Let's open in prayer and ask for God's blessing upon our time. Our Father, we ask through the merits of Christ that the Holy Spirit would be our teacher, that the same Spirit who gave us the word would now illuminate our hearts and our minds, help us to think through these wonderful truths that we're gonna be thinking through tonight. Perhaps sometime, this may be for some, the first time they've ever been exposed to these kinds of things, and just pray that you'll encourage us and strengthen us in the faith as we contemplate these things together. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. We've been working through the nature of the Bible, the nature of the Holy Scriptures themselves, and we've considered the plenary verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture. We followed that with the infallibility and the inerrancy of Scripture. God's Word is infallible, that is, it's incapable of error. Therefore, it is without error. We then contemplated its sufficiency. And then we considered last week the canon of Holy Scripture. How do we know which books are Scripture, which are not? And I was actually reading just this past Lord's Day, my wife had purchased for me for my birthday, a man named Michael Barrett wrote a book called Old Testament Introduction. It just came out about a month ago. So I've been reading that and he was addressing this very issue of canon in the opening chapters of his book. And he said something, he put it so simply that I wanted to share it with you. He said, basically, canon has three steps. Number one, when God inspired the word to be written, it was automatically canon. It was canon because God's authority stands behind it. The second part is the church recognized it as such. The church's recognition didn't make it canon, but the church's recognition was acknowledging we hear the voice of our savior speaking through this. And the third step is the church collected those books into one volume, one book, and that's where we get canonicity from. But there's something we need to think through when we say God inspired the word. When we say it's inspired, infallible, inerrant, and sufficient, we mean in the original text. We always use that language, that qualifier, in the original text. The 39 books of the Old Testament were originally written in Hebrew, and a little bit of it in Aramaic, most Hebrew, but there's some Aramaic there. 27 books of the New Testament were all written in what was known as Koine Greek, or Common Greek. Greek was the trade language of the Roman Empire, so everybody knew Greek. Therefore, because the Bible, the New Testament was written in Greek, it was able to disseminate all across the Roman Empire very, very quickly. So we say it's inspired and infallible as given in the original text. But I once heard a fundamentalist pastor preach a sermon in which he casts suspicion on that phrase as given in the original text. He pointed out the fact we don't have the original text. And that's true. Does anyone know what the original texts are called? The original manuscripts or autographs? Original autographs. We don't have the original autographs anymore. And so what he was basically saying was he was seeing a conspiracy in the phrase in the original text. As if to say that's a liberal's way of claiming we don't have the Bible now. Well, I can appreciate his zeal in some ways, but his statement really wasn't well thought out. I think if he thought it through a little bit more, he'd realize he actually agrees with the statement in the original text. What you have to know about this particular person was he was a King James only advocate, and so he was using that as a way of expressing his King James only-ism. But as given in the original text means this, the Bible, was given by inspiration of God, and what was inspired was what was drying on the parchment after Moses lifted his pen, or Paul, or Peter, or David, or Isaiah. That is what the original text is. But what we're affirming is that we believe in the inspiration of the original autographs, But we recognize that there have been copies made by hand throughout the centuries, and that there are errors of transmission that have been made, and there are errors of translation that make its way into our English versions. In other words, is the one who's translating the scriptures from Greek into English, for example, are they being moved by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to do their translation? They're not. They're interpreting the scriptures and seeking to put it into the receptor language. And so what we're acknowledging is that there are errors of transmission, errors of translation, but the original text itself is what is inspired by God. But this being said, we need to think through what's called the preservation of Holy Scripture. Has God preserved the text throughout history so that we can now say we have authoritative copies of the Bible? And so it says in your notes that this is titled The Transmission of Holy Scripture. I'm changing the title to The Preservation of Holy Scripture. So what I'm going to do is teach you under two headings tonight. First, the promises of preservation. And secondly, the providences of preservation. So let's start with the promises of preservation. If you remember when we talked about the sufficiency of scripture, we asked the question, does the Bible itself claim to be sufficient? Because if we believe it's inspired, infallible, and inerrant, and then the Bible itself claims to be sufficient, then we have to believe in sufficiency because the word of God itself says so. So the question for tonight is this, does the Bible promise that God would preserve his word throughout history? And the answer to that, of course, is yes. We're going to go through this very briefly, but let me look at three different texts of Scripture, beginning with Proverbs 12, verses 6 and 7. David is making a contrast here. Verse three, he says, may the Lord cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaks proud things. In other words, may their false words die with them, as it were. But then he says, down in verse six, the words of the Lord are pure words, like silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. So that's speaking to infallibility and inerrancy. It's pure, right? Verse 7, you shall keep them, O Lord. You shall preserve them from this generation forever. Whereas the words of the wicked will die with them, the words of Holy Scripture will never die. God will preserve them in every generation, even though men try to destroy the Word of God. God Himself will, by His providence, preserve His Word. Isaiah 40 and verse 8, you probably know this one by heart. The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever, right? So in other words, he's contrasting creation, which perishes, with the word of God, which is eternal and never perishes. One more place is Matthew 5 and verse 18. We referenced this text when I was talking about inspiration in our second session together. And then Jesse preached from this text just this past Lord's Day. Chapter five, verse 18. For assuredly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Now we used it to talk about the extent of inspiration, but this text is also saying not so much as a jot or tittle of the Hebrew scriptures will ever be lost, heaven and earth will perish, but God's word will not perish. So here's my basic question. Does the Bible itself, does God promise in His Bible that He would preserve His Word in every generation? And the answer clearly is yes. And once again, our confession of faith recognizes this. If you ever notice, our confession just plagiarizes the Bible all the time. It's a great way to do things. But it says this, paragraph eight of chapter one. The Old Testament in Hebrew, which was the native language of the people of God of old, and the New Testament in Greek, which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations, being immediately inspired by God. So do you hear what they're saying? They're saying the original autographs, that is what's given by inspiration of God. Next phrase, and by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentic. by a singular care and providence. They are kept pure in all ages. What that's teaching us is the preservation of Holy Scripture. So that's the promise of preservation. What we're gonna focus on for the rest of this time is the providences of preservation. And what I mean by that is God didn't preserve his word by magic. He didn't do it miraculously. He did it providentially. And how did he do it? Well, he did it through the work of scribes. men who hand copied the scriptures looking at one document and copying it by hand to another. The printing press is actually of relatively young origin. The printing press is just over 500 years old. I don't know if any of you remember this, but in 1999, the History Channel was talking about the 100 most important men of the last thousand years since we were about to enter into the 21st century. Now, technically speaking, the year 2000 wasn't the beginning of the 21st century. That was the last year of the 20th century. Actually, 2001 was the beginning of the 21st century, but never mind that. Nonetheless, they were talking about the greatest influences, the most important men of that thousand year period. And what's interesting is Charles Darwin they put as fourth, they put Martin Luther as third. So he beat out Martin Luther, I was happy about that. But I thought their number one choice of the one man who has been most influential of anybody was brilliant because they said it was Johann Gutenberg. The invention of the printing press is what caused the ideas of all those men to be disseminated throughout the world. And I think their choice was a right one. So you didn't have the printing press in those early days when the scriptures themselves were being written. And then obviously copiers are even more recent, probably the last, what, 50 or 75 years that copiers have been invented. So over the centuries, The way the Bible was being written or preserved was by scribes who would use whatever resources they had, hunched over a desk, doing the tedious, really hard work of taking the scripture that was in front of them and copying it by hand onto a scroll. Have you ever copied a letter before? I'm sure all of you have. Do you know what happens? Well, things like this. There's errors that get made because like your eye skips a line while you're copying and so you omit that line altogether. Your mind starts turning to clay, and so then you accidentally copy a line twice or a word twice repeatedly. Or your eye fixes on one pickety word, and then you look at your copy, and then when you look back at the original copy, your eye catches that same word a paragraph down. And so you omit an entire paragraph. Well, scribes did the same kind of thing. They made the same kind of errors. That's why we say there are errors of transmission. And then other scribes take that copy and they copy that copy. And over time they add their own errors or they try to fix the errors. Sometimes maybe they're trying to edit something, they're making self-appointed editors, so they're trying to conflate different words or whatever. Or I think that's a mistake and I think what we need to do is rectify that and try to add, go back and fix that. So all these errors begin to multiply throughout the various texts. And these various different readings are called textual variants. And the study of trying to take the documentary evidence we have and then from that discern what was the original text based on the copies we have. That's called textual criticism. It doesn't mean you're being critical of the Bible. It means you're trying to discern, how do I know what the original text actually said based on the evidence that we have? Now, as a general rule, There's not a whole lot of controversy surrounding the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. And, by the way, as promised, I have it with me. This is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, which, as you can probably guess, is not from around here. This was published by a German publishing house, but it's, so the footnotes are in German, but the text of the Bible is the Hebrew text. And I'm gonna pass this around, and any of you can look at this, okay? Just wanna make sure I get it back before I go. But if you wanna look at it and you wanna go, let me take a look at what Genesis 1-1 looked like in Hebrew. Well, what you need to do is don't open it like a normal book, because Hebrew goes from right to left. So you open it from the back side. And I have a bookmarker here in Genesis 1-1. And when you looked at the script, you don't go from left to right. You go from right to left. So it reads like this. Okay. So I'm going to pass this around, but this is the, what's known as the Masoretic text of the Old Testament Hebrew. So y'all are welcome to take a look at that. But the reason that there's not much of an issue with the text of the Old Testament is largely because of a group of Hebrew scribes known as the Mazarites. The Mazarites, one thing you need to know in Hebrew, the letters you're looking at, they're all consonants. There are no vowels in the Hebrew language. The pronunciation, the vowel pronunciation, was passed down by oral tradition, and that's how you knew how to pronounce the words. Well, the Masoretes were concerned that that was going to get lost, so they put together what was called vowel points, and the vowel points are in the text. You'll see these little dots underneath the letters, and that's a code system they used so that the oral tradition of the vowel pronunciations would be preserved and kept. But what the Masoretes did, They were very deeply concerned to preserve the purity of the Hebrew text. And so what they would do is they would take the original text they had, and they would copy it, and then they would examine that copy with just scrupulous care to make sure that it was an accurate reflection of the original that they were pulling from. So they do things like this. They would count the number of words in the book of Genesis. And so say they have, I don't know how many words in the book of Genesis in the original Hebrew or even in English, but let's say it had 75,000 words. Let's say that's what it was. They would count the original and say, okay, there's 75,000 words here. Let's count the copy. How many words do I have? 75,000. Okay, good. Then they'd say, well, what happens if you divide that in half? What is the middle word? They would count and find out what the middle word was. And they would say, is the middle word in my copy the same thing? They knew the number of, like if you took the letter Aleph, for example, basically our letter A, they knew how many times the letter Aleph appears in Genesis. So they would count that up and then they would take their copy they had done, they'd say, how many Alephs are in my copy? And they did all this to make sure that what they had copied was accurate. That was the Masoretic and then they burned things, texts they thought were inferior. So because of that, the principle text we have is called the Masoretic text. Now, there are other variations. There are some textual variants and things like that, but there's not the same kind of issues in the Old Testament as there is in the New Testament, with the New Testament Greek. And of course, we have some other ways to check the Hebrew text as well. The Masoretic text is not the only text there. You've probably heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest Hebrew text we have. They're from 200 BC or something like that. Remarkably close to the Masoretic text, which is like a thousand years later. So that's been a help, the fact that there's what is known as the Septuagint. Does anyone know what the Septuagint is? Greek translation of the Old Testament. So this was translated into Greek, so by examining the Septuagint, you can understand something of what the text they were translating from was. As a matter of fact, the Septuagint was done, what, a couple hundred years before Christ? So the Septuagint is actually quoted in the Greek New Testament. They quote from the Septuagint, this Greek-speaking Bible, as it were. So you have all those kinds of things that really establish the text. Now, we're going to spend the rest of our time on the New Testament because the New Testament is much more complicated. Now, several of you who are taking the course, you've read Behind the Bible by Jeffrey Johnson, and he gives you a really good primer on how to understand these things. Jeffrey Johnson is very helpful on Greek things. He's very helpful on the church. Don't read them on the attributes of God not so much not so helpful there But nonetheless helpful on things of Greek and and helpful on ecclesiology Well when it comes to the New Testament And here we have several copies of the New Testament, by the way. I've got five copies. There's a reason I have five with me. I'll tell you about that in just a moment. The one I'm holding in my hand is the New Testament in the original Greek, according to the Byzantine majority text form, put out by Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont. This is my personal favorite Greek New Testament, just so you know. And I'll tell you why next week, God willing, why I prefer this particular New Testament. But in the New Testament, We have something on the neighborhood of 5,800 Greek texts. Now that can be deceiving because that makes it sound like we have 5,800, almost 6,000 complete Greek New Testaments. That's not what it is. Some of these are just fragmentary. In fact, I sent out a text or a link to YouTube just last week. that talked about one specific document, it's P52. It has a little bit of John's gospel on the front and the back, and it's just a tiny little piece of papyrus that was found, a scrap that was found that has some of the gospel of John on it. It would cover basically the end of a two-by-four. That's how small it is. So a lot of this stuff's just fragmentary. But basically, take all the fragments together, you have almost 6,000 pieces of the Greek New Testament, as it were. Well, imagine that you have, I'm gonna pass this around as well, by the way. That's the Greek New Testament. It reads normal. Wait, let me see that just a second. Let me do something real quick. This is John 1, and I have the ribbon marker in John 1, 1. This is what it says. Now you say, what does that mean? It means in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. So what you're looking at what that looked like originally when John first wrote it. So pretty awesome stuff when you think about that. I've been taking Greek, so I had to throw out a little bit of that there for you. Okay, now imagine that you're a New Testament textual critic, all right, and you're given a task. There's a huge table set in front of you, and it has 5,800 pieces of the New Testament, or full New Testaments, and you know something about where they come from, how old they are, what region they were found in, that kind of thing. But basically, you're given a task. Take these 5,800 documents, Look through them and discern what the original text was based on this evidence. Do it precisely, do it infallibly so that you can give us a printed Greek New Testament based on it. That's the work of the textual critic. Oh, but by the way, when you go to do it, there are 400,000 text variants in the New Testament, 400,000. I'm telling you this to say it's not a precise science. Textual criticism works through a lot of things. There are King James-only advocates, and by the way, you're gonna hear me talk about King James-only advocates. I'm not a King James-only advocate, obviously. I have great respect for the King James Bible. I really do. But King James-only advocates tend to throw out a lot of misinformation to make their case. But they talk like textual criticism is an exact science, and it's not. It simply is not. Now, you may think to yourself, if there's 400,000 variants, how can I be certain that I have the Bible in front of me? That's a valid question. So let's work through this, and again, I'm indebted to Jeffrey Johnson for behind the Bible in what he has to say here. But how has God preserved his word throughout history? What about his promises? Has he promised to preserve his word? He has. So how do we deal with or reconcile that with the fact there's 400,000 textual variants just in the New Testament? Well, of these, let me give you some statistics. And again, this is from Jeff Johnson. The New Testament is composed of about 180,000 Greek words. 400,000 textual variants. 75% of these are obvious copyist errors. So what's 75% of 400,000? 300,000. That leaves 100,000 variants that we have to deal with, right? 24% of the variants, that is roughly 96,000 of them, are just variations in word order. Now that's not too unsettling because in Greek, unlike English, word order doesn't matter. Words can be thrown out in a different order. You can literally have the subject at the end of a sentence instead of at the beginning of a sentence like it is in English. Because the way the words are laid out, the word itself tells you that it's the subject, okay? So sometimes you might look in two different versions, and you're reading the words of Paul. And one of them he says Jesus Christ, another one it says Christ Jesus. Well, does that affect the meaning at all? it's the same person it's talking about. So we're talking about, you know, 24% of the variants, that's what you have. This only leaves about 1% of the variants of the 400,000 variants that actually make any difference, really mean a major difference to the translation. And most of the variants are things like this. If you use the King James or the New King James, and you read 1 John 1 in verse 4, it says this, these things we write to you that your joy may be full. If you use the ESV or the New American Standard, then you're gonna read, these things we write to you that our joy might be full. So your versus our, does that change the meaning a whole lot? Not at all. As a matter of fact, in Greek, it's two different words that are being used, but there's only one letter to distinguish them. It's heumēs or heumēs. And the question is, did he say your or did he say our? Now, let me ask you a question. How many of you are going to lose sleep tonight worrying about the inspiration of scripture because you don't know if John wrote your or our? And the most of the textual variants are things like that. And actually it should be our, because the oldest of manuscripts say our, and the majority of manuscripts say our. Your is actually a minority reading, and a very young reading as well. But regardless, those are the kinds of things we're talking about. Again, according to Geoffrey Johnson, there's only about 50 variants that are really still disputed. 50 variants out of 400,000 variants that actually make much of a difference. That should give you a lot of confidence that the Word of God has been preserved. There's no other document in history that has been preserved and copied so much as the Bible itself has been. Now let's talk about those 50 variants. There are variations in our English New Testaments that come from variants in the Greek text. Okay, and so there are, when you take all the variants, Basically, textual critics, are y'all following me so far? Is this clear? Okay, I know this is complicated, but I'm trying to make it as clear as I can. Basically, when you group the variants together, you come up with four textual families, okay? So the first is called the Alexandrian text, and with that is called, another one's called the Western text. And these are in your notes. Both these families make up only a small handful of the Greek manuscript evidence, but they're the oldest. They're the oldest texts we have, all right? In other words, they're the closest to the original autographs in time. And so the theory is that a water that's closest to its source is pure water. So that's the idea. Then you have a third text, a third text family called the Caesarian text. There's some scholars who debate whether this should even be classified as its own family. Some people think it's a conflation of just the Alexandrian and Western texts together, so these two text families copied. But the fourth type is called the Byzantine text. The Byzantine text makes up more than 90% of the 5,800 manuscript copies we have of the New Testament. That's why it is sometimes referred to as the majority text. But it's the youngest in time. In other words, it's the furthest removed in time from the original autographs. The oldest manuscript from the Byzantine family dates to around the 4th century AD. and many copies coming from that. So, you got that in your head? Four manuscript families, right? You got the Alexandrian and the Western, which are the oldest. You have the Caesarian, which some debate is even its own class. It's just a variation of the older manuscripts. And then you have the Byzantine, which makes up the majority of evidence. Basically, textual critics belong to three different schools of thought, all right? And the way that they understand the Greek New Testament. The first is known as the critical text approach. The critical text. The vast majority of scholars, vast majority of theologians, vast majority of Reformed brothers would hold to the critical text view. And basically, it's the idea that the Alexandrian text represents the purest text there is because of its antiquity, because it's so old, because it's the closest in time to the original autographs and therefore is the purest. There are two editions of the Greek New Testament based upon it. One of them is put out by United Bible Societies This is it. This is actually the third edition. It's in its fifth edition now. So the fifth edition is the go-to one that everybody uses today, which came out, I can't remember when the fifth edition came out. 2014 is when the fifth edition of the United Bible Society's Greek New Testament came out. Well, the interesting thing about this is there's another publishing house called Nestle-Aland, and Nestle-Aland uses the same exact text in their 28th edition that the United Bible Societies does in their 5th edition. It's the same exact Greek text, okay, and it's carrying them. It's the manuscript evidence. And the Nestle-Aland edition has a fuller and a larger textual apparatus than does United Bible Societies. That's basically the only difference between them. But both of them are the same thing. Most modern Bibles, most modern New Testaments, are based upon the United Bible Societies and Essel Aylen Greek text. In other words, if you use the ESV or the New American Standard or the American Standard version, the NIV, all of them use this particular New Testament as their basis, okay? And by the way, afterwards, y'all are welcome to come up and take a look at these. But that's the critical text view. So this is a gross oversimplification. Okay, are you still following me? I'm getting head nods. Okay, I know this is a lot. I'm drinking water from a fire hose here. But basically, for the critical text, if you want to grossly oversimplify it, older is gooder. Okay, that's the view. The next view, the second view, is known as the received text only view. There are several editions of the received text around. This is the one from Trinitarian Bible Society. I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of the received text. Sometimes you hear it referred to by its Latin name, Texas Receptus. The received text is the Greek text that underlies the King James Version of the New Testament and the New King James Version. So that's the received text. King James only advocates are also received text only advocates. And then there's a third view, the majority text view. This again gets a little bit confusing because both the received text and the majority text are based upon the Byzantine family. And sometimes you'll hear people who advocate the received text only view call the received text the majority text. but it's something somewhat different from what we actually call the majority text. So this is the idea, over 90% of the manuscript evidence is Byzantine, from the Byzantine family. And so the idea is more is gooder. words we don't neglect 90% of the evidence for the rest of the, for the remainder of the evidence the majority should rule. Now let me, there are two different editions by the way of the majority text. One of them is I have right here. This is put out in This particular edition, this is an interlinear, I believe this is Tindall House, no, Thomas Nelson puts this out. This is a Greek interlinear, so if you open it up, you'll see the Greek text, but you'll see the English translation right over it. So that you can follow, and you'll kind of get a sense of why the word order is just kind of wonky from what we think about in English when you read it. But this one is put out by Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad. It was published in 1985. It's the second edition. It's called the Majority Text. Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad were actually behind the New King James being translated. They're professors from Dallas Seminary. And then the other version of the majority text is the one that's being passed around which is from Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont. I believe it's Pierpont is with the Lord. Robinson is still alive. He's actually a professor at a Southern Baptist Seminary. He's a Greek scholar. He actually put together an analytical Greek lexicon that I found very, very helpful. This was published by Chilton Books originally in 2005, then again in 2015. Now, okay, you're still with me? Okay, very good. Let me talk about the majority text and the received text and what the difference between them is. Does anyone have the, where's the Robinson Pierpont Greek Testament? Let me go ahead and grab that. Thank you. Again, y'all are welcome to come up and look at this afterwards. Okay, so receive text, majority text, all right? The receive text, where did it come from? After Johann Gutenberg had made his printing press, there was a man by the name of Desiderius Erasmus. He was a Roman Catholic man. He wanted to be the first person ever to put together a printed version of the Greek New Testament. And so he took the documents he could find, which he had about six manuscripts to come from, all of them were from the Byzantine family. And he put them together in a rush to try to be the first man to put a printed Greek New Testament out. He did not have a copy of the book of Revelation. He found one copy. He had to actually hire a scribe to copy it for him so he would have access to it. And he wanted to include it in his edition, obviously, of the Greek New Testament. Only one problem. The last six verses of the Revelation were missing. He knew they were there because they were in the Latin Vulgate. So what he did in order to make sure they were included was he translated from the Latin Vulgate into Greek and put those six verses as his own translation from Latin into Greek. It's my understanding that even to this day, those are still what are represented in the received text. It's his translation from Latin to Greek. Now, he published his Greek New Testament, which became known as the Received Text, in March of 1516. Now, I want you to think about that. Think about the date. Because what happened in 1517 on October 31st? Does anyone know? Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door inaugurating ultimately what became known as the Protestant Reformation. Now I would say, I would argue by the way that that was actually not the crucial thing, it was when he, 1521 at the Diet of Worms that was when the Reformation was officially sounded. I don't know if you know this, Luther actually was not yet converted when he nailed the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door. because he wasn't arguing against the practice of indulgences. It was the abuse of indulgences that he was protesting. The conversion, the discovery of the justifications by faith alone would come later, a few years later, after he had nailed the 9-5 thesis to the Wittenberg door. But one of his most famous books that Luther ever wrote was, does anyone know? The Bondage of the Will. Do you know who he wrote that against? Erasmus. He wrote against Erasmus. He was debating Erasmus and that's why, so the man who printed the Greek New Testament is the very person that Luther was opposing. So just a little bit of history there. Well, here's the thing. Suddenly you had a printed edition of the Greek New Testament available And the Reformers are saying, let's go back to the Scriptures. And so what do they do? They start translating the Bible. Luther takes the received text, he translates into German, straight from Greek into German, his German New Testament. William Tyndale took the received text, and he translated the New Testament into English. And it was the first time that a Bible was ever translated straight from Greek into English. Wycliffe had translated the scriptures into English about 100 years earlier, but the thing was, he translated from the Latin Vulgate into English, not from Greek or Hebrew, because he didn't know Greek or Hebrew. And so this was the first time that someone translated straight from Greek into English. Man, I'm getting confused myself. OK, you still with me? Still follow me? What's going on here? Well, here's the thing. The received text was based on about six or seven documents that Erasmus had access to. Archaeological discoveries have discovered a lot more documents and a lot more texts in the Byzantine family. which means that in the received text, though it is one stream of the Byzantine family, there are some variations that have, some of the textual variants that made its way into the received text are minority readings. because they were only based on a handful of documents, as opposed to having now 5,000 documents that are from the Byzantine family. So what we call now the Byzantine majority text gets rid of, or doesn't get rid of, that's not the right word. It takes out those minority readings in favor of ones that have wider attestation. Does that make sense? Is that clear? Okay. So in other words, there are differences between the received text and the Byzantine text. 1,838 to be exact, according to one count. 1,005 of these come down to translatable differences. Now, I want to show you a very specific example, and it's in your notes. It's called the Johanin comma. Johanin, does anybody know what Johanin means? written by John. So Johannine writings means things written by the Apostle John. 1 John 5 verses 7 to 8. For there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three agree as one. That's from the New King James. It says something similar in the King James. But you see the words in boldface print? Those words are found in a minority of witnesses, and they're very, very late. In other words, you don't find those early in the textual manuscripts, and you don't find them in the majority of textual manuscripts. I am absolutely convinced that the Johannine comma is not part of the original text. And so the critical text omits those words, and so does the majority text, because, again, they're not found in ancient, the most ancient of Greek texts we have, and they're not found in the majority of Greek texts we have. So that's just an example. Two observations, and then we'll have some questions and answers. First of all, if you use the New King James Bible, have you ever noticed in your New Testament that it will give alternative readings in the footnotes or in the margin of your Bible. And it will say either NU or it will have like a Gothic script M. Have you ever noticed that? You know what NU stands for? stands for, N stands for Nestle, U stands for United. So it's saying the variance in the Nestle United text, this is how the critical text reads here. If it has the Gothic looking M, it's talking about the majority text. This is where the majority text differs from the received text. So you don't have to know Greek to know what some of these variations are if you use your New King James Bible. Now, this all may seem confusing. I'm hoping in the next few weeks, as we talk about translations, it begins to come together for you because we're going to get very specific about specific examples. But here's what I want you to know. Take all these variations, all these different versions of the Bible we have. Your New American Standard, your English Standard Version, your King James, your New King James, even your NIV. There are different brothers within our association. I don't think I know anybody within our association that uses the NIV. Most use the English Standard Version. Many use the New American Standard Version. Some use the New King James Version, like I do. And one or two use the King James, all right? All those men hold to the same confession of faith and fully subscribe to it. And if you came to those pastors in our various churches, they could open their Bible, whichever version they use, and they could prove to you the plenary verbal inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy of Holy Scripture from their version. They could show you how the Trinity is taught, that there's one God who exists as three persons from whatever version they're using. They could teach you about the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ from an NIV, from a New American Standard, from an American Standard, from a New King James. They could show you justification by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone. They could also teach you about the second coming of Jesus, that Jesus is coming in the future, and they could prove it from their versions. In other words, here's my point. Versions, with the exception of corrupt versions, which are truly corrupt, and we'll talk about some of those, We don't need to be dividing over the issue of Bible translations. That somebody uses the ESV versus someone who uses the King James or New King James. This is not a hill to die on. It's not, you don't look at someone who holds to the critical text and say, well brother, you're just unorthodox. You're not as conservative as I am. You don't love Jesus as much as I do. Or that because someone holds to the received text that you look down on them and think they're inferior to you. That's just sinful and wrong. We may have different opinions and even strong opinions about things, but on the fundamentals we're completely agreed. And I hope you find that encouraging. Last thing I wanna point out to you is there's a chart at the end of your notes. There was a fundamentalist pastor actually that puts a portion of this chart together, and I took it and thought, I can expand on that. I think maybe make it a little bit better even. But I think if you look at this, it can be helpful to you. The triune God moved 40 human authors to write the original autographs. That's plenary verbal inspiration, right? Then, scribes copied those into Hebrew and Greek copies. And we also have ancient Bible translations based on that. And we have quotations in the Apostolic and Church Fathers. In other words, early Church history, men would quote from the Scriptures, and the question is, what were they quoting from? Now, that's of somewhat limited use, because you don't know if they're quoting from memory or what they have in front of them, but at least it tells you something, an attestation to certain verses being there. Well, textual critics then take these Hebrew and Greek copies, and they evaluate them in an effort to determine what was the original text most likely to be. And so they put out printed Hebrew and Greek Bibles, which is what we have in front of us here, and then those get translated into English Bible translations. And then through the process of hermeneutics, we study the Bible, we make reference to the original languages, and we read our Bibles, and we teach our Bibles, and we preach our Bibles. Does that make sense? Does that help you? So hopefully that's the point of what I'm saying tonight. Now, God willing, we're gonna talk about Bible translations next Wednesday, and then the Wednesday after that, we're gonna take off for Thanksgiving, and then come back in December, and we're gonna talk about part two of Bible translations. And what we're gonna talk about next time, next week, God willing. is what are the practical differences that it makes if you're using these various Greek New Testaments? What are the differences that show up in our English Bible translations? And we're gonna get specific about that. And then we're gonna talk about philosophy of translation. So which text do you use is a question. How do you translate what's in front of you? Your philosophy of translation. And that will help us to understand the differences between Bible translations.