Jude 3 reads, Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. May God bless again the reading and the hearing of his word in this place. Well, in the previous lectures, I tried to lay out a way of thinking about the transmission, the origins and the transmission of the traditional text or the confessional text. And we talked about four eras that we could trace. First, the emergence of the text, from its writing and early faithful copying, and how it was providentially kept. And then up to the Reformation period, second period, where we talked about the triumph of the traditional text when it was put in that stable form, printed form. And then we began last time to talk about challenges that were lodged against this traditional text that started in the Enlightenment or the Endarkment, and went through the 19th century and the rise of modern historical criticism and modern text criticism, and all the way into then the 20th century, the rise of the academic handbooks and the writings of people like Metzger and Aland and so forth. But there's a little bit more that I want to say about the challenges that were lodged against the text. And then at the end, we're going to talk about the affirmation of why we can make a case for holding to the traditional text. But we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the unique challenges that have been lodged now in the 21st century. So now we have moved, have we not, from really the modern era into a new era, and of course this is often referred to as the postmodern era, the postmodern age that we're in. And there have been some unique challenges that are going on right now with regard to the Bible in this particular age. The postmodern age has been variously described as the age of diversity, the age of relativism, the age of multiculturalism. One wag has described postmodernism as having one's feet firmly planted in midair. When it comes to text criticism, one might suggest that the modern age came to an end and the postmodern age began, with regard to text criticism, with the publication of Bart Ehrman's 1993 book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. It was a watershed. That's why Ehrman is well known. Now, it's hard to tell these things. When I teach a survey of the New Testament, I always do a lecture at the beginning about different ages of the interpretation of the Bible. And I talk about the pre-critical age from the time of the apostles to the Reformation, the Reformation age from 1517 to, I take it, to 1689. And then I say the Enlightenment, 1689. I take it to 1789, the French Revolution was the height of the Enlightenment. And then the modern period, I usually date from 1879 to 1989. And that's the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism. And that leads us to the age that we're in now, this postmodern age. But with regard to text criticism, it's Bart Ehrman's 1993 book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Ehrman, a former evangelical Christian, had attended Wheaton University and Moody Bible College before going to Princeton Seminary, as I've already noted, to study text criticism under Bruce Metzger, where Being introduced to text criticism, he eventually deconverted. And of course, we don't believe in that as we'd say he was a false professor and was never actually converted. But anyway, ostensibly he deconverted, abandoned his Christian profession. He claims to be an agnostic, but he seems more like an atheist. This landmark book of his in 1993 turned the world of text criticism on its ear as it argued that it was, in fact, the Orthodox Christians who had corrupted the transmission of the text of the Bible in order to fight against those whom they perceived to be heretical. See, the traditional view was that the heretics had corrupted the scriptures and the Orthodox had preserved them. He said, no, no, no, no, no. The Orthodox corrupted the scriptures. And many of the authentic readings were actually those of Gnostics, those who didn't believe in the deity of Christ, subordinationists, adoptionists. And so it's the Orthodox corruption of scripture, as the title of his book indicates. And his view, wider view was that heretical Christian groups in the larger early Christian movement were just as legitimate as the Orthodox. The Christian movement from the very beginning was diverse. What's true for you isn't true for me. Postmodern. It was a diverse movement. from the very beginning. We therefore, according to Ehrman, cannot speak of early Christianity, singular, but should instead speak of early Christianities, which is the title of one of his books, later books, from Oxford University Press. In his Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Ehrman was adopting a well-known thesis of a previous generation by the German higher critic, Walter Bauer, as expressed in his classic book, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. The idea of the New Testament text as reflecting a diversity of views, each legitimate in its own right, had coincided with a corresponding postmodern notion that the goal of text criticism should no longer be defined as the search for the original text. One of the best known contemporary New Testament text critics is a fellow named DC Parker, who is currently professor of digital philology, whatever that is, at the University of Birmingham in the UK. One of Parker's key early works in the field was titled The Living Text of the Gospels from Cambridge University Press in 1997. In it, he argues that there is not one static text of scripture, but there is a living text that is always changing and developing. It called to mind debates that we have about the US Constitution, the strict constructionist, and those who believe we have a living constitution, that it's the same concept that's being brought into the understanding of the scriptures. In the opening chapter of that book, he outlines his theory of textual criticism. And in it, he explains, quote, there is no original text. There are just different texts from different stages of production. In 2011, Parker delivered the prestigious Lyell Lectures at Oxford University, which then appeared in book form as Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament from Oxford in 2012. In this work, Parker reviews the current state of postmodern text criticism. He notes in particular that contemporary text critics no longer believe that it is either possible or desirable to attempt to reconstruct the original text of scripture. Thus, Parker argues against what he calls the modern concept of a single authoritative original text, and he calls it a hopeless anachronism. According to Parker, scholars must not think of text criticism as a search for the original, but only as a recovery of what he calls the form of text from which the surviving copies are descended. In the language of Munster and Birmingham, this is the Ausgang's text or the initial text. The task of the New Testament philologists then, according to Parker, is not to recover an original authorial text, but simply to recover as exactly as may be the oldest recoverable form of the text beneath the manuscript copies. The odd thing is, see, we have a lot of evangelicals who are running around in the 21st century doing 20th century text criticism and The people in the academy, like Bart Ehrman did with James White, they just chuckle at them. You're doing what, that's old, that's passe. That's not even being done anymore. So he also speaks in that lecture with excitement about the latest technological revolutions of the digital age. And indeed, uh, we're living in a revolutionary age right now. We're living in the digital age and everything is changing. Um, and one of the results he says of this digital revolution is that there is a democratization of fields, which have hitherto only been accessible to a few people with the resources and opportunities on that. He's absolutely correct. There was a time when if you wanted to study Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, you would have to travel all over the world. You have to go to London and Leipzig and St. Petersburg, and you'd have to travel all over the world to see these things. Now you can sit down at your desk with your computer and you can examine many of these documents online. And one of the things that's happened is it means we can look at some of this research that's been printed and we can hold a lot of people accountable for a lot of misrepresentations of interpretations of some of this material. There has been the democratization, he's right. But he then speculates that in the future, quote, users will be able to build their own critical text. This is what he sees as the brave new world of the future. It's not that you're going to be bound to the Nestle Alon 28th edition or the UBS 5th edition, or you're going to be bound by, uh, you know, whatever else edition of Greek tech, you're going to be able to make your own. You just sit down and you take a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I've got the gospel according to Jeff. I can create my own. I did a blog post, I think, or maybe it was a word magazine podcast where I described it to build a bear. You know the whole Build-A-Bear phenomenon? You go to the place of the mall, and you take your kids in, and you pay the price, and they get to pick out what creature they want, and what clothing it's going to have on, and what kind of stuffing it's going to have in it. Just build your own Bible. So we're talking about this like not conversation. It's Kierkegaardian hyper-individualism. Um, we're all just going to have our own Bibles. Well, that should, uh, that should alarm us. That should alarm those of us who are traditional Christians and believe in, uh, and believe in what Jude said, earnestly contending for the faith, which was once delivered unto the saints. The history of the transmission of the text of the Bible has indeed been greatly affected by various technological revolutions. We've talked about some of those in these lectures. The development of the codex, the book format, as opposed to the roll or scroll. That was a major technological advancement. The usage of the minuscule script. The invention of the printing press. And we're living in it right now. We're living in a new Gutenberg age, this digital revolution, and it remains to be seen how this will affect the transmission of the scriptures. And friends, maybe we're being raised up for such a time as this to make sure that at this time, at this very important time that we hold to the traditional text. The most significant development in the last decade, now we're getting to the last 10 years now, In the last decade or so has been the appearance of a new method. It's been mentioned a couple of times, the coherence based genealogical method, the CBGM. What is the CBGM? It is a new approach to text criticism which makes use of computer technology to provide study and analysis of the witnesses to the New Testament and their relationship to each other based on comparisons of these witnesses and their variants. The CBGM method was developed by a German scholar who's part of the Munster Institute named Gerd Mink. along with other scholars, again, at the Institute for New Testament Research, founded by Kurt Aland in Münster, Germany. This new method has been used in the ongoing publication of a work that is known as the Editio Critica Maior, or the ECM. And this is a major revision of the modern critical text. See, the Academy never stops revising. And this is a major international project that is being undertaken right now, revising the modern critical text. It is meant, eventually, to update and replace the text now that is in the Nessel Land and the UBS handbooks. The first work that they completed was on the Catholic or general epistles of the new Testament. They finished this around 1997 and continue to do some tinkering to it. Uh, they also in 2017 have printed the ECM of acts and that will probably be the next thing they'll show up in, in a 29 and they're working on John. Eventually though, it's the entire, all 27 books in new Testament will be, uh, uh, work through. the ECM process. So the ECM of the Catholic epistles was applied in the Nestle-Alon 28th edition of 2012. That's the most recent modern critical text. Now edited by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research under the direction of Holger Struttwolf. The identical text appeared in the UBS fifth edition of 2013. The CBGM method has thus far proven to be more than a little perplexing to the uninitiated, even to those who've tried to be initiated into it. The key interpreter for the CBGM for English-speaking audiences has been a young scholar named Peter Gurry of Phoenix Seminary. Gurry did his doctoral work at Cambridge University, and he did it on the CBGM. He published his dissertation with Brill in 2017, a critical examination of the CBGM in New Testament textual criticism. He also published a helpful article in the Journal for Evangelical Theological Studies in 2016 titled, How Your Greek New Testament is Changing. A Simple Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, or CBGM. And he recently co-authored, in 2017 at least, with Swedish Baptist scholar Tommy Wasserman, a more supposedly popular level book. Oh, it's very hard to read. Book titled, A New Approach to Textual Criticism, An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method. Co-published by the Society for Biblical Literature and the Deutsche Bible Gesellschaft in 2017 again. Having read some of Gurry's material and having examined some of the information available on the CBGM at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research's website, I can resonate with one observer, a fellow named Stephen Carlson, who said, I have to admit that the CBGM looks like a mysterious black box whose inner workings seem inscrutable. With regard to the newest editions of the Greek New Testament, which have the fruit of the CBGM applied to the Catholic epistles, there are at least three significant changes to the text that have been made as of 2012. First of all, the text is altered in the Catholic epistles in at least 33 places. If you have a copy of the Nestle Law in 28th edition, those differences are listed on pages 50 and 51 of the preface to that work or introduction to that work. Most of these changes are relatively minor, but there are at least two ones that are significant. One of those is in Jude, where in Jude verse five, the traditional reading has been Lord. I will therefore put you in remembrance, though you once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believe not. And in the new text, modern critical text, the word Lord has been changed to Jesus. And you may think, well, That's good. Jesus is Lord. And those are kind of interchangeable. But the traditional text has always had Lord there. And there may be other implications for why that might not be a theologically pleasing insertion to make. One is that the incarnation of Lord Jesus Christ happens in time. in his conception in the womb of the Virgin, his birth in Bethlehem. And so the incarnation didn't take place in the time of the Exodus. And so it's more appropriate to say Lord rather than Jesus. Also, Jesus may be a reference there to Joshua. And so it just muddies the waters. You think, well, that's a minor change. But when you think about it, it begins to muddy the waters. The other change that is even more significant is in 2 Peter 3, verse 10. 2 Peter 3, 10. And in 2 Peter 3, 10, in the A.V., it reads, But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. And the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. It's about the end of the ages and what will happen to this world. This world will pass away and be replaced by the new heavens and the new earth. Already in the modern critical text, they had changed the language here. And so if you were to read something like the New International Version, there at the very end, it's the last phrase, the NIV reads, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare, not burned up, but laid bare. But the new, as of 2012, Nessalon 28th edition, includes a negative particle in Greek, ook, not. So that if I were to translate what the NA28 says at 2 Peter 3.10, it would be that the earth and everything in it will not be laid bare. That's a completely different meaning, right? It will be laid bare. It will not be laid bare. This really begins to affect your eschatology, your doctrine of last things. This is not an insignificant theological change that's been made to the current modern critical text. A second change is there were three significant changes. One is those 33 differences, including Jude 5 and 2 Peter 3 10. Another is, rather than using brackets, the text uses in various places diamonds for disputed passages. Gurry explains, the editors formally refrain from any judgment on which reading is original. Sound familiar? And what they do is if there's a passage they think is difficult, they'll put something in the text, but they'll put a diamond by it. And then the apparatus, they give you all the alternatives. Build a bear. You make your own call on this one. Could be this, but here are four other choices. That's the idea. In the future, everyone will have their own Bible. Gurry reports that there were about 30 brackets in the previous edition of the Nesolam, the 27th edition. It was done according to the pre-CBGM method. Whereas there are 40 in the NA-28. So he says there is slightly more uncertainty about the text. Wait a second, I thought this research was supposed to give us more certainty about the text. But, you know, the ensuing editions give us less certainty, actually, after all. Third, rather than using the Gothic M for the majority or Byzantine text, the Nessalon 28 uses the designation BYZ for the majority or Byzantine readings. On one hand, from a traditional perspective, there do seem to be some actual positive developments about the CBGM. These include, first of all, the CBGM has rejected the so-called traditional text types. This is another thing. You have these people running around, contemporary apologists, who say, well, the Alexandrian readings are superior to the Byzantine readings, and this is a Western reading, and this is a Caesarean reading. The people in the academy are saying, that's so Westcott and Hort. They don't even talk about that anymore, except for, the Byzantine. They've gotten rid of all the text types except for that late, smooth Byzantine one. Gary says, the most significant and, for that reason, controversial change is that the proponents of CBGM convinced the editors of the NA28 and the UBS Fifth to abandon the longstanding notion of manuscript text types. This shift alone could be momentous for the discipline. The abandonment of text types comes from the CBGM's methods emphasis on texts, meaning the actual words, rather than manuscripts, physical copies or artifacts that contain words. Well, this is actually, again, positive for us. We've been saying for years, there's a problem with Westcott and Hort and these text types. And basically, now the Academy says, well, turns out you guys were right. And this unravels all the presuppositions that have been held since Westcott and Hort concerning the so-called superiority of the Alexandrian text type. Second, something that might be a little bit positive, the CBGM has resulted in what Gurry calls renewed appreciation for the Byzantine text. Gurry says that the CBGM has resulted in a renewed appreciation for the so-called Byzantine text, which dominates Greek New Testament manuscripts from the 9th century and beyond. The text form has generally been disparaged by New Testament critics as being late and unreliable. But the CBGM for the Catholic epistle shows that a number of Byzantine witnesses are, in fact, very close to the editor's own reconstructed text. Gary says that about a third of the changes in the NA28 UBS 5th edition are in support of Byzantine readings over readings found in witnesses like Papyrus 72, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and others. So it's vindicated many of the Byzantine readings as in their view being the best readings. On the other hand, of course, the CBGM method has introduced some changes that will be troubling, as I've already noted, to those of us who are traditionalists. Again, the issue with 2 Peter 3.10, which I didn't mention before, the introduction of that negative particle, that ook, they did that as a complete conjectural emendation. There are zero. Extant Greek manuscripts that have a negative particle at 2nd Peter 3.10. Zero. It's a reading that is found in some of the versional evidence is found in the Sahidic Coptic, the Philoxenian Syriac, and perhaps dialect five of the Coptic. It's not a single Greek manuscript that has ook in it, but This computer-generated model says that's probably the best reading there, even though it goes against over 2,000 years of the Christian transmission of the text. Another problem, of course, with the diamonds is it suggests that the New Testament has multiple readings that are open to various and diverse interpretations, precluding the notion of the New Testament as a fixed and well-defined standard. What is more, the fact that the CBGM makes use of computer technology and algorithms does not exclude the fact that it will be shaped by the subjective perspectives of those who operate the method, and in particular by their own presuppositions concerning which text will serve as the standards by which others are measured. And many of these guys acknowledge that. There's a fellow named Klaus Wachtel, who's also a German scholar, a CBGM research associate at Munster. And he had an essay in a work published in a book titled Editing the Bible, Assessing the Past and Present. published by SBL in 2012. And he says, the CBGM method is a method that helps to control the subjective element in text criticism. But it is clear that other scholars, starting from different premises, will come to different conclusions. So we've baked in our presuppositions. And if you were to tweak the algorithms to fit your presuppositions, you might reach different results. Gurry says, one of the most frequent issues with the CBGM is understanding exactly how much influence it has had on the editor's text-critical judgments. Unfortunately, he says, this question is not one that can be answered by a simple description of the method itself. That is because the results provided by the CBGM, like all text-critical data, have to be weighed and interpreted by a human. Somebody puts the data into the black box. And so the CBGM appears to be just as susceptible to circular reasoning as is any other human method. The problem is that scholars often tend to reach outcomes based on their initial presuppositions. Oh, you just support the text of Septimus because that's your presupposition. Well, you don't have any when you approach the text. Look at Westcott and Hort. They favored Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and therefore, it was the neutral text. So that any reading that agreed with those manuscripts, they designated as authentic, early, original. While any reading that deviated from them, they designated as late, inauthentic, spurious. Though the CBGM has abandoned the traditional text families, the scholars using the method have presuppositions. regarding, at the least, what they perceive the initial text to be. This is the brave new world of 21st century postmodern text criticism. In the next few years, we can fully expect several new editions of the critical text to appear. They're not going to stop. There's going to be NA 29, NA 30, NA 31, NA 32, should the Lord tarry. And it remains to be seen just with the NA 28, what this is going to have an effect on the translations, right? In all languages, this is going to affect the translations already. We're seeing that there are a couple of translations that have adopted, uh, the reading Jesus rather than Lord in Jude five. Thus far, I'm not aware of any who have adopted second Peter three, 10. And actually, I think that is causing some of the pushback from Tyndall House that other people are saying this is taking it too far. We've got to have a firewall of some sort against this. And what will happen, again, once this entire New Testament is revised according to the Editio Critica Maior, according to ECM? Will this be the end of text criticism? Of course not. Before long, there will be a new, new method that will topple the old, new method. The academy does not exist to conserve tradition, but to challenge and subvert it. I mentioned translations, I saw, I forgot later, ESV and the Christian Standard Bible have adopted in a 28 reading already at June 5, but no one has adopted the second Peter 310 reading as far as I know yet. As Gurian Wasserman acknowledged, clearly these changes will affect not only modern Bible translations and commentaries, but possibly even theology and preaching. I changed the possibly to definitely. It will affect theology and preaching. I was recently watching a video of an interview with former Google engineer and whistleblower, Greg Coppola, as he described his work with computer technology at Google. And it struck me that some of his comments might apply to assessing the value of the CBGM. In the interview, this Google engineer and whistleblower said the following. Again, he's not talking about CBGM, but he was talking about Google's use of algorithms. He said, in my experience, as algorithms get more complicated and more advanced, that only means that they have more human decisions going into them. So there are actually more opportunities for human beings to influence the final product. The more the illusion is promoted that somehow technology exists in a world that is completely apart from humans, that somehow you can create a computer or an algorithm that will think for itself and be free from any human biases, then the more easily people can be misled and manipulated. Not everyone is happy with CBGM. In how we got the New Testament, Stanley Porter, again of McMaster Divinity College, who's one of these evangelical types who've embraced the modern critical text, they're realizing, well, wait a second, this is the end of the search for the authorial text. He writes, quote, there are a number of apparent problems with this method, which purport to be a scientific approach to text criticism, including the following. It is still based on a number of assumptions that emerge as Mink outlines his approach. Its treatment of variance fails to note that some are of greater significance than others. It fails to define coherence as other than a statistical result in terms of percentage of similarity. It is unclear what exactly it is attempting to ascertain in the initial text. It treats variants in isolation from actual manuscripts. And the results, he says, are so far quite minimal. He's like, well, it's only changed two measly verses. In addition, as I've already noted, the evangelical Tyndale House in Cambridge released through Crossway in 2017, the Tyndale House Greek New Testament. The Tyndale House Greek New Testament follows a more traditional modern reconstructionist text critical approach based on the method of a 19th century text critic named Tregalus, requiring that each reading in the text be supported by at least two Greek manuscripts from the 5th century or earlier. It also excludes patristic, church fathers, and versional evidence. Furthermore, the Tyndale House Greek New Testament contains no conjectural emendations. In the introduction, the editors note their desire, quote, to constrain editorial choice as, quote, a check on editorial fallibility and eccentricity. And I think we can fairly read through the lines and see this was aimed at the CBGM and at 2 Peter 3.10. So the evangelicals who embrace the modern critical text are realizing there's some major problems coming down the road, some major problems coming, and they're trying to do something about it, I think. They might say, no, you're conspiracy theory on this, but I don't know. Regarding the Tyndale House Creek New Testament, since it came out in 2017, and it's something you may encounter. It may be the basis for future English translations, revisions of ESV or something like this. There are some things about it, actually, that, again, we might approve of. For example, the traditional ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 through 20, is not in brackets in the Temple House Greek New Testament. Why? Because it has witnesses, at least two witnesses from the 5th century or earlier. So it's there. Um, as well, the 10 to house Greek New Testament includes several readings, traditional readings that had previously been excluded, like Luke 22, 43 and 44, the angel appearing to Christ in prayer. And this while he was sweating, like with great, uh, like great drops of blood and also very significantly Luke 23, 34, Christ's prayer on the cross father, forgive them for they know not what they do. It's in the 10 to house Greek New Testament. And also at John 1, 18, it gives the traditional reading referring to Christ as the only begotten son. Yet there are some things to be lamented. Most significantly, it relegates the woman taken in adultery passage, John 7, 53 through 8, 11 out of the text proper and puts it in the apparatus, in the footnotes, literally taking it out of the text. And it excises a host of other traditional readings and adopts the same diamond symbols to signify supposedly insoluble uncertainties in the text. So that's where we are. That's the postmodern text. And that's the impetus for us for some urgency in this task to reach The next stage, which is the affirmation of the traditional or the confessional text. I had a lot of stuff here. I'm just going to pass over it. And we're going to go on. And I want to talk a little bit about the case for the confessional text. So as we come to the close, I want to offer a case for why I think the confessional text should be preferred above the modern critical text. First, the canonical text provides a sure foundation of epistemological certainty for God's people. Robert talked about this already. Garnett Howard Milne, a reform minister in New Zealand, now deceased, began his recent book, Has the Bible Been Kept Pure, with these words. The Protestant Reformation was essentially a dispute over religious epistemology. How do we know what the truth is? Do we need Mother Church, the magisterium to tell us what the truth is? Do we need church councils to tell us what the truth is? Or do we need the scriptures, the self-authenticating, the autopistas scriptures? And so it was a conflict over epistemology. The reformers believed that the truth was not found in the Roman magisterium, not in the Latin Vulgate, but in the immediately inspired and preserved texts of God's word. Modern text criticism abandons confidence in the certainty, stability, and reliability of God's word. As the apostle Paul put it in first Corinthians 14, eight, for if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for battle? Second, the canonical text affirms the classical Christian conception of the providential preservation of his word. Edward F. Hills begins his introduction to Dean Bergen's book, The Last Twelve Verses of Mark, with these words, Every faithful Christian must reckon seriously with the teaching of Christ concerning the providential preservation of Scripture. The biblical roots for this doctrine come in such places as the account of the law of God being found in the temple by Hilkiah during the days of King Josiah, 2 Kings 22 and 23. In Jeremiah's rewriting of the scrolls that King Jehoiakim had cut up and thrown away in the fire. In Psalm 12, as David declares, the words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord. Thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever. Is there in Psalm 119, which declares forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. It's there in the words of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, 18, when he said, for verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. And it's there in Christ's words in John 10, 35, when he said, and the scriptures cannot be broken. It's there in the declarations and warnings such as those found in Deuteronomy 4.2. You shall not add unto the words which I command you, neither shall you diminish aught from it. And also in the very fitting words that close the book of Revelation, but appropriately enough, since it's the last book in our typical ordering of our canonical scriptures, it closes the entire canon of the Christian scriptures. in Revelation 22, 18 and 19 with its warning. If any man add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man take away from the words of this book of prophecy, God shall take away from his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city and from the things that are written in this book. One of the fundamental flaws of the modern text criticism model is that it attempts to reconstruct the text whether that was in the 19th and 20th centuries attempting to reconstruct the original text as they perceived it, or if it's the 21st century where they're simply attempting to reconstruct the so-called initial text. But one of the fundamental problems is they're trying to do this reconstruction model, as I've tried to stress in these lectures, with only a limited number of extant Greek manuscripts, including very few that are earlier than the 4th century. with many of the earliest of these coming from unknown provenances. In their evaluation of the CBGM, Wasserman and Gurry offer some refreshingly honest insights into the limits of historical reconstruction, of history in general, and of the text of the New Testament in particular. This is what they write. Listen to this. And again, these are advocates for the whole modern critical text endeavor. But here's the concession they make. They say what is left behind are fragments, chance survivals from the past. We are trying to piece together the puzzle with only some pieces. In the case of textual criticism, this means that we only have a selection of the manuscripts that once existed and sometimes incomplete manuscripts. Although New Testament textual critics are usually straining under the great number of manuscripts we possess, there must be an even greater number that are forever lost. They go on to point out that the CBGM at present makes a use of only about one third of the extant Greek manuscripts. It's only a small amount. The CBGM is only using about a third of those. And it makes absolutely no use of versions, the early Latin translations or Syriac translations or Ethiopic or Coptic and so forth. And it makes no use of patristic evidence. They're not feeding any of that into the CBGM. This means that if you apply the CBGM to the gospel of Mark, which hasn't been done yet, it's not going to take into account as it now is the rich patristic references to Mark's ending in Irenaeus from the year 150 and Justin Martyr from even earlier. And so they're going to conclude this is an original. Wasserman and Gury conclude that the selectivity of the evidence means that all of CBGM's flow diagrams and global stemma, these are their words, do not give us a picture of exactly what happened. These are cutting edge people. We can't get a picture of what happened from this material. When one looks at the findings of CBGM, they conclude, listen to this, it is more like a watercolor painting of a great national park than a topographical map. We might be able to identify key landmarks from the watercolor, but we would not want to use it to find our way through the forest. I don't know about you. I just don't want the watercolor. I don't want just the topographical map. I want to visit that land. And I want the conveyance to get there and to see these things. The puzzle piece analogy reminded me of one of my very first online skirmishes that I ever had about traditional texts. A young apologist of those days, and I'm guessing this was a decade or so ago, A fellow named Jamin Hubner took exception to a negative review I had posted on my blog to the English Standard Version. And he started to engage me. We went back and forth. It's still online somewhere. And this fellow is interesting. He had his own apologetics ministry. And it was associated with a well-known apologist out in Arizona. And this fellow. This fellow eventually, who's this dogged defender of the monotheists, he has since that time become a radical egalitarian, arguing for women serving as officers in the church. He's gone off into other directions. And all of a sudden, all references to him have disappeared from a certain apologist's website. Well. It's sometimes where people go when they're unhitched from the moorings of the traditional text, right? But anyways, we got, in the last part of the discussion, we got to start talking about the Pirkepea Adulteri. How could you possibly believe that that is original? How could you possibly believe that? And in one of his posts, he said this. He says, speaking to me, he says, it is not enough to desire certainty, and avoid discomfort in dealing with textual variance to reject the facts and turn to some brand of King James version only ism or the TR is stable or whatever. The believer must open himself up to the word of God itself. All of it as it comes to us from the sands of Egypt or the halls of a monastery or some other place. Then he said, the Lord has provided a rich tradition from which to gain and read the autographic text. But like a child sitting with 110 pieces for 100 piece puzzle, we must every now and then do some work to figure out what is truly part of God's word. The story of the woman caught in adultery probably isn't one of those pieces. Well, this puzzle analogy had just the opposite effect on me than my opponent intended. To me, the puzzle analogy demonstrates the dangers in embracing the modern critical text. It leads one to see the Bible as a jumble of puzzle pieces, including many stray pieces that don't fit, with perhaps other pieces who can know missing altogether. and still others having to be forced together unnaturally to make it all work. Those who embrace the confessional texts, however, see the Bible as an intact, beautiful picture that does not require that we put it all together, but that we receive it as it has been preserved by the Holy Spirit and expertly framed by our Protestant reformed forebears. Third, The confessional text affirms the authority and reliability of the canon of the Christian scriptures. And we've hit this hard. I think we've said enough probably, but I'll say a little bit more. The issue of the canon of scriptures is not merely an issue related to which are the authoritative and inspired books of the Bible. It's also about the inspired text of those books. To embrace the modern critical approach is to abandon any notion of textual and therefore canonical stability. I sometimes throw this out as an example. It's a rather far-fetched example, but still, logically, it fits with the methodology that they've embraced. Let's say that next year, in the sands of Egypt, they discover, or a cave somewhere in the Judean desert, they discover a cave somewhere that has a jar, and in it is a manuscript, and it's Romans. And it's written on a papyrus roll, and it's written in unsealed script. And it's the oldest copy we have of Romans. But it's missing Romans 9, 10, and 11. It goes from chapter 8 to chapter 12. Again, it's the extreme example, but their method means hypothetically such a thing could happen. And let's say scholars find this manuscript. They examine it and they come to a decision that it is the oldest and best manuscript we have of Romans. Does this mean that future critical editions will put in a bracket or put a diamond by Romans 9, 10, 11? Or will they just take it completely out and put it into a very large footnote? Again, you think this is a strange example. But think about what's happening in the pulpits of America and other countries today. Not in liberal churches, friends, but in evangelical ones. John MacArthur, June 5th, 2011, completed his exposition of the Gospel of Mark. He had been working for 43 years as pastor of his church, expositing books of the New Testament. This was the last book that he was working on And on that day, June 5th, 2011, he preached two sermons. One in the morning service, you can still read them on the Grace to You website, is titled Amazement at the Empty Tomb, Mark 16, 1 through 8. And then in the evening, he preached a sermon titled, The Fitting End to Mark's Gospel, Mark 16, 9-20. The title is a bit misleading though, because he's not saying that verses 9-20 are the fitting end to the gospel of Mark. He's saying that verse 8 is the fitting end. And he says verses 9-20 is spurious, uninspired, and should not be used in preaching, teaching, or expositing doctrine. We already talked about some of the problems of this. This would mean that Mark would be a gospel that did not have the resurrection appearances. Think about the apostolic preaching of Paul as he outlines it in 1 Corinthians 15. He says, the gospel that I received and I have passed on to you is that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried. That he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures, and that he appeared. Those four points are essential to the gospel. Would we have a canonical gospel that did not have the resurrection appearances of the Lord Jesus Christ? I submit to you, I do not think that would be the case. And yet, an evangelical minister preached this. What about John Piper? I did a podcast on a message he preached some years back on John 7, 53 through 8, 11. And unfortunately, his analysis of the passage is not unlike the analysis given in many evangelical pulpits today. He essentially concluded that this story was perhaps valuable, maybe even historical, but it's not part of John's gospel. At the very end, he ended the sermon by saying, it's true in that very impassioned way he can do. It's true. It's a true story. He said, whether it happened or whether it belongs in this gospel. Really? So we have a true story about the Lord Jesus Christ, but it wasn't faithfully preserved in scripture. What theology of scripture is this? How does this fit with any orthodox historical understanding of the scriptures? It doesn't. If the text of scriptures is constantly up for grabs based on findings and conjectures of modern critical scholars, what does this do for the average Christian reader's confidence in the authority and reliability of scripture? What does it do for the confidence of the average pastor in the pulpit? Or in the counseling study? What does it do for the average hearer in the pew? It undermines faith. It tears down faith. This new diversity view is already beginning to be seen in the way modern English translations present the text of Scripture. I look at the time and I'm going to hustle through some more of this. But just take a look at the ending of Mark in the New Revised Standard Version, where they now include a verse that's never been till modern times in our Bibles, the so-called shorter ending. It only appears in a handful of very late manuscripts. It's now printed there in the text of the New Revised Standard Version. And they're put between verses eight and nine. It's adding something to the text. It's late, it's never been accepted until modern times. And then even within the traditional ending, they also include, after verse 14 in the footnotes, A passage that is known as the Freer Logion that appears in only one Greek manuscript, Codex W, Codex Washingtoniensis, because it's in the museum in Washington, D.C. And so basically what they've said is, here's the ending of Mark. It's Build-a-Bear. You figure it out. Does it end at verse eight? Does it end with the so-called shorter ending? Does it end with that plus the traditional ending? Can you throw in the freer logi on there at verse 14? You figure it out. Well, you think, well, that's, okay, NRSV, that's used in PCUSA and Episcopalian churches and United Methodists, but it's, you know, that's a liberal mainline denomination translation. Well, pick up the ESV. The shorter ending isn't there in the text, but it's there in the footnotes. And then pick up the 2015 New Living Translation, which follows exactly the same pattern as the NRSV. That's an evangelical translation. The shorter ending is there between verses eight and nine. The Freer Logion is there in the footnotes. That's an evangelical translation. Presumably, the reader can make up his own mind about what the text should be. Friends, to my way of looking at things, that is not freedom, but chaos. Yeah, that's right. There is an alternative, and it is to embrace the traditional text, the confessional text. Fourth, this is the last one. The confessional text provides a more reliable basis on which to conduct an effective public ministry of preaching, teaching, and apologetics, defense of the faith. Few have delighted more in the findings of modern text criticism than atheists, Muslims, and other opponents of biblical Christianity. How strange it seems when modern apologists who embrace the modern critical text debate Bart Ehrman. In truth, when it comes to their views of the text of scripture, they really have nothing to debate. It's basically a joint appearance. They both agree that the ending of Mark is not original. They both agree that the woman taking adultery isn't original. They don't really have a debate about text criticism. Just one thinks that somehow it's inspired and the other one doesn't. How sad it is to see Muslims rushing to the microphones to find an audience to ask the Christian apologist about 1 John 5, 7. And then to see that Muslim interrogator delight as the apologist tells him and the world that this isn't really part of the word of God, but was only added by accident or deception. Doesn't the apologist realize that he is only affirming what Muslims have long taught that the Bible has been hopelessly corrupted? If we want to offer a truly sound apologetic to an unbelieving world, we will affirm that God has kept his word pure in all ages. And that when we read faithful translations based on the faithful text, we are reading the very words of the apostles who saw, heard, handled, and touched the crucified and risen Christ. There's a rather popular term these days. It's in vogue present among reformed and evangelical Christians. And it's the term retrieval. Have you seen this is showing up everywhere, titles, the books and so forth. It's most often discussed relating to the doctrine of God. It's been argued that we need to retrieve classical theism, including the doctrine of divine simplicity. As our confession teaches that God is without body parts and passions. rather than embrace a newfangled view of looking at God that's known as theistic personalism. So there's a lot of talk these days about retrieval. We need to retrieve the classical theistic way of looking at the doctrine of God. Might I suggest that in addition to retrieving classical theism, that we also retrieve the classical doctrines of the inspiration, preservation, and canon of scripture? Last thing. Back on September 26, a friend of mine passed away. He was nearly 80 years old. His name was Lloyd Sprinkle. He was a pastor in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Providence Baptist Church. He had been pastor of his church for over 53 years until 2015 when he had a stroke and stepped away from the pulpit. You may know, some of you may know Lloyd Sprinkle because in 1976 he started a publications ministry. The first thing that he published was a work by R.L. Dabney on the life of Stonewall Jackson, and he did a lot of other things. He started doing a lot of Puritans, a lot of early Baptists and Presbyterians. And this thing, this is before the internet, and books, old books were rare, and it was all mail order, mom and pop organization, he and his wife. He took out a mortgage on his house Borrowed a couple thousand dollars, which was a lot in 1976, to begin this thing. And he has come to be known all over the world. Sprinkle Publications. And I know we have a conference in Virginia called the Keech Conference every year, and we have international speakers come. And any time we'd have somebody come, we would say, well, Lloyd Sprinkle is part of our group, and he'll have a book table there. They're like, Lloyd Sprinkle? Lloyd Sprinkle was part of this? Wow, I want to meet him. I went a couple of years ago to Hong Kong, and I preached in the Reformed Baptist Church there, the only 1689 church in Hong Kong. And it's a little room, very valuable real estate there. But on the bookshelf, there's a Sprinkle Publications book. So this guy just had this huge reach, and he passed away. And the Sprinkle Publications was coming to an end with his death. Ian Murray, you may know Ian Murray from the Banner of Truth. I'd done an interview with Lloyd Sprinkle back in 2015. It's on Word Magazine. You can listen to it. But Ian Murray had heard about Lloyd's death. He had listened to my podcast and he wrote a biographical article on Lloyd Sprinkle. That's going to probably be in the Banner of Truth. And he sent the article to me and I read through it and I was struck by this line. He said, The awakening of the doctrines of grace in the 1960s and 70s was not planned by men. And the sudden hunger for the old literature, which had built churches and nations, came surprisingly and simultaneously in different parts of the English speaking world. He was talking about the revival of interest in the Puritans, Calvinism, Reformed theology, that probably all of us here have been affected by to some degree. And he says, isn't it weird? God was working at Westminster Chapel in London with David Martin Lloyd-Jones and Ian Murray, and then this unknown pastor out in Harrisonburg, Virginia, of all places, who actually had background as a dispensational fundamentalist, had gone to Piedmont Bible College and had come to grace, as he says in the interview, I came to grace. And it just, that movement just popped up all over the place. It was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was in Montville, New Jersey. It was in Presbyterian circles, renewal of interest in Reformed theology and Puritanism and so forth. And what I want to suggest, friends, is it possible, I don't want to pretend to read the providences of God. But is it possible he is working in strange and peculiar ways and things like this? And in other places, Mongolia, we heard the other day, a group of Mongolians in places all over the world. Is he working in people all over the world to raise up a concern and interest for defending his word? Well, he took down Goliath with just some smooth stones, friends. We don't have to be powerful. We don't have to be big. We have a big and powerful God. And so let's trust in him. Let's put our faith in him. Let me invite you to stand together. Let's pray.