I'd like you to grab one of the Pew Bibles in front of you. If there's not one in front of you, there will be one behind you. And open up to John chapter eight. Okay, you're gonna notice that John chapter eight starts with John chapter seven, verse 53. Let me read this passage to you. They went each to his own house, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning, he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst, they said to him, Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now, in the law of Moses commanded us to stone such woman. So what do you say? This they said to test him that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her. And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? She said, No one, Lord. And Jesus said, Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on sin no more. Okay, so we've gone over the passage. Did anybody see anything unusual in there? Anybody? Double brackets, double brackets. Well, when I did my ordination about a year and a half ago, one of the questions they asked me, and my panel was sitting there, I wrote this long paper. I was pretty confident in my paper until I sat down and he introduced the people on my ordination council to me. I had two seminary professors and four authors on my ordination council. And their job was to examine me. And one of the questions they asked was, what do you do about the end of Mark and the John 753 through 811? Well, I was pretty confident that I had that nailed. I gave the standard answer that each of you would probably give. I said, well, the origins of those passages are somewhat questionable. So, because they are, they're in the Bible, we have to deal with them, we don't read them and form any doctrine or theology from them. And I smiled. And they all looked at me and went, oh, okay. And one of the seminary professors said, and? And I said, I got no more. And what? And so, when we were done with the Ordination Council, they gave me five things that I had to work on, and they said, you know, take some time after this. One of those five things was a thing called textual criticism. And that's what we're going to talk to you about today. So this is gonna be a little bit of a different type of sermon. And we've got a little bit of work to do this morning. So I wanna just explain what these double brackets are and what we can do about them. Now, in order to do that, I need to give you some background as even why we're doing this and why it would seem important to us. I was called to be an intern 12 years ago. Shortly after that, I started filling in the pulpit. Shortly after that, I became executive pastor. And right there in the middle of all that, I became what is known as an expositor, somebody who preaches the Bible verse by verse, book by book. Now, when I, you know, I was convicted by that, that that was the way to teach the Bible, it ignited a fire in my heart that burns to this day to preach the undiluted Word of God. And the way we wanted to preach that was to understand what the original authors were saying, what the original hearers were hearing or reading when they read it, and how that applies to us today. So one of the promises I made to the congregation back then was that I would go through these books and not skip over the hard parts. I would not skip the parts that might offend somebody, and that I would do the best I could to bring the truth of God. I believe that we have, to the best of our capabilities, been able to stick to that covenant that I started with the congregation 12 years ago. Now, let me tell you why that's important for you to understand. because you can sit in a lot of churches today and walk out with three or four or five things that you can do to be a better Christian, that you can do to improve your walk. We are preaching, brothers and sisters, the Word of God and transformation of hearts by the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit through that Word of God. The heart of what we've been trying to do for 12 years here at Warrington Bible Fellowship is in Galatians 4, verse 19. my little children for whom I again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you until Christ is formed in us we don't want a guideline for living the Christian life we want to be transformed by the presence and the power of Christ by the guidance of the Holy Spirit through his holy word So today, what are we going to do about those double brackets? Well, it might be helpful to understand how we got the Bible. As we look at where these texts come from and where our philosophy of ministry is, you know, our philosophy of ministry is not to skip over, to equip you. And let me just linger there for a second. When we started this 12 years ago, the people that guided me in exposition all were saying the same thing. Look, if you go back to your hometown and you start expositing scripture, you're going to be the only guy in town doing that. We were. We were. Nobody else was doing it. And it's become popular now. It's become a little bit mainstream, I believe, because it's the right way to do it. And so when we started going down this road, the whole thing was to bring out the Word of God, bring out the authority of God, and to convey that to you so that you would grow up on a steady diet of the Word of God so that When life rises up, as it has a tendency to do, and stings us, we don't have to go back to a list of things to do. We can go to the scriptures. Now again, 12 years ago, that wasn't very significant, but you can see the wisdom of God in raising up expositors as more and more of them come into the church because of the times that we're in. 12 years ago, we would never have imagined that we'd be going through the things that we're going through right now. So it's on my heart, the heart of the elders, the heart of our two pastors here, all of our leadership team, to equip you as best as we can to live in the times that we're in. You know, I've said it before, five years ago, Christians, the church, we were the good guys. Nobody liked us, but we were the good guys. Everybody knew that we had a sense of integrity and a sense of moral honor. Today, they call us haters. Today, we're the bad guys. We are intolerant and narrow-minded, and those people who are so much in favor of tolerance in all things just can't seem to tolerate us. Figure that one out. So my passion, the passion of Scott and Seth and the elders, is to give you the Word of God as a foundation for living in a time when the world is hostile to our faith and our belief. And I gotta tell you something. Our kids are gonna have it worse. It's not getting better. So they need to be equipped too. This is why everywhere you look in our church, our teaching is based and founded on the Word of God. Even in the songs that we sing as we worship, they are scripture. They are scriptural truths. We've got 90 minutes on Sunday morning to convey the Word of God in a manner that allows you to walk throughout the entire week depending on it and looking at it for your spiritual growth and health. So that's what's behind all this. So where did this Word of God come from? Well, it's a long story. We're gonna try and try and boil this down to something that's easy to absorb. We're talking about textual criticism. That's not literally criticizing the text. That is an analysis of the manuscripts that are used to write the Bible. So it's a textual critique, not a complaint against the text. And we're gonna try to explain these terms. And I pray that by the time we're done, that you see the same thing I've seen in the last 18 months as I've gone deep into this, that God has actually done an incredible job of preserving His Word, and preserving the integrity of His Word, and that this is not a teaching that is designed to pull the legs out from underneath you. So please, listen to me carefully. Listen to me objectively, listen to me thoroughly, don't check out because you don't agree with something I say, and see if the Holy Spirit moves in your heart as well. So we have the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament was written over a period of 1,400 to 1,500 years, recognized as authoritative by the Hebrews, copied absolutely meticulously by the people who were given charge to copy. Most of them were priests. They were absolutely incredible in the methods they used. The high-ranking copyists were called masoretes from somewhere in Alexandria. They kind of set the standard for everybody. And they would literally, they would sit down, and they'd have another copy with them, and they'd copy it, then they'd count the words, they'd count the letters. If the letters and the words didn't add up, if they weren't in the right positions on the piece of paper, they'd throw the whole thing out and start over again. They approached us with such reverence that the scribes that were copying it, every time they wrote the Word of God, they would destroy their pen, go bathe, change all of their clothing, go through the mikvah, through a cleansing process, and then go back to their copying. And if they wrote the Word of God two words later, they would go through the whole process again. So there was this incredibly accurate process in reproducing the Old Testament. So by the time you get to 435 BC, the time of Zechariah, the time of Malachi, God stopped leading people in what to write. The Old Testament was copied by prophets. It was written by prophets. And God stopped speaking to those prophets right around 435. Now, the extra-biblical sources kind of detail this. Josephus talks about the time of the prophets up through Antexerxes, which is a book of Esther. Thank you very much. The book of Esther kind of brackets the beginning and the end of the Old Testament. And even the book of Maccabees, which is in the Apocrypha, we'll talk about that in a little bit. talks about the Maccabees pushing the Romans out and retaking the Temple Mount and wanting to rebuild the altar but not knowing exactly what to do or how to do it or having God's blessing to do that they stack all of the stones to the altar off to the side and the scripture says waiting for a prophet to come and guide them so God is silent for 400 years The Jews have no prophet. There's no further scripture being written. Their canon is closed. So you can imagine, as we've been going through John, what was going on in Jerusalem the day that somebody runs into town and says, there's a prophet out in the wilderness. John the Baptist. It's the prophet they've been waiting for. God hasn't spoken in 400 years and the prophet John the Baptist is here. This is why everybody runs out to see him. They've been waiting for God to speak. He tells them, I'm not really worthy to tie the bootlaces of the one who comes behind me. I'm just a forerunner. The one that I wanna point you towards is Jesus Christ. Well, that didn't go over real well, as we're seeing in John. But Jesus begins his ministry, he gets baptized, he comes out of the water, he starts calling disciples. People are following him all over the countryside, large crowds, so on and so forth. At one point, Jesus singles out 12 of his followers and he tells them, you are going to be my apostles, he calls them. And the Holy Spirit, when I leave, the Holy Spirit will bring to your remembrance those things that I said and I wrote. So Jesus literally says, you guys are going to write scripture. We've got prophets in the Old Testament, and we have in the New Testament, we have apostles and the inner circle of influence of the apostles. You know, we don't know who wrote Hebrews, Jude, James, Luke. But those were all people that were very heavily influenced, very close to the apostles, and current line of thinking is that the apostles either approved of what they wrote or actually influenced what they wrote. So you have apostles in the New Testament, prophets in the Old Testament. So they are the ones that are given responsibility for writing scripture. And it's an absolutely incredible process that the entire New Testament is written over a period of about 40 years. 1,500 years for the Old Testament, 40 for the New. Now it's important to understand that it took only 40 years because once the apostles, the ones who were designated as apostles by Jesus Christ himself, once they passed away, there were no more apostles that were inspired to write scripture. When John passes away sometime in the mid-nineties, perhaps, on Patmos, maybe a little bit later, maybe a little bit earlier, when he passed away, he's the last of the apostles, the last of the inspired ones. Technically, for all intents and purposes, the canon is closed. Now, they didn't recognize that at first because the authority of their writings, of the apostles' writings, wasn't completely recognized at first. But what happened was, as these guys moved through the countryside, as they began their teaching, they started writing letters, the letters that we're talking about right now that are in the New Testament, they started writing their gospels, and they started reading them and giving them to the churches. The churches immediately recognized that something special was going on. And it didn't take very long for them to understand that these writings were actually inspired by God. And they started circulating them more and more. Now, some of them took a while to circulate. Some of them, people weren't sure at the beginning. But somewhere very, very early in the second century, the church recognized the body of literature we have right now as being authoritative. And some people say sometime late in the first century. So very close to the time that the apostles walked on earth, their writings were recognized as authoritative and inspired by the word of God. Now, immediately after them, you had two groups of teachers. We call them the early church fathers. Some of them were there in the first century, second century, helping the church grow. Some of them were a little bit later through the second and third centuries and early fourth. Those are called the anti-Nicene fathers. They are the ones that had theological influence prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325. Those guys were not just theologians and were not just church leaders. They were prolific commentators. They were prolific writers. There are volumes and volumes of commentaries that they produce. There's enough commentaries that they've written that they have actually been able to assemble a complete New Testament using the quotes that they wrote in their commentaries prior to 325. None of them have John 7.53 through 8.11 in it. It's not mentioned. It's not acknowledged. Nobody writes about it. Nobody comments on it. Well, what's it doing there? Well, here's what happened. As the letters were circulated, as people began to see him as authoritative, the church was exploding. And oddly enough, God caused the church to expand so rapidly through persecution. you know, Christians would rise up in one area, somebody would get upset, they'd go in and try and get rid of all of the texts, try and get rid of all the scriptures, the Christians, they would scatter, and they'd take the gospel with them. So the church was expanding very rapidly, and they couldn't keep circulating the originals. They were written on very weak papyrus, papyri, scrolls made out of plants that would disintegrate easily after their use. Some of them were written on what they called vellum, which is an animal hide that they would have sheets and kind of bind them together. They call them codexes now. They look a lot like a book. But they just weren't lasting, so they needed copies. So they didn't have masoretes to copy them, and they needed a lot of copies fast. So the way they would copy the letters of the New Testament is somebody would stand in a room and read the letter, and he would have 20 or 25 guys sitting there writing down what he said. Now that was good, that was fine, and they would do that over and over again, except sometimes somebody would move a comma. Actually, they didn't have commas, but somebody would change the way they punctuated things. Every now and then, somebody would get one word wrong, and, or, the, something like that. Nothing significant. And I need to tell you up front, as we get deeper into this, these are called variants. There's one manuscript says this, the other manuscript says that. The total number of variants we have amounts to less than a half percent of the entire text, and that includes this passage here. So there were minor variances. None of them, none of them had anything to do with any doctrinal or theological position, and they've never uncovered a variant that did. But there were human beings that were copying them. And they're getting distributed. Meanwhile, the early church fathers are writing their commentaries. Some people, as they're copying the scriptures, go, oh, well, you know, Augustine said something about that. I'll just put a note out here in the margin. And over a couple hundred years, some of those notes migrated into the text. Now, at first, they were notated. This is a note. Somewhere along the way, some of them weren't notated. So by the time we get to Nicaea in 325, there are a number of variants out there. A guy named Athanasius, you've probably heard the name before, noted church scholar, theologian, okay? He stands up and says, here's what we're gonna do. You know, this Bible is getting pretty widespread, pretty widely distributed. We're going to define the books here in the Bible. Now, Athanasius didn't, you know, we have this idea that there was this big meeting somewhere, and they brought in all these books, and somebody said, well, that one's gotta go, and this one's gotta stay, and we don't like that one. And, you know, if you listen to Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code, he'll convince you the church hid some books. So you have the hidden books of the New Testament that you can buy on Amazon. That's how hidden they are. You know, you have the Apocrypha, which actually means hidden books. And we go, oh, hidden books. They're right there in the Orthodox and Catholic Bible. They're not hidden anywhere. They're just not authoritative. Athanasius says, here's what we're going to do. We're going to acknowledge and affirm the group of books that the first century church recognized as authoritative, and we're going to set them apart from all the other writings that are going on. So nobody ever decided what books were in the Bible other than the apostles and the churches that they were written to. There was no vote, no list that was edited and re-edited and added to and subtracted to. All they did was say, we are acknowledging and affirming that these are the books of the New Testament. They already had the Old Testament done. So that happens in 393. In 397, the Pope, decides that They have to have a Latin Bible now all you know, the Old Testament is written in in Hebrew and Aramaic New Testament is written in Greek Greek was no longer the dominant language in the world. Pope Domitius decides that he needs a Latin Bible, and he charges a theologian, a world-class, even to this day, theologian named Jerome, to translate a Latin Bible. Jerome gets the best manuscripts he can. He doesn't have very many research capabilities. It's hard to travel. He's using pretty much the things that are relatively close to him, relatively recent. And he writes a version of the Bible called the Vulgate. Anybody heard of the Vulgate before? It's what the Catholic Church based their worship on for 1,500 years. The Vulgate. Now, the Vulgate is good for a while. It eventually does the Old Testament. That's in there as well. There are two church councils, one at Hippo in 393, another one at Carthage in 397, and they affirm what Athanasius said about the books of the Bible. And at that point, the canon is officially closed. The end of the 4th century, the canon is officially closed. Remember that. The end of the 4th century, the canon is officially closed. Now, that concept is based on the verses that Pastor Seth read a little bit earlier. There's one verse at the beginning of the Bible in Deuteronomy. It says, don't add anything to this book. Don't take anything away from it. There's another one right at the end of the Bible in Revelation 22. Don't add anything. Don't take anything away. We can have a long talk about whether or not that pertains to Revelation and Deuteronomy or whether that pertains to the whole book. I'm here to advise you that it's a good philosophy on the entire Bible. Don't add anything to it. Don't take anything away from it. So now we've got the Vulgate, and the Catholic Church is getting more and more influential. The original Vulgate had the Apocrypha, which was not recognized as authoritative then. And then somewhere at 1512, I think it was, you have Gutenberg shows up at 1455. Prior to that, it's something to think about, in 650, a monk called Kaedmon versifies the Bible. He divides it up into chapters and paragraphs, puts numbers on them, and gives each line a number. So versification shows up in 650. Gutenberg comes up with the printing press, 1455, starts printing Latin Bibles, and the entire world changes. Everything gets turned upside down. Now the Bible's available to everyone. Shortly after that, There was another theologian, another noted and good theologian named Erasmus. Erasmus, in 1516, decides that he wants to assemble a new Greek New Testament. Now, here's where things start getting interesting. Because Erasmus wants to use the most modern methods, and he wants to do a lot of research, and he worked really hard on this, and he actually did quite a fine job, except... Erasmus used some of the material used to put together the Vulgate, but also started drawing on material and text and fragments that dated back to the 11th and 12th centuries. Okay, now if you remember the process used in duplicating those texts and everything, by the time we get to the 11th and 12th centuries, the variances are multiplying. And Erasmus uses that to come up with a new Greek testament. It's not well-received at first. He makes some changes in it, and then people begin respecting it, and it wouldn't have much impact on us, except... 20 years later comes a guy named Luther. Remember Luther? Reformation, 95 thesis on the door. And Luther begins to gain influence and decides that he wants the Bible written in German. Luther takes Erasmus' work and translates it into German. Now, how many of you guys have a German Bible at home? Oh, no one. Oh, Peter's got one. So that really doesn't affect us very much. Except in 1607, the King of England decides we need a New Testament in English. And he charges his people with making a new version of the Bible based on the work that Luther did Erasmus and in 1611 they came out with the King James version of the Bible okay now you're with me so the King James best-selling Bible in the history of the world Still the second best-selling Bible on the market, King James. And if you ever talk to those people that are rabid King James followers, you know how committed they are to it. Except it's based on manuscripts that are used in the 11th century, in the 12th century, the 8th century. When was the canon closed? Fourth century. Fourth century. Okay? Here's, you know, we look at that and you take a look at the King James, it does not have double brackets, it doesn't have a footnote, it doesn't say anything about these passages. Some of the more modern ones may have a footnote down at the bottom of the paper. Okay? Here's the question that, you know, once we understand how all that happens, the King James doesn't have John 7, 53 through 8, 11. I'm sorry, it does have it. The NASB, the ESV, the NIV, most of your modern translations recognize that this doesn't belong there, and they've notated it, and I'll tell you why in a little bit. There's either double brackets or a footnote. King James has got it, the newer translations don't. So this is how that happened, okay? King James comes out with his version in 1611. There are some problems with it. They edit it right away in 1617, they come out with another one. Late in the 19th century, they update it because nobody could read it anymore. I don't know if you've ever seen a 1611 King James, but it's almost unreadable. It's got the funny S's and, you know, and it's not just the V's and the Vals. And what happens is late in the 19th century as well, there's a recognition that the manuscripts that were used for the King James weren't the best and oldest manuscripts. So there are two men, Westcott and Hort, that decide that they're going to come up with a new Greek, a Greek New Testament, a new version of the Greek New Testament, okay? So what they do is they go on a worldwide search looking for the oldest and the best manuscripts, and they spend a good deal of time doing this. They find codexes in Mount Catherine's, St. Catherine's Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai. And that's called the Codex Sinaticus. Now, these are codexes that when assembled, it's a complete copy of the New Testament. There are fragments and pages and that sort of thing in there, but they've got it. They find another codex in the basement of the Vatican, the Codex Vaticanus. They find another codex, and they found it in Germany, but it had come from Alexandria, Egypt, where the air was arid and things had a tendency to be preserved, and that was called the Codex Alexandrinus, okay? They take those three codexes, plus a whole host of other fragments that they found, and they write a Greek New Testament. Nobody likes it. They're actually almost drummed out of the whole theology business, okay? So they're trying to defend themselves. People kind of start coming around and going, well, they did do a lot of hard work, and they do have the oldest manuscripts here that predate the other manuscripts. So there's some recognition that they did okay, but 10 years later, two other guys named Nestle and Aland begin doing the same thing. They want to come up with a new Greek New Testament. And they understand that Westcott and Hort are not held in very high regard, so they discard all of their work and go on their own search. And they take eight years to do it. And when they produce their translation, it is almost exactly the duplicate of Westcott and Hort's. And the whole theological world raises their eyebrows and goes, Oh. And it doesn't have John 7, 53 through 8, 11. It doesn't have the ending of Mark that you'll find in your Bibles in the same double brackets. Everything after verse 8 in Mark 16 is in double brackets. What do we do with that? What do we do with that? Look, we understand this. God has moved in a powerful way to preserve His Word. God has moved in a miraculous, supernatural way. He gave us Westcott and Hort. He gave us Nestle and Elan. Nestle and Elan, you can read their work today in a book called the UBS Greek New Testament. It's in its 29th edition right now. He gave us these men who devoted their entire life to bringing God's undiluted word to the world. And we thank God that people like Westcott and Hort were bold enough to stand up and say, King James made a mistake. King James made a mistake. So when we look at the double brackets, we praise God that this has been identified as something, you know, the earliest manuscripts they can find that have that passage in it are from the 5th century. The 5th century, after the 4th century, right? Okay? And the funny thing about it is, when it does pop up, sometimes it's right here at verse 53. Other times it's after John 7, 38. Other times it's in John chapter 20 in two different places. And even other times it's in Luke. It's the same story, the same words. in different places in the Bible starting in the fifth century. So we thank God that we have people and resources that he has used to make sure that his word is untainted. Just as a summary, you have people that we know and respect that all agree that It's extra-biblical. Don Carson, Bruce Metzger, Leon Morris, Andre Kostenberger, Herman Ritterbos. I know those names might not be familiar to you. If you need to know more about them, let me know. But they are the top theologians of our time. The top textual critics of our time. Stories missing from the earliest and best Greek manuscripts of John. All the early church fathers make no mention of it, nowhere they don't refer to it. If you take a look at the text later on this afternoon and pull that out and read from 752 to 812, the text flows very nicely. There are a number of questions that arise if you try to put that in the middle of where it is now. No eastern church father cites it. Then you have this difficulty that shows up in different places. And even more than that, and you've got to get deep in the language to understand this, it's written differently than John writes. And one of the things you can take a look at is the passage mentions scribes. John doesn't use that word anywhere in his writings. It's nowhere. John talks about Pharisees and priests. How does this impact our day? Well, listen carefully. The story itself, and coincidentally, all of the people that I just mentioned believe that the story is true. They believe that it actually happened. And if you take a look at the story, it's true to the character and nature of who Christ is. It's true to the times. You know, the Pharisees show up, and they say, hey, we got this woman that's caught in adultery. The law says we're supposed to stone her. What do you say, Jesus? And you've got to know what the law says. Listen, the law they're quoting is out of Deuteronomy 22, 22. If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman and the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. So they show up. They've got the woman. Where's the guy? They don't have the guy. Both of them are supposed to die. They're not even interested. They're not looking for justice. The story says they're trying to trick Jesus. They're trying to trap him. And what does Jesus do? Jesus literally says, it's not about the law, it's about grace. You've received grace. She should receive grace. One of you wants to stone her, go ahead. If you're without sin. Everybody leaves, he says, sin no more. That's a nice story. Here's a problem. If you receive this as authoritative, then you've got to receive the ending of Mark as authoritative as well. And, you know, if you read later on this afternoon, read past Mark 8, read up to Mark 16, 8, and you see the dramatic change in language, Phrasing and everything is totally different. It's very obvious that Mark didn't write this. And that passage advocates picking up serpents and drinking poison. Now look, some of us have been close to people that have engaged in those practices. Matter of fact, it's been in the news most recently over the last six months. We have people down in Tennessee and Kentucky that are dying because they're handling snakes and drinking poison. So we can't receive these passages in the brackets as authoritative scripture. They are extra biblical. Now, don't let this shake you. Let this be an encouragement to you. There are other extra biblical things in our Bibles. There are things in our Bibles that aren't inspired. Take a look at them. Open up your Bible. Go to the front. Is there a table of contents there? Do you think for one moment that they had a scroll with the contents on it? You know, is there a publisher's page there? There is, okay, and we just heard about Caedmon. Chapter headings, chapter numbers, verses, they weren't there, they're not inspired. As a matter of fact, I think the versification of the Bible is probably one of the greatest plagues perpetrated on the church that we have ever experienced. Because of versification, we could go look at this one verse. And you know, one of our passions is taking everything in context here. It's so easy to develop bumper sticker theology from one verse without reading in context. But I know John 3.16 says this, without any regard to John 3.15 or 14 or 17. So the verses were not inspired. The pericopes, the pericope over this, pericope is kind of a fancy word for paragraph, The pericopes are not inspired. The pericope over this passage in John chapter eight says the woman caught in adultery. These additional verses are the same as that. And we praise God that somebody was able to tell us that these were added after the canon was closed. So it's not evil, it's not bad, they're good stories kinda. We just don't want to form our theology based on it. You know, we look at this, and I can't tell you how many hours I've spent with groups, different groups of people going, I wonder what Jesus was writing on the ground. Oh, I think it was the fish. Yeah, it was probably the fish. You know, oh no, it was, and somebody once told me he was writing a verse reference to the Old Testament. I don't think so Okay, so we get hung up on on that and we start saying things like if you live in glass houses You shouldn't throw stones that's based on this passage so we end up with a great to-do and no transformation and No transformation the book isn't a book about to do It's a book about transformation and regeneration It's a book about the work of God sending his son to redeem fallen man and bring glory to him. And I thank God and praise him that he's preserved it and given it to us in as close a form as we can get and still have it as a translation. Listen to this. You know, you look at ancient scriptures and I'm probably going to talk about a few things that you might not be familiar with, perhaps some of you history people are, but you have the There was a history written by Julius Caesar called the Gaelic Wars, composed sometime between 58 and 50 BC. It's actually quite informative, and for the academics, this is a big thing. There are 10 existing manuscripts of the Gaelic Wars. All 10 of those were written in the 12th century. So over 1,000 years between the time Julius Caesar wrote it and the earliest manuscript we have. Livy's Roman history, written while Jesus was alive. There are 20 manuscripts of that. All of those are 11th and 12th century, a thousand years after it's written. Tacitus' Histories and the Annals of History, composed around AD 100. There are only two of those, and one from the 9th century and the other from the 10th century. The History of Thucydides, lived around 460-400 BC, right around there. There are only eight manuscripts of that, again, all of those 12th, 13th, 14th century manuscripts. 1,500, 2,000 years after it was written. You compare those to the manuscripts we have for the New Testament, the earliest and best, and there are over 30,000. There are 30,000 manuscripts and fragments of the Old Testament, and a lot of those dating back to the 2nd century and the 3rd century, less than 100 years after they were written. We have the most thoroughly documented ancient text that man has ever seen in our Bible. 30,000 compared to 10. And I don't even want to get into Homer and the Odyssey and the Iliad because those didn't have copies until almost 2,000 years after they were written. So God has preserved His Word. He's given us the evidence of it. He's given us scholars that devote their lives to it. And we can depend on it. And He's given us double brackets to show us which ones we shouldn't depend on. Amen? Okay, now look, I know there will be questions. Matter of fact, we've got a minute or two. I can take one or two questions right now. Anybody have a question? Peter. Peter wants to know why the translators of the ESV wouldn't just leave it out. Bruce Metzger, who's dead now, was one of the leaders of the ESV translation team, struggled with that. And so did the translators of the NIV, the New King James, and the NASB. And ultimately, you know, what do we do? If we put it in there, people are going to see it as authoritative. If we take it out, it's going to cause more problems, because the King James Version is ancient. And there are so many of them out there, and so many people were raised in the faith on the King James Version. So, ultimately, they decided that they would leave it in and notate it, so that people could be cautious about it. Their final decision, and there's no easy answer to what you do about that, just like there's no easy answer about how we preach this passage, but ultimately they decided that it would be more problematic to take it out than to leave it in. Anyone else? One more question. Thank you, thank you. We go back to the volume of texts that we have, the volume of older and better texts that we have, again over 30,000, and we understand that the variances in those is less than one half percent. less than 1.5% differences between the texts. That includes the end of Mark and the beginning of John chapter 8. So we can depend on the inerrancy of God because the variances are very minor. And most of them are in the areas of punctuation and that sort of thing. So again, in all of the variances that they have, there is not one that impacts our theology or our doctrine or the truth of the message that God wanted to give us through the Bible. And, you know, we're dealing with translations, folks. The original ones didn't even have punctuation. Matter of fact, the original texts were written in what they call unchules, all capitals in a big square. So there were no line breaks, there were no word breaks. The ones who read them had to pick everything out of there. So we deal with translations, we deal with a minuscule number of variants in non-essential areas. Let's pray. Father, we thank you and we praise you for being faithful and good and being true to all of your promises. I pray, Father, your spirit would move in us, would move among us. Lord, that this would not be a moment of doubt, but a moment of affirmation that you would comfort our hearts and touch our souls, and that the transformation that you began in us would continue until it's perfected. Amen.