How long ago I was attending an annual board of directors meeting for frontline missions. We support frontline missions here. And executive director of that mission gave everybody present that day a wonderful little gift. And I have it here in my hand. It's a treasure. An inch and a half by one inch, 200 pages in Russian. This is the entire Gospel of Mark. As I've traveled in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, I've met some of the men who at the risk of their lives, their health and their fortunes literally were involved in printing. these copies of the Bible. In fact, some of them, as I've looked in their faces, teaching them, are men who actually have had their personal belongings confiscated by the governments of those countries. They have spent years in Soviet gulags in Siberia, suffered great damage to their health, all in the interest of preserving and publishing the revelation of God. The truth. Is God's greatest treasure. And the word preserved. Is a treasure for us. I'd like you to take your New Testament turned to 1 Peter 1 as we begin tonight. 1 Peter 1 verses 22 to 25. I think we should ask ourselves a devotional question tonight as we begin. Do I value the truth as God's greatest treasure to me? His word that is preserved like these men and like other believers through the centuries. This word transcends all else in importance. It is God's mind. It is God's thoughts preserved for us. This remarkable paragraph at the end of chapter 1 of 1 Peter and verses 22 to 25 captures a powerful summary of the effect of God's Word preserved this great treasure in our life and experience as believers. Verse 22 reads, Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man is the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. But the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which was by the gospel, which by the gospel is preached unto you." In this magnificent summary, We learn that this Word of God, this living, pulsating Word of God preserved for us, radically transforms human relationships. That's what verse 22 says. Seeing you purified your souls and obeying the truth of the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently. But this miraculously preserved Word that is alive, not just ink on pages, also is a word that beyond just transforming human relationships, even before that, in order for that to happen, literally can transform human nature. And it does. It totally changes it. Verse 23, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. And this wonderful text of Scripture teaches us that this Word preserved, the living Word of God, forever transcends all other human achievements. And that's really what this quotation that comes from Isaiah 40, verse 6 and 8 is about, that you find at the end of this paragraph. For all flesh is as grass, in all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. Compared to the enduring quality of the living Word of God preserved, this magnificent monument to the mind and heart of God and the ability of God to transform human nature, to transform human relationships, all human achievement, even the best of human achievement, is nothing but passing and transitory, like a meadow with grass that is burned over and brown, the grass that passes away, like the flower of the grass, the most beautiful, the culmination of the growth of the field. Another word, the highest of achievements. They all pass away. Great books, they're replaced by other books that are written. Great buildings, they're bulldozed over or fall to ruins and other buildings are built on them. Look at the Mayan temples of Central and South America. They're in ruins. The pyramid of Giza in Egypt. There it stands in essential ruins. The Parthenon of Greece in ruins. Even Solomon's temple barely has anything remaining. It's in ruins. All the flower of the grass. perisheth. I'm not cynical, men and women. I'm really not. But great movements are swept aside. Wonderful, glorious human philosophies fade and new philosophies arise. Nothing human lasts. But the Word of the Lord endureth forever. the absolute superiority of the Word of God as the most valuable and enduring of all things in the earth is the focus of this glorious statement. in this paragraph in the Word of God. And I'm sure that as Peter penned these words, he no doubt had echoing in his thoughts the statement of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount in verse 17 and 18 of chapter 5, when Christ said, I came not to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill. And that law and that prophets will not perish, not one jot or one tittle until all be fulfilled. All come to pass. It will endure forever. Heaven and earth will sooner pass away. In other words, It's not going to happen. It is impossible for it to happen. Don't even look for it to occur. God's Word will endure forever. You have the Word of Jesus Christ on that straight from our Savior's mouth. Now, what I have the wonderful privilege of doing this evening is with you thinking together. about how our great God has done that. We're going to think together. We're going to meditate together as brothers and sisters in Christ over exactly how the Son of God sought to the fulfillment of His glorious statement in Matthew 5, 17 and 18 and how 1 Peter 1 verses 22 to 25 have come to pass in history to this present moment. Just what has God done in the preservation of His Word through the Old Testament manuscripts and the New Testament manuscripts? Now, I promised you this morning that we were going to go to seminary tonight. And in fulfillment of Ron's prophetic pronouncement this morning, I am prepared with all my energy to bore you to tears. But by the grace of God, I'm going to attempt not to do that. And if you'll look with me at this as a faith-building experience, as before your eyes as you look at this information, these facts of history, you're seeing a fulfillment of the promise of your God. And the fulfillment of that promise, men and women, should cause your heart to soar in faith. It should cause your confidence in God and the nature of His Word to increase. It should heighten your love and passion to know and understand the mind of God, because it is in truth the mind of God that sits on your coffee table, that sits beside your bed, that's there on your desk for you to see, for you to meditate on, for you to love, for you to obey. Oh, how love I thy law, David said. It is my meditation all the day. Why? Because it is God's law. It is his mind. So, let's begin to consider tonight together the magnificent work of God and the preservation of His Word and the amazing accumulation of manuscript evidence. I'd like us to begin, and I think the right place to begin, is with the preservation of the Old Testament manuscripts. There is virtually unanimous agreement among authorities and ancient Near Eastern documents, that the Old Testament towers over all other ancient literary works as that which is preserved beyond any of the others in extent, these 39 books of the Old Testament. And I can assert that without fear of contradiction from a secular authority, a liberal authority, a Catholic authority, any authority. There is universal agreement that there are no ancient Near Eastern documents that even come close to the quality and quantity of preservation to the 39 books of the Old Testament. Just consider the opinion of the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles as an example of the reliability of the Old Testament. You know, Christ quoted in the first century from copies of the Old Testament as the authoritative word of God repeatedly. In fact, he said in Luke four for man shall not live by word alone, by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Meaning that daily attention to the revelation of God preserved as he had it in his hands in the first century, hundreds of years after the original documents were written, was the preserved word of God to be meditated on and to feed our souls with. He said concerning the preserved Word of God in the first century, the youngest copy of which he possessed was no doubt several hundred years old, that it would never pass away, that he came to fulfill it and for all its prophecies to come to pass. Do you know that the apostolic writers in the New Testament quote every one of the authors of the Old Testament, every one of the 39 canonical books? They relied on the first-century manuscripts to do that. In fact, some of the authors of the New Testament even quote from what's called the Septuagint, which was a 250-year-old Greek translation of the Old Testament as the authoritative Word of God. They weren't struggling, were they, with God's work of preservation of His Word? But consider now with me the meticulous practices of the scribes in producing the Old Testament manuscripts. There's a rich history and documentation of this, dating clear back to the first century and even some since then as well. There were two groups of scribes among the Jews. They were called Soferim and the other were called Masoretes. the sofa ream with the scribes that arose during the era of Ezra and this was really these men, the official Jewish Bible Society. They did their work from 400 BC to 200 AD and this is what they accomplished. They standardized the shapes of the Hebrew letters. They hit on the device of literally counting every word, every verse, and even every letter on a page and putting those numbers at the bottom of that page to ensure that the copying of that page in the future would be accurate down to the letter. Following the Soferim were the Masoretes. They did their work principally from 500 AD to 950 AD. They did a great work for us because they preserved for us the oral pronunciation of Hebrew words. You see, as the Hebrew Bible was originally written, it's just consonants. And it was simply tradition that allowed them to pronounce those words correctly. But the Masoretes actually developed a vowel system in order to give us the pronunciation of all of those words. They did some also some notations always in the margins of the manuscripts where they felt there was some variation with previous manuscripts and offered some potential correction and they stayed with the device of counting. the letters, the words, the verses on every page to ensure that nothing was added and nothing was deleted. They also controlled the kind of materials that the Word of God was copied on, that it was only done on the skin of clean animals according to the law of God. They established a uniform number of columns on each page that all the scribes were to follow. They never permitted anything to be written from memory, but to always be checked visually, word by word, phrase by phrase, as they copied. And believe it or not, if you can imagine, they actually conducted a special ceremony every time they copied out the name of God in the copying of the manuscripts. And then they did something very interesting. These Masorette, they actually systematically destroyed worn out copies or copies that had errors in them to ensure that there was not the spreading of an accurate copies of the manuscripts of the Old Testament. I want us to consider several amazing examples of the preservation of Old Testament manuscripts, and this is really significant. It's significant because of, one, the age of the manuscripts, which you'll see here in just a moment. The fact that the materials that these documents are made of, of course, was destructible material. It was parchment. It was papyrus. Thirdly, the mobility of the Jews. The Jews didn't stay in one place. They didn't stay just in Palestine. They disseminated all through the Roman Empire. There are Jewish synagogues, the ruins of them, found everywhere in the Roman Empire to this day. They've been excavated. So you've got the Jews wandering all throughout the empire. And then there's the frequent conquering of the Jews at Jerusalem alone from eighteen hundred B.C. to nineteen forty eight A.D. Jerusalem itself was attacked and and laid waste to attempts to be controlled. and in many cases, to some degree or another, devastated. In fact, in A.D. 70, the Roman general Titus laid siege to Jerusalem, razed the city and destroyed the temple, which was the main depository of all the manuscripts of the Old Testament. And then, of course, as I said a minute ago, there was the systematic destruction of the manuscripts by the Masorete themselves because they didn't want faulty copies to get disseminated or spread around. Now, all of that wrapped up together. I mean, all the wandering of the Jews, all the attacks of the enemies, the wearing out of the materials, their own intentional destruction of faulty copies. You'd think things would be getting down to pretty minimal amounts left in existing. Well, think with me about this fact. These examples of God's preservation of the Old Testament. There is the Leningrad Codex. That's named after where this manuscript of the Old Testament is found. It's dated at 1010 A.D. It's in a museum in Leningrad in Russia. It contains the text of the Masoretes dating from 980 BC. For many, many years, this was the oldest copy of the Hebrew Old Testament that existed in the world. In fact, it is the basis of the current Hebrew Bible that's used by Jewish rabbis, that's used by Christian scholars to this day. This particular text, this particular copy of the Hebrew Old Testament. But in addition to this manuscript that's dated 1010 A.D., there is the Latin Vulgate. Now we're talking about back translating. This is dated at 404 A.D., a Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible in the Old Testament. In addition to that, we have Codex Codex Sinaiticus. This was actually discovered on Mount Sinai in Palestine in the 1800s. It dates from 375 to 400 AD. It's a translation of the Hebrew Bible in Greek. And then there's codex Vaticanus. And of course, you can guess where this one is kept. It's actually kept in the library at the Vatican. It dates at 325 to 350 A.D. It is a Greek manuscript translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. And then there are other numerous early foreign language translations dating from the first to the fourth century. There's the old Latin that dates to 200 AD, a Latin translation. The Syriac Peshitta that dates from 100 to 300 AD, a translation in Syrian from the Hebrew. The Coptic, which is an Egyptian dialect that dates from 100 to 200 AD, a translation from Hebrew. The Ethiopic from northern Africa. which dates from 300 to 400. The Gothic, which dates from 300 to 400. And the Armenian, which is a translation from Hebrew that dates from 400 to 500. Why is that significant? These translations are significant because actually they are older than the oldest Hebrew manuscript that was possessed for many, many generations. They date back some thousand years earlier. than the Leningrad Codex. So if you back translated those documents, those translations into Hebrew, you would have the Masoretic text, essentially identical to the Leningrad Codex, but a thousand years earlier. Then, The most significant archaeological discovery in the 20th century occurred. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A remarkable story of a young shepherd boy wandering with his sheep near the shore of the Dead Sea in Palestine. These manuscripts were discovered from 1947 to 1956. In fact, what absolutely establishes their validity is that the first one was discovered the year that Brother Stan Roop was born. That settles the issue right there. They were found in eleven caves on a hillside on a cliffside no more than sixteen miles from Jerusalem. The young boy's father The boy who found them, a shepherd boy, was throwing stones into the caves and he heard a pot shatter and they climbed up into those caves and they found literally hundreds of these ancient manuscripts. that were stored there for safekeeping by a fact called the F scenes. They were a very separatistic sect of Judas from the first century who had a community. It's called the Qumran community by what a seasonal, not really a river, but a seasonal stream called the Wadi Qumran, and they have their own communal living place there. They had a scriptorium where they actually copied Scripture and the ruins have been excavated of that scriptorium. You can visit that today. You can see these caves today as well, where these manuscripts were found. I've been in the book dealers shop, the dealer of antiquities shop who actually purchased the manuscripts from the young boy and his family for, of course, his own possession and then eventually they were sold to the Israeli government. There were five hundred manuscripts that were discovered. 100 of the 500 were biblical manuscripts. Every one of the biblical manuscripts has a commentary written on it. The only book of the Bible that there is not a manuscript for is the book of Esther, which was a sectarian bias that the Essenes had because You may be aware that the name of God is not specifically explicitly mentioned in the book of Esther, and so somehow that biased them or prejudice them apparently, and they did not copy a copy of that. Some of these manuscripts are whole scrolls. Some of them are nothing larger than virtually a scrap. As a manuscript. These manuscripts we know. By virtue of the that's used and the material that they were written on date from 250 to 150 B.C. A very small group of them date at that age of the 100. A much larger group dates from 150 to 30 B.C. But men and women, think with me for just a moment before we move on to talking about the text of these manuscripts. This predates the Leningrad Codex, which is 1010 A.D. by twelve hundred and sixty years. In fact, if you look at 250 B.C. and think for just a moment or even the more recent ones of that 100 from 150 B.C. to 30 B.C., we are somewhere between 150 and 400 years from the writing of the last canonical book of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi, that was written between 400 and 500 B.C. We're getting very close to the time of the writing of the original manuscript. Now, here is the amazing fact. There is a whole scroll of the book of Isaiah that serves as a beautiful example of the quality of these Dead Sea Scrolls. The Isaiah scroll is a classic example of the reliability of the Jewish practice of the transmission of Scripture as they copied Scripture. Compared to the present-day Hebrew Bible based on the Leningrad Codex of 1010, the Isaiah scroll matches it 95%. With only five percent variation in those manuscripts and those are all clearly just scribal errors there misspellings reversing of the order of the words. We don't have any kind of intentional corruption of the text. From this, we can draw a very important conclusion, and I've decided I'd quote for you a man named Gleason Archer, who's an internationally known Hebrew scholar and Old Testament scholar, a believer, a conservative man who made the observation because of their faithfulness, we have today, and he's speaking of the faithfulness of the Jewish scribes and their copying. We have today a form of the Hebrew text, which is in all essentials duplicates the recension, which means version which was considered authoritative in the days of Christ and the apostles, if not a century earlier. God has done this. And you know what is really amazing, men and women, we don't really even know how many of the people that were involved in this were even actually believers. They were Jewish men who had it as their occupation and job to copy the Scriptures. And they did it. And God providentially oversaw it. And what's preserved for us today is a phenomenal record. of the revelation of God. The English translation you have in your hands, men and women, you can rest assured is the very Word of God that Jesus Christ quoted from. Not in English, of course, but that He quoted from in the first century and the apostles quoted from in the first century and was used even prior to the first century. That is how well-preserved, and men and women, please understand a very important fact here with me. There is not an honest linguist. There is not an honest scholar in any seminary, liberal or conservative, in the world who will deny what I just said. They may deny that it's the Word of God. They may fault its doctrines or its teachings. But they cannot deny the miracle of God's preservation of the word. They can't deny it and they don't deny it. Well, it gets better. It gets even better from here as we turn our attention to the New Testament and the magnificent preservation of God of the New Testament manuscripts. Compared to the Old Testament manuscripts, of course, we're much closer in time than when those Old Testament documents were originally written. You know that the New Testament books were written over a very short period of time, and that's very different than the Old Testament. The Old Testament scriptures were penned, were authored over a period of a thousand years. The New Testament documents were authored over a period of 50 years. The Old Testament documents were authored in numerous locations throughout the Middle East. The New Testament documents were authored in Palestine and in various locations in the Roman Empire, depending on where Luke and Paul were at the time they did their writing and the other apostles. But we have some very important questions to ask and answer, and I think this is the right way for us to look at what God has done wonderfully with the manuscript evidence of the New Testament. And let me pause and say this to all of you. If you have an interest in having this information, all of it, these details, these slides, we'll provide all of them for you intact, the whole thing. All you have to do is call the church office. Sorry, guys, but it's actually already in a separate computer file, so they can just email attach that to you and you can have it all for your personal use. You're welcome to it. So in case you've been concerned that you can't copy, possibly copy all this down, that's not a problem. Don't worry about that. This is all available to you. And the first vital question I want us to ask is what did the New Testament manuscripts look like? What do they look like? Well, they don't all look the same. Some of them are made of parchment. Some of them are made of papyrus, some of them are made of paper. Parchment is simply the treated skins of animals, ideally young cattle, young sheep, goats or antelope. These manuscripts made out of animal skins were actually written in brown or black ink. This is a very popular methodology of recording information until the Middle Ages. They were very strong, very easily preserved. Some of the manuscripts are papyrus. This is a plant that grew twelve to fifteen feet high along the banks of the River Nile. A cross section of a papyrus plant is about the thickness of a man's wrist. It's triangular in shape. And actually, what they would do was cut this in strips and lay the strips horizontally, lay the strips vertically, and then actually smash those strips together and create a solid mass. When it would dry, they would actually sand it or buff it. And they had a very fine writing surface as a result. Sometimes they wrote on the front and the back, not just one side or the other. And then paper. which came sometime later was, of course, consisting of the fiber of flax or hemp or cotton. It was actually imported by Arabian traders into Europe in the Middle Ages and replaced parchment in Europe at that time. The manuscripts come in all three of these kinds of materials, the ones that exist today. Where can you find these manuscripts, all these New Testament manuscripts? Well, These documents can be found in museums in Europe. They can be found in museums in the United States, in the United Kingdom. But what you're going to find when you do locate them there is one of two forms of manuscripts made out of these three materials, either a scroll or a codex. The scroll made of papyrus, typically. was anywhere from thirty one to thirty two feet long. In other words, with three columns on a section, you could get all the book of Luke and the book of Acts on one particular scroll, which, as I mentioned before, sometime written on the front of the back. The Codex is a new was a new approach taken in the second and third century to get away from the scrolls, that's where we get our books. This is a codex. The pages were made of parchment and they were sewn together and they were bound. Obviously, that makes the information a lot more accessible. You can turn to just one particular place instead of saying, well, let's see, I want Luke 24. So you got to unroll 31 feet of scroll, you know, to get to the end of the book of Luke. Not real convenient. The invention of the codex helped that out tremendously. Those manuscripts that you would find in museums and the Middle East and Europe, Russia, the British British Isles and United States will either be unseal or minuscule manuscripts. And that means that the letters are capital letters on seals. Those are the really early ones written up to the eighth century. And the minuscules, the small lowercase letters in Greek, were written from the ninth century on. So you're going to see scrolls, you're going to see codexes, you're going to see manuscripts that have all capital letters, manuscripts that are newer, if I can put it that way, not as old, that have small letters. You're going to see manuscripts that are parchment, papyrus and paper. These manuscripts that I'm mentioning that appear in all these museums in Europe, the Middle East, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, have been photocopied and produced and assembled by the Munster Institute of New Testament Research in Germany, mainly the work of Kurt and Barbara Alland. These two people with their team have made accessible through photocopied in photocopied form. All of these Greek manuscripts that I'm alluding to are discussing. In fact. Where there are variations in the manuscript, they've developed a magnificent system to note those variations actually at the bottom of the Greek New Testament on each page. So, you know, where even the slightest variation is as you examine verse by verse. How many Greek manuscripts of the New Testament are there and how old are they? Well, there are a lot. and they vary in age. We have some that are as old, as date back as early as A.D. 30 to those that are relatively recent, 500 years ago. Manuscripts of all or part of the New Testament. Let me show you what I mean. The manuscripts that are papyri. These are very old manuscripts written on papyrus. In the first and second and third centuries, there are ninety six of these. The unsealed manuscripts that date from around the second century up to the eighth century, there are two hundred and ninety nine. The minuscule manuscripts that date from the ninth century on, there are two thousand eight hundred and twelve of them. There are lectionaries. These are selected parts of the New Testament. that are used in book form for services within the church. There are 2,281 of these for a grand total of 5,488. Now, there have been wars. There have been natural disasters that actually, unfortunately, have destroyed some of these manuscripts. But the manuscripts still number well in excess of 5,000 of them. Now, let's look at some of the primary examples of the things God has preserved the manuscripts for your New Testament, the Greek New Testament that was translated into English that you read in your devotions every day. This is remarkable. One is John Ryland's papyrus named after the man who owned it. Bought it and then actually donated it to the British Museum. This manuscript, men and women, dates from A.D. 130. That's 40 years after John wrote his gospel in approximately A.D. 90 to 95. The Chester Beatty papyri, again, owned by, purchased by, and as a collector and then donated to the British Museum, dates at A.D. 200, contains major portions of the New Testament, within 100 to 150 years of the original composition of the New Testament. The Bodmer papyrus, too, dating from 150 to 200, contains virtually all of the Gospel of John. Codex Sinaiticus, dates from 350 A.D., contains all of the New Testament. Codex Vaticanus, A.D. 350, contains virtually all of the New Testament, with some minor exceptions. Codex Alexandrinus, which dates from 400 to 500 A.D., contains all of the New Testament except small portions of Matthew and John and 2 Corinthians. Now, how does The Greek manuscript evidence of the New Testament compare to other ancient documents. How does it compare? Keep in mind that we have five thousand or better than five thousand of these manuscripts. Keep in mind that the works that I'm going to cite from ancient Rome and ancient Greece are viewed as authoritative and reliable by secular historians based on the number of copies that exist. Now listen along. The writings of Caesar, written from 100 to 44 BC, the earliest existing copy that we have is one from A.D. 900. There's about a thousand years difference from the writing of the original to the copy that we possess. There are only ten of these copies that exist and yet it's reviewed as a reliable source of the writings of Caesar. His Gallic Wars. The writing of a man named Livy, Tacitus Livy. He wrote his work in 59 B.C., lived until about 87. We have this historical work by him, this Roman, and 20 copies. The age of the copies are difficult to date, but there are only 20 copies of it, and it's viewed as an accurate representation of what the man wrote. You know the name Plato. You've heard that before, the famous Greek philosopher. He lived from 427 to 347 BC. The earliest copy we have of his tetralogy, which is a philosophical work, dates at AD 900. That's the youngest copy we've got, even though he lived in 427 to 347 BC. There's a twelve hundred year time span between the original and the copy we possess, and there are only seven of them. But nobody doubts that it's Plato's works, and it's an accurate rendering because there are seven copies and they're all the same. There's Tacitus. And his famous Annals, another work of history by a Roman author, he wrote these around eighty one hundred the earliest copy that we possess dates of eleven hundred eighty a thousand years later. There are twenty copies of this again. Nobody doubts the reliability. Everybody accepts the historicity. Have you ever heard the name Pliny? Pliny was a Roman Governor, actually, in the first century and a little beyond. He lived from 61 to 113 AD. He wrote a history of the Roman Empire. The earliest copy we possess dates at 850 AD, 750 years after the writing of his original. There are seven copies of it, and it's viewed as reliable. The same is true of the writings of Demosthenes, the Greek rhetorician and politician. He lived in 383 to 322 BC. The earliest copy we have dates at 1100 AD. That's 1300 years from the writing of the original. There are 200 copies of this, but they're all from the same original copy because they're all virtually identical. Again, no one questions that this was, in fact, what he wrote. It's viewed as historical and reliable. Here's a familiar name, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who lived from 384 to 322. The earliest copy we have, again, is 1100 A.D. Fourteen hundred years from when he wrote the original to the copy that we possess. There are only five copies of his works in manuscript form. Nobody doubts. that it's Aristotle's work, that it's reliable. Homer and his famous Iliad, written as early, oh there's Aristophanes to put into the mix, who wrote from 450 to 385, the earliest copies 900 AD, 1200 year span, ten copies only. I mean, you're beginning to see, I hope, a pattern here. Here's Homer who wrote his Iliad, the famous epic poem written in 900 B.C. The earliest copy dates 400 A.D. There's a great or 400 B.C. There's a 500 year span between them. There are 643 copies of this of various dates. And that's, of course, the most dominant number that we've seen so far. Now, why did I do all that? So, that was getting a little tedious, Dr. Hankins. There's a point. I'm trying to fulfill Ron's prophecy. No, the point is this. Here is the point, folks. The New Testament. Now, you saw time and time again when they wrote the newest, the oldest copy we have, and that it was oftentimes a thousand years, wasn't it? From the writing of the original to the oldest copy. And then we'd have twenty copies or ten copies or maybe two hundred or maybe in Homer's case, six hundred and forty some. But the New Testament documents were written from 40 A.D. to 100 A.D. The earliest copy we possess 130 A.D. Just approximately 30 to 40 years difference. The number of copies we have in excess of 5,000 of these copies. Do you see why it's right for us to say that the New Testament stands alone and towers over in its manuscript evidence any ancient work that is viewed as historical and reliable. They don't even come close. Look what your God has done. It's like God is saying, look, there's not going to be any mistakes here. We're going to go way, way, way back close to the writing of the originals. And we're going to duplicate this in thousands of times so that in the end, there's really no question. My word is preserved. Now, there are variations in these manuscripts, these 5000 plus manuscripts. And that's troubled people. Some of you may be keenly aware that that has caused really an incredible debate to rage among Bible-believing Christians in America today. Some who hold that the Greek text used to translate the King James Version stands over and is superior to the Greek text that reflects the compilation of the five thousand plus manuscripts. By the way, the Greek texture King James Version was translated from consisted or was created by a is a Rasmus Roman Catholic humanistic scholar out of seven Greek manuscripts. The manuscript evidence that we possess today is remarkable in its quantity. The beauty is that it proves out and establishes the English translation in the King James. There's not there's not information there that contradicts anything that's in the King James translation. Our King James translation is reliable. It is accurate. It is a wonderful translation. But I'm here to say this to you. The debate that has raged between people who argue that the Greek text behind the King James is vastly superior to the compilation of data and information from the 5,000 Greek manuscripts that have been accumulated and discovered over the years and want to make this a matter of debate among Christians and make Bible versions, good conservative, orthodox, accurate translations of the Bible a matter of debate and division among the people of God? That is the purest example of a mountain out of a molehill that exists in Christianity today. And let me tell you why. Virtually all the variations in those five thousand plus manuscripts are variations in spelling or word order. There are twenty thousand lines in the Greek New Testament. only in forty lines. Is there any concern about the variation of the content? Those forty lines contain four hundred words that represents one half. of one percent of the content of the New Testament, about which there is discussion among New Testament scholars from the manuscripts about what really should be translated. But let's note something, folks. It's not that we don't have the information. It's just making a decision about the one half of one percent. We've got it in thousands of manuscripts. One half of one percent spelling. Word order. 400 lines out of 20,000 lines. 400 words. That absolutely in no way impacts anything in the interpretation of the New Testament. Nothing. And what I want you to do is not to feel that I just said what I said. to stick my finger in somebody's eye. That's not the point. The point is, lift your heart in praise to your God who has preserved His Word in such a manner, to such an extent, that there is absolutely no denying it. We have the Word of God. I've translated from a photocopy of the Gospel of John, dating around 200 from John 6, John 3, 16. I've translated it from Greek myself. And guess what, folks? It says the same thing that your English Bible says. God has preserved his word. But what if God had not preserved all these manuscripts and we're coming to a climax here? Is there any other ancient manuscript support for the text of the New Testament? What if tomorrow somebody seditiously gathered up and destructively gathered up all these manuscripts of the New Testament, put them in a building and set them on fire? There was a great book burning. Would we lose our New Testament? Not a chance. In the writings of the early church leaders, We have quotations from the New Testament from Justin Martyr, who lived and actually died in 165 A.D. Three hundred and thirty verses are quoted. Irenaeus of Lyons, who died in 202 A.D., 1,819 quotations. Clement of Alexandria, who died in 212 A.D., 2,406 quotations. Origen of Alexandria, and later of Caesarea, died in 253 A.D., 17,922 quotations. Tertullian of Carthage, 7,258. He died in 220 A.D. Hippolytus of Rome died in 235, 1,378 quotations. Eusebius of Caesarea, known in church history as the first church historian, died in 339 A.D., quotes the New Testament 5,176 times. Men and women, look at this number. 36,289 quotations from the New Testament in these early church leaders writings alone. And here is the remarkable fact. You can reconstruct the entire New Testament from those quotations. Every verse is there. That's been examined, checked and double checked. Wow. OK, what if we gathered up all the writings of the church fathers and we put them all in a house and we set that on fire? What then? Well, then we could go to the first century through the fourth century and in the first century through the fourth century. What we would find is a translation of the Greek New Testament in Syrian. another one in Latin, another one in Coptic, another one in Ethiopic, Armenian, Gothic and Gregorian. And we could back translate and have the entire New Testament in Greek by back translation from these ancient translations of the Bible. There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament. God has done a wonderful thing, hasn't He, folks? In preserving His Word for us in the manuscript evidence of the Old Testament and the New Testament. I want you to be encouraged about what God continues to do to preserve His Word. He's translated His Word. He's used many men and women to translate His Word into thousands of languages. Scripture translation is a very difficult and challenging thing. It takes arduous effort and years to learn how to do it. And yet the documents of the New Testament have been have proliferated amazingly. And I've talked about some of these ancient translations just a minute ago, and I'm noting them for you right now on the screen. So you can just get an idea of how many of them there are. There's more here right now I'm putting up for you than I just read to you a second ago. But take it a step further. modern times, now look at this. In 1800, the Bible was translated into 52 languages. In 1970, It was translated into fourteen hundred and thirty-one languages. Nineteen eighty-five, sixteen hundred and sixty languages. Nineteen ninety, nineteen hundred and twenty-eight languages. Nineteen ninety-five, two thousand sixty-two languages. Nineteen ninety-six, two thousand one hundred and sixty-seven. And by two thousand seven, because of computer technology, the Bible in whole or in part had been translated into four thousand six hundred and sixty-three languages. of the sixty nine hundred languages in the world. Now, let me say, well, while there's there's still two thousand two hundred and fifty languages, it's not translated into. That two thousand two hundred and fifty languages represents one percent of the world's population. One percent. One percent of the world's population does not have a part of or all of the scriptures translated into its language, but they're working at it rapidly, quickly. The job is getting done. We can say that there is validity for the claim that the translation of the Bible is one of the greatest accomplishments in communication in the history of the world. The United Bible Societies, of which there are 142 in the world, estimate that since the beginning of printing, over three billion copies of the Bible have been printed and distributed. God is at work to preserve his word. And God works in the individual heart and the individual life. I spent a little time in Zambia last summer preaching and teaching some pastors there. Got to walk in places that David Livingston walked and served and ministered in South Central Africa. He was the son-in-law of Robert Moffat. Moffat was a veteran missionary when David Livingston arrived there on the field. Once Moffat was on one of his long journeys witnessing and carrying the gospel to people. And he came to an area that was known as the Baquanah people. And he wasn't getting a good reception from the people at all. They weren't ready to provide him with food or a place to stay until an elderly Baquanah woman came up to him, provided food for him and milk for him and smiled at him. And he asked her in her language, why do you do this? And out from under her robe, she pulled a copy of the Bible in Dutch, which was the language of the immigrants, that she had learned to read. And she said in her language, this is the light that lights my path. This is the oil that makes my lamp burn. And men and women, that is what the living Word of God does in every place, in every nation, and among every tongue in the world. Praise God that His Word endures forever. Let's stand to our feet together. Father, how we thank Thee, how we praise Thee and glorify Thee for Thy kindness and Thy mercy. And what great work You have done for us in preserving Your Word for us so fabulously, so magnificently. We rejoice in that, Lord. And we pray that You would help us have a heart and an attitude that is fitting in keeping with the great effort You've gone to to see that we have the true Word of God preserved for us.