brilliant man. He didn't collect bottle caps or baseball cards. He collected languages. He could speak old Gothic, Sanskrit. He knew all the ancient languages, new modern languages. And he had a very high reputation as a young scholar.

And he was one of the first Western scholars asked to examine the Isaiah scroll. And this man was not a Christian. He was not teaching at a seminary at this time. And so Dr. Lanier went to study the Isaiah scroll. And he was amazed. As he studied, he found that 95% of the text of this Isaiah scroll was word for word, verbatim, the same as what we had from the existing copy from around 900 AD. The other 5% where there are variations were spelling variations. That was it.

That led him to put his faith in Jesus Christ. You may think, well, why? Well, he knew languages. And when you copy things time and time again, errors can enter in. He had done a lot of work on Shakespeare's plays. And when Shakespeare's works, which were often copied by hand, would go from one city to the next — maybe they're going to do Romeo and Juliet in a neighboring city — they'd copy it by hand.

But sometimes an actor would change a line or they would change a word or pronunciation. And then it would get copied again. And by the time it was copied three or four times, they had to go back and rework the whole play because it wasn't original to what Shakespeare had written. He knew that this does not happen. This was the hand of God. So he gave his heart to Christ and became a wonderful seminary teacher.

I can tell you, He is an awesome God. In cave four, we found a Hebrew fragment of the Old Testament that also dates to the eighth century BC. And we're still cataloging these discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls. So let's flip back to the front here.

Number two: God preserves His written word found in the New Testament. While we do not have the original autographs produced by the apostles, the extant copies allow us to accurately reproduce them. Jesus said in Luke 16, "It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fail." A tittle was the smallest marking in the Hebrew language.

Those smallest little marks almost look like an apostrophe but are part of a letter. You think about, for example, the letter P, capital P. Then you have the little line that extends down from the letter P and it makes a capital R. That little line would be a tittle, right? "Not one of those will fail from the law." He also says, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away." Look at Revelation 14:6:

"Then I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting Gospel, to preach to those who dwell on the earth, to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people."

The application is that we are to proclaim the everlasting Gospel to everyone. God preserves His word. Would He let the greatest news — His own revelation — fade away? Not a chance.

Flip over on the back. We're going to look at number two here: New Testament manuscripts.

First of all, we're going to look at the papyrus manuscripts. They're our earliest ones. They originated from a period when Christianity was illegal. If you remember, the early Church was greatly persecuted, and you would not want to be a professional copyist making what we call codices — or books — because you could be burned by Nero or by Domitian later on for doing so. So the earliest copies of Scripture were written on papyrus because it was the cheapest material available.

Scripture was transcribed on papyrus. Seventy of these manuscripts exist from 117 to 250 AD. The earliest one that we have is the John Rylands fragment, discovered, I think, in 1934, if I recall, in England at one of our universities. I think it was Oxford, if I recall right. They had researchers sifting through boxes of fragments that had come from Egypt. And someone came across a small one.

It's not big. It's smaller than, say, a credit card. And it caught his eye because this man knew Greek, and this was from the Gospel of John. On the front it had John 18, and on the back it had part of John 18. This is the passage where Jesus is before Pilate and Pilate says, "What is truth?" Right? And this small document was then dated. Four different experts dated it — they date them based upon the material itself, based upon the writing style and the grammar, and also the material that it was found with.

All four said that this dated to approximately 100 to 130 AD. So this dates very early on. Christ was crucified, died, and resurrected around 30 AD. If you take the early dating — and these dates are plus or minus 25 years — some scholars say this dates to 80 or 90, perhaps even that early. We'll go with conservative; let's say it's 117 AD. That is within about 80 years of Christ's death and resurrection.

This is within a 50-year time frame of when many of these writings were said to have been written. Some people date John late. They may date it as 85. Some people date it at 90. Well, this would put it within, you know, 10 years, or possibly even less, of when John wrote the manuscript. I like the early dating of John for some other reasons, but still, anything within 50 years is amazing.

The Bodmer Papyri — this is a series of papyri — dates from 175 to 200 AD. We have the entirety of Luke, John, Jude, 1st and 2nd Peter, and others. And then there's the Chester Beatty Papyri. These all have numbers — P45, and that's just the technical name for each one to be able to catalog them. These date from 180 to 200. They contain most of the New Testament in codex form. A codex is a book. For whatever reason, Christians didn't like scrolls. We like books, and that's the way that these were found.

Then we have what we call the uncial manuscripts. These date a little bit later, and uncial manuscripts were written on vellum or on parchment as opposed to papyrus — again on the animal skins, if you will. We have 310 of these that exist between 325 and 750 AD. We have three of them in particular that are very early.

Codex Vaticanus arrived from Constantinople, and it has both the New Testament and also the Jewish version of the Old Testament translated into Greek, which we call the Septuagint. So it's complete, and it's very early, and it's very easy to read, actually, if you know Greek and understand how these were written.

Codex Sinaiticus was on vellum. It has a very interesting history. It was found by a man named Count Tischendorf. Tischendorf was the man they modeled Indiana Jones on, so to speak. He was not a womanizer and a gunslinger and a treasure hunter. His treasure was searching for Scriptures.

He went all around the world going to places in particular like monasteries, because when there would be wars in ancient times, they'd often leave the poor monks alone. These guys didn't have any money. They weren't hurting anybody. They didn't have weapons. They were a peaceable lot, and so they became storehouses for ancient manuscripts. So he'd go there and say, "What do you have?" He was in Sinai — Mount Sinai, in Egypt, the same Sinai where God had given the Ten Commandments to Moses — and there's a monastery there, St. Catherine's. He had to be picked up in a basket and brought over the wall; it was very secure.

He was there on his first visit, and he noticed the monks kept on taking scraps to be burned in the kitchen. And he started looking at these scraps, because all the books they had weren't organized. There was no Dewey Decimal system, you know? And so he had to look at each one of them. It was very painstaking.

But one of them caught his eye, and he recognized that these were pages from a codex, and he looked at it, and it was part of the Septuagint — the Jewish Scriptures translated into Greek from around 200 BC or so. And they were burning these as kindling, because they didn't know what they had. And he said, "Wait, let's save that." So he knew they had good stuff. He came back a second time, struck out.

Came back a third time a couple of years later. Didn't find a whole lot, but he had a monk who was waiting on him and bringing him food while he was looking over the various manuscripts. He wanted to thank this monk. And so what he did, Count Tischendorf had put together a printed version of the LXX, the Septuagint. He said, "Here, I want you to have this. This is mine. I want you to have a printed version of the Septuagint." And the monk looked at it, and he said, "I've got one of these." He looked at him and said, "Let me show you." And he went and got this book out of the closet.

And this book was what we call an uncial manuscript. An uncial manuscript was a Greek manuscript written in all capital letters, very much in block print with no spaces in between, no punctuation. And this was a complete copy of the Scriptures — both the Septuagint and the entire New Testament. It's what we call Codex Sinaiticus, and it dates from 325 AD. This is ancient. This guy had it lying on a shelf, right?

You can go online and you can see this. It's been beautifully photographed, and you can read through it today. We also have the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus on parchment from 350 AD, from Syria.

Notice where these are from. One was from Constantinople. One was from Egypt. One was from Syria. These are coming from all over, not just from one place. And this was what we call a palimpsest. A Syrian pastor — an ancient Syrian pastor — had taken a copy of the New Testament, because writing material was scarce, and he had washed off the ink and written his sermons on it. Count Tischendorf was able to take that, and you could still see the old writing, and was able to remove that man's writing and trace back over the original writing.

That took a long time to do, but that's where we get that text from. And then, in the upper right-hand corner, Codex Alexandrinus — this is a little bit later, from 390 to 450 — contains both the Septuagint and also the complete New Testament.

Now, this is a lot of different documents. Dan Wallace, who is at Dallas Theological Seminary, an eminent New Testament scholar, has calculated the entirety of all the handwritten New Testament manuscripts before the printing press. And this isn't just Greek. In Greek alone, there are about 5,800, which is a ton.

When you add all the others — by the end of the second century it was in Coptic, it was in Latin, it was in Syriac, it had been translated that quickly, within 100 years of it being written into these other languages — when you add all those together, he estimates that there are about 26,000. Conservatively, we're going to say 24,000. And he actually, being a nerd, figured up how thick each manuscript was. Most of these manuscripts are 400-some-odd pages. If you were to stack them on top of each other, all these manuscripts together would be 1.1 miles high. This would equate to more than four Empire State buildings, including the spire, stacked on top of each other.

Have you ever been to the Empire State Building? I have. I've looked down from the top of it. It's amazing. Could you imagine one that's four times that high? That's how much of a witness we have of the Scriptures, handwritten before the printing press. Hannah, if you don't mind, come up here. Hannah's going to help me out here. Let's give Hannah a round of applause. Hannah, about how tall are you? About four feet or so.

Dan Wallace, as a comparison, took all of the ancient Greek manuscripts that we call classical Greek. This would go from Homer's Iliad — maybe you read that in school — Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, men like Euripides, Plato, Aristotle. All the way down to the time of Christ, essentially. Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger — all of them.

If you would take all of their documents, all those handwritten documents that exist for classical Greek literature — from which we know the Roman world, and from which we know math and philosophy and science — it'd be about three feet six inches. So it'd be about right here. So literally Hannah's head and shoulders above that. That was the information as of 2014. They found a few documents since then, so maybe it's about Hannah's height now, right?

Literally, the New Testament stacks up a mile above that. Isn't that amazing? Thank you, Hannah. Appreciate it. Let's look at some of these bullet points here. The runner-up for the New Testament in terms of manuscript copies is the Iliad by Homer: 1,757 Greek manuscripts, mainly fragments. Herodotus, the father of history: 117 manuscripts. Plato survives in 210 manuscripts. Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars survive in 251 manuscripts.

Pliny Secundus — that's not Pliny the Younger or Pliny the Elder — has 200 copies. Livy's History of Rome, which is a massive tome, survives in one partial and 19 copies. Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome: only 31 manuscripts, and these are all partials. Look at those numbers — they are very anemic compared to 5,800 New Testament manuscripts in Greek and over 24,000 handwritten copies in all languages.

Let's look at the date of the New Testament manuscripts. We already looked at P52, the John Rylands fragment, dating to potentially the first century, around 117 AD, give or take 25 years. We have fragments from 117 AD. We have books that exist from before 200 AD, and most of the New Testament before 250 AD, and the complete New Testament by 325 AD. So this is a gap of 50 years for fragments, 100 years for books and collections of books, 150 years for most of the New Testament, and 225 years for the entire New Testament.

So what we have is the entire New Testament with existing copies within 225 years of when it was written. That's a very small window for errors and changes to enter in. We have fragments within 50 years, right? So the documents that we have are very close to the original autographs in terms of time. Compare that to the classical Greek manuscripts. Homer's Iliad — we have a fragment from 400 BC, but the first complete copy we have is from the tenth century AD. That's 1,400 years later. So we don't have as much confidence that what we have of Homer is actually what Homer wrote, because the first full copy comes 1,400 years after the fact.

Herodotus, whom we call the father of history, has a gap of about 1,350 years between his earliest existing copy and when he wrote. Caesar's Gallic Wars is a gap of 950 years. Pliny Secundus — this is a gap of 400 years for fragments, 750 years for a complete copy. Livy's History of Rome is a gap of 1,350 years. We know pretty much everything about the Roman Empire from Livy, right? And there's a gap of 1,350 years. Tacitus — this is a gap of 750 to 900 years, 750 for a fragment and 900 years for the complete.

So what I'm getting at is that when you compare both the number of New Testament manuscripts and the date, there's no comparison. There are some critics who will say, "Well, you know, 50 years is a long time between the original writing and the first copy fragment. Something could have entered in there in error." Well, they sure do trust Tacitus. They sure do trust Herodotus to tell them all about ancient Greek culture and Roman culture. And there are gaps of 1,300 years there, right? They quote Homer all the time, and there's a huge gap there, right? So there is no ancient literature more well-attested in both number and date than the New Testament. Hands down, it's not even close.

Number three: even if all the ancient copies were lost — if we lost every one of these 24,000 handwritten manuscripts — we could theoretically reproduce the entire New Testament from the writings of the early Church fathers. The early Church fathers go all the way through the period of Augustine, which is about 400 AD. These were the early Christian writers, pastors so to speak, of the churches — and these bishops, the same thing as an elder.

The apostolic fathers were a subset. These were the men who lived up to about 150 AD. And they were actually claimed to be disciples of the disciples. Some of them knew John personally, so they had firsthand eyewitness accounts from these men. Perhaps they knew Timothy. Perhaps they knew Peter and some of the others.

The apostolic fathers give us quotations from every New Testament book — every single one of them — and that's before 150 AD. So the idea that, "Oh, nobody knew about 2 Peter until later on, because we don't have a copy from 150 AD, so it was added later" — well, they quote and acknowledge 2 Peter before 150 AD. Almost every book of the New Testament is quoted by the early Church fathers by around 300 AD.

Every verse was quoted. When they would write, they would write commentaries. They would write sermons. And instead of just saying, "Romans 9 tells me this," they would actually quote the entire chapter oftentimes in their writings. And so it would be challenging, but you could go through their writings and cut out all their scriptural quotations and you would be able to reproduce the entire New Testament. You may have a hard time putting it in order — it'd be like a puzzle — but that's how extensively it was quoted. So we have that early attestation from before 300 AD just from the Church fathers alone. It was quoted so often.

Number four: the New Testament was copied and circulated very widely within a decade of its completion. You may have studied the history of the Didache. It was written between 50 and 70 AD. And in it, the author quotes 10 of the 27 New Testament books. This is before 70 AD, before the destruction of Jerusalem.

Clement of Rome, who wrote in 95 AD, quotes 14 of the New Testament books. Ignatius, who was the Bishop of Syria and was condemned to die — martyred by Rome — as he passed through Asia Minor, wrote letters to churches, kind of like Paul wrote letters to churches. And he quotes or alludes to 17 books of the New Testament. This is before 110 AD.

Polycarp, who was said to be a disciple of John himself — John the Apostle — refers to 20 of the 27 New Testament books in one single letter. So we have these men quoting from these New Testament books all within about 30 years of it being completed, which is amazing. So it was spread wide and far, yes.

Can you go over Clement of Rome and take your form of that? Yes — Clement of Rome in 95 AD quotes 14 of the New Testament books. And then Ignatius quotes 17 of the New Testament books. And the Didache is 50 to 70 AD. So that is extremely close to when these books were written — 10 of the 27 books.

I'm just going to throw it out here and ask: do we have quotations for the Apocrypha in these early Church fathers? And if not, what's the difference that's being made for the canonicity of the Apocrypha? Exactly. We do have some quotes from the Apocrypha, and in two weeks, canon is going to be taught right here by Mr. Gerber. And so we're not going to get into it tonight. All these lessons build upon one another. So you're thinking ahead, which is great.

This next point is pretty amazing. Different authors wrote from different places at different times to different recipients in different areas, including Rome, Macedonia, Achaia, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria. At no time was the translation and distribution of the New Testament centrally controlled by men. That's the most important thing on this whole list. Even if you don't remember the dates, remember this. It's not just important — this is very, very, very, very, very important.

These were written by different authors from different places. Paul wrote some from prison, right? He wrote some when he was at Corinth. He wrote some from Ephesus. These were written at different times to different recipients in different areas all over the Mediterranean. At no time was the translation and distribution controlled by men.

When the Muslims say, "Well, Christ never claimed to be divine — three or four hundred years later, people entered these divinity statements about Christ into the text where Jesus claimed to be God," ask them when and where. They would have to go to all these different geographical places, round up all these copies, know multiple languages — Syriac, Coptic — because by the second century it had been translated into Latin and these other languages.

They would have to go and change them all. The Bible was never linearly produced. It was always organically done. It was never controlled by a man, but it was controlled by the Lord Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, by God Almighty, sovereignly given to the people who needed to hear it. And then these epistles were passed around. So it would be impossible for these to ever be controlled by men, by a group of monks in a back room saying, "We're going to rewrite this for our benefit."

Quickly here, number five: textual variants among manuscripts do exist. The vast majority are word order differences, spelling variants, and movable nu — and where these variants differ, they change no major doctrine. Textual variants among manuscripts do exist. The vast majority are word order differences, spelling variants, and movable nu.

What movable nu is, is kind of an archaic grammar element that helps you pronounce things better, but even the scribes didn't fully understand or always use it. In English we have something similar. When you use two vowels together, it sounds weird, right? You don't say, "I am going to eat a apple." You say, "I'm going to eat an apple," right? Well, they had the same thing in Greek. And the scribes didn't always use it. It wasn't uniform. But does that change the sentence at all? You know what I'm saying if I say, "I ate a apple" rather than "I ate an apple," right? Sometimes it just sounds better the other way around.

There's also what we call homoioteleuton. Scribes, when they would copy by hand, would look up at the Greek text above and then look down at the copy paper below and may skip a line. Homoioteleuton means "same ending." So sometimes there would be several words on the same line that ended in the same way — say, "ing" to put it into English terms. And so they wrote the first three words and stopped at a word, say, "understanding," that ended in "-ing." They write that down, then they go back up and look — "okay, where's -ing?" — but their eye doesn't go to where they left off; it goes to the next "-ing" that they see. So they skip a phrase. It's a common scribal error. We do the same thing. Have you ever copied something down? Sometimes you leave out a word or a phrase.

But where these variants do occur, they make no major difference in our doctrine. They don't change anything significant. This is what you'll hear skeptics say, especially those of you who may go to college, or maybe you meet an agnostic who is well-versed in this. They'll say, "There are 400,000 plus variants in the New Testament Scripture." And in the New Testament, if you counted up every word, there are 138,213 total words.

So you've got over 400,000 variants and 138,213 total words. That means there are three variants per every word in Scripture. In other words, for every word in Scripture, there's three variants. So how could you ever know what Jesus said? How would you ever be able to piece this together? "We have no confidence that this is Scripture because there are so many variants" — that's what they'll say. But they're being intellectually dishonest.

First of all, we have a lot of variants because we have over 2.5 million pages of handwritten Scripture. And that was the figure from when I was in seminary. So we've found a lot since then. There may be over 3 million pages. The more pages you have, the more variants you're going to have, right? If you just had one copy of something, how many variants would you have? Zero, because you only have one copy. But when you have over 2.5 million pages of Scripture, you're going to have a lot of variants — things such as word order differences, spelling variants, the movable nu, homoioteleuton, those kinds of things.

Whenever we find these variants, 99% of them do not impact the meaning of the sentence at all. 1% do, but of that 1% — which is about 4,000 — less than half, about 1,500 of these variants, are what we call viable. What we mean by viable is that they have early support. If we have a reading that is late — say, a variant from around 1300 AD — and we have no prior variant that reads that way, we say it has no support. No other document existed before then. This was a scribal change or an error. We can disregard this. We say it's not viable.

And in most of the viable variants that we do have, we can deduce the original meaning pretty easily from looking at the context. Let me give you a couple of examples. Look down below. You see John 5:4. John 5:4 deals with the man who was paralyzed and was sitting by the pool of Siloam. He was waiting for a stirring of the water by the angel, which is kind of strange. They believed that an angel would stir the water, and then he wanted someone to carry him down there into the water where he would be healed.

One thing that a college professor or an agnostic may do is say, "In your Bible, show me John 5:4." If you have the NIV or the ESV, many of the translations you have in front of you, it won't be there. And the reason why it's not there is because that is considered to be a variant. In the earliest documents we have that contain that verse — verse 4 — we see on the left-hand side of the scroll a scribal note, an annotation, which means a scribe was annotating this, trying to explain, kind of like a commentary in the margin, what the text was saying.

We believe that this is a case where that scribal note got moved from the margin and into the text. So that would be one variant. It's in some early ones and it's not in others. So it would be a viable variant. Most good translations will have it in the notes. It'll say, "This is not in the earliest and best manuscripts," or whatever they want to say about that. But Christians are honest about their text. They're not lying about the text. They put these notes in there — they're not hiding it from you. It's actually the best transparency you can imagine.

When we find a variant, we let you know about that variant. Another variant that you may see is in the longer ending of Mark, Mark chapter 16. Many older manuscripts stop at verse 8. Not all do. Verses 9 through 16 — there are actually four different endings of Mark, depending on which manuscript you're looking at. Some of them have a longer ending, a few extra verses; some of them don't. Is it okay to count those as Scripture? Yes, because you have early attestation. But there is some debate about it. Does it change any major doctrine? None whatsoever. But we annotate that in our Scriptures. We let you know. We're honest. Yes, this is something we're not sure of. It's a viable variant.

1 John chapter 3 verse 1, which is talking about adoption — it says "that in such we are" in the New King James and the King James, but in others that phrase is not there. And the reason why is that we believe this to be a variant caused by homoioteleuton — the same ending. The phrase that's left out ends in what we call MEN, Mu Epsilon Nu. And the word right before it also ended in Mu Epsilon Nu. So the scribe's eye, as he was copying, just looked at the ending and left off that little phrase. But if it's not in there, does it change what we think about adoption? No, because aren't there other texts in Scripture that talk about being adopted? Romans 8, for one — exactly right.

Then one last example. 1 Timothy 3:16 begins with, "God was manifested in the flesh." This is a great early creed of the Christian faith. But some translations may say "who was manifested in the flesh." If you look down at my notes, you'll see nomina sacra. In early text copying — we don't know exactly why — many of the copyists would abbreviate holy names, such as Jesus, Christ, and God Almighty. And later on, this practice extended beyond just the holy names.

They would abbreviate by putting a line above the contracted word. If you look over on the right, you'll see that Theos is abbreviated by the nomina sacra as what looks like an OC, with the O having a line above it and a little mark within the O. Well, when you look at some of the uncials, some of the copies just have a regular OC without the line above and that little mark, which would translate to "who." So which is right? Hard to say. It could be that some of the copies that do not have that accent mark above it once had it and it faded out, because a lot of these documents have faded over time. Or maybe that was the original reading. We really don't know.

What I can say is that it is extensively quoted as "God" — not "who" — by the early Church fathers. And we also have the early Codex Alexandrinus referring to it as "God was manifested in the flesh." But if it's translated "who was manifested in the flesh," does that take away our understanding that Christ became flesh? Where would we go to find that the Word was made flesh? John chapter 1, right? So it doesn't affect any major doctrine whatsoever.

So we will see some variants. We need to be honest about variants, not scared of variants. They are few and far between. And when we do find them, we know that they don't affect the major meaning of Scripture. And we actually annotate them right here. We're not hiding anything. No one has gone behind the scenes and edited out and taken away parts of Scripture as some people like to theorize. Number six: the Bible is unlike any other document in its power to transform lives through Jesus Christ.

We've gone over a lot of minutiae and gotten a little bit nerdy with you, because I want to give you a taste of what this is like. But don't ever forget that this Bible we have — not only is it dated earlier than any other ancient manuscripts, not only is it more credible and authentic, not only does the number of copies far exceed any others — don't forget that this is a living, powerful, active, breathing word, and it changes people's hearts. Right? Paul said, "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to the Jew first and also to the Greek." Hebrews 4:12 says, "For the word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart."

H.A. Ironside — I'm going to close with this. You may know him; he's long since deceased. He was pastor at Moody Bible Church for a long time, an eminent Bible scholar. He wrote many commentaries. You may be familiar with them. Early on in his ministry, he did a lot of street preaching and evangelizing — like you do when you go downtown Winter Garden.

He was doing it in the Bay Area out in San Francisco at that time as a young man. One time he was preaching and had a group of around 60 or so people gathered around him. There was one man who was very well dressed, carried himself well, looked like a man of means, who watched and stared at him intently. And he knew that this man wanted to talk to him. So afterwards, this man approached him and handed him his business card — a very nice, ornate business card.

He said, "Mr. Ironside, I want to challenge you to a debate at the National Academy of Sciences next Sunday, and I'm going to cover all the expenses. I'm going to present the case of the agnostic and I want you to present the case of the Christian before an audience and let's see who wins the debate." H.A. Ironside told him this without hesitation. He said, "I'll tell you what — I will do so on two conditions.

First of all, that you bring witnesses and I bring witnesses. I want you to bring at least two witnesses, a man and a woman. Let them be down-and-outers." That was what they called back then people who were on the street, living lives of debauchery, drunkenness, whatever. He said, "I don't care what their sinful life has been, but I want you to find two down-and-outers who heard the Gospel, rejected it as baloney, then heard the agnostic gospel, and were so thrilled by the fact that there wasn't a God that it inspired them to leave off their sins, to change their lives, to go back to their families, to change their whole way of living, to become model citizens.

I want you to find two people like that who will testify. And I will bring at least a hundred men and women who were prostitutes, who were vagrants, who were drunkards, whose lives were radically changed by the Lord Jesus Christ upon hearing His Gospel, who had gone back to their families, whose lives are changed, and who are now changing other people's lives. If you do that, I will debate with you." And the man said, "Carry on," shook his head, and walked off.

Because the Bible is a living, breathing word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword. So end of scholastic debates — don't ever forget that the very character of Scripture is a witness to its authenticity, to its credibility, because this changes lives like nothing else can.