We are in this series on apologetics, on defending the faith, and we're still in the first question in the series, and that is, how do we know the Bible is an extraordinary book? How do we know it's not just another religious book? Now, at the beginning of the series, I recommended some general sources to you that you would find very helpful. We talked about the two approaches to apologetics. We used the terms presuppositionalism and evidentialism, and that was all very hoity-toity. and intellectual. And I mentioned that if you want to read about presuppositionalism, Cornelius Van Til is the guy. But he's not a light read. You've got to be real serious to read Van Til. If you want to read evidentialism, in my experience, the evidentialist writers tend to be more readable because they tend to be less theoretical and philosophical, and they're giving evidences. There are a couple of names that I mentioned. One was Norman Geisler. who teaches up in Charlotte. To my mind, Geisler's big weakness is that he's given up on young earth creationism. He's bought into the millions of years stuff. And that's too bad because I don't think it's necessary. I really don't. But there are good people on both sides of that question, so I'm not going to call him a heretic for that. His apologetics writings are very good. He's got a couple, a book that came out just a couple of years ago called I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist that is really excellent. It's quite good and very readable. It's designed as a presentation to an unbeliever, a very skeptical unbeliever who's not going to be convinced easily. And you could be your own, the judge yourself of whether he succeeded in that regard. But it's a very useful book. Even though he goes the millions of years stuff, I wish he didn't. He has a couple of other books. When skeptics ask, is covers a lot of material that's similar to the kinds of things we've been talking about. The questions people ask, who have legitimate questions they want to know. How do we know the Bible is not an ordinary book? How do we know there's a God? How do we know He's good, given what we see around us in the universe? Those kinds of questions. He's got another book called When Critics Ask, which is designed to address the alleged contradictions in the Bible. And it just goes in biblical order. You've got Genesis in the front, Revelation in the back, and any reference for which there has been a reasonably meaningful suggestion that there's a contradiction in there, he addresses that. And that is a really useful. It's not the kind of book you sit down and read front to back, but it's a very useful reference work. I don't think I mentioned one other work that you'll know the author. Josh McDowell has been around for many years, was very popular back in the 70s on college campuses, has been associated with Campus Crusade. He's an evangelical. And so there are some differences I would have with him. But he wrote back then a series of books, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, More Evidence That Demands a Verdict, which are very good and have been used to bring a lot of honestly seeking, particularly college-aged students, to Christ. And I commend him for those works. He's come out with another one more recently that's called A Ready Defense. which is talking about a lot of the same questions that we're talking about here and that Geisler talks about in When Skeptics Ask. And those books are every bit as good as my series and probably better because you'll have them longer and they answer more questions. So I would highly recommend When Skeptics Ask, When Critics Ask, and A Ready Defense. We're addressing the question, is there objective evidence that the Bible is extraordinary? And I suppose I could say supernatural. that it's from God and not just like all the other religious books, Book of Mormon, Bhagavad Gita, Avesta, Science and Health, Key to the Scriptures, ancient or modern. And I said basically that we started with the fact that the Bible claims to be different. And while that won't convince a skeptic, I made the point that it is what the Bible claims for itself. And if you're going to call it a good book, then it's very hard to do that if it's making claims that are untrue and fraudulent. So let's get away with this, all these great religious books that we can learn from. The Bible is not one of those if it is not from God. It is a liar. And we don't read books that are full of lies, at least not for edifying purposes. I gave what I considered to be the two best arguments. And again, the reason people are lost is not that they are not convinced. The reason they are lost is that they will not believe. And it requires an act of the Holy Spirit of God to bring them to repentance and faith. The Bible clearly teaches that. But as part of sowing the seed, I think it's good to be equipped with these kinds of observations that just make people pause and think, because they're not what they hear every day in society. I take those two lines of thinking, which are the literary unity of a book that's an anthology and was put together over hundreds of years by people who didn't meet each other. And I don't care how good the editors are. And I told you a story about that. I don't care how good the redactors are. It's really hard to put a book together like that that doesn't have contradictions in it. And we looked at the question of contradictions in some detail. Then I argued fulfilled prophecy. And I made the comment that the prophecies are, the ones that have been fulfilled are so accurate that even liberals don't try to deny their accuracy. They simply say they were written after the fact, after the fulfillment. They were history written as though they were prophecy. And I pointed out a number of examples of cases where that cannot be true. Daniel's prophecy of the timing of Messiah's death, we know that it was written before the Messiah's death. Daniel was in existence in the first century. Steve here went up to see the Dead Sea Scrolls yesterday. I haven't had the privilege of doing that. One of the really neat things about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that it demonstrates both the anciency, I just made up a word, and the accuracy of the scriptures. Last time we got into the discussion, we've been talking for a few weeks about the whole business of how do we know it's accurate, the copyists and all of that. As part of our discussion last week of manuscripts, the whole question of King James only controversy came up. So I said we'd take a little extra time, maybe a whole week or more than one week if you want to, and talk about this controversy, try to put it in some kind of you are here, big picture perspective. I made the comment last week that there are good reasons to be King James only, and there are very bad reasons to be King James only. And it's also perfectly acceptable not to be King James only. Now, that sounds like just wishy-washiness. It's really not. Let me recommend another book to you. It's easy to read, and you can get it on Amazon, and it's by somebody in this church. Dr. Sam Schneider, who is one of our elders and on the faculty over at Bob Jones, has co-authored with Ron Telepetre, who is a staff member over at Bob Jones, a book, Biblical Preservation and the Provenance of God. I can't remember the exact name of that. If you look up Schneider on Amazon.com, you'll get it. And it's S-C-H-N-A-I-T-E-R. Now, what's interesting about this is they discuss the whole manuscript King James Only thing. And they have different views. Sam, for those of you who know the terms, Sam is an Alexandrian guy. Ron is a majority text guy. They completely disagree. And they sat down and wrote this book together, and it's wonderful. It's a wonderful illustration. And they lay out seven different varieties of the position and which ones are biblically defensible and historically defensible and which ones are not. And, of course, their two end up being some of the ones that are defensible. That's how authors work. Anyhow, let's talk about the big picture. Let's talk about how it works. I said last time that we don't have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible. And we said, we probably don't because God knew they'd be worshipped. That's speculation, but it's a pretty good guess. All we have is copies. Now, when people copy things by hand, they didn't have copy machines in those days. When people copy things by hand, they can make mistakes. And there is nothing in the Bible that says that copyists would be preserved from mistakes. It does say that the apostles would be guided into all truth. And it very clearly says the Scripture cannot be broken. Jesus said those words. The authors of Scripture cannot make mistakes. But there's nothing about the copyists in there. The Bible does say that His Word would be preserved. And I'm going to come back to that idea. So you've got these guys copying manuscripts. And I gave you some numbers last week. There are more than 5,300 copies of the Bible in whole or in part Greek manuscripts. That is more than 10 times as many as any other document of its age in the world. And more than 100 times as many as any other document of its age in the world except for one, which is Homer's Iliad. So the manuscript evidence is just overwhelming. We've got this haystack of copies. Now, they're not kept in a haystack, okay? They're kept in museums under glass. If you put them all together, they would be as big as 5,300. It would be a bunch, a big pile. It's almost embarrassing how many copies we have. But because copyists make mistakes, there are occasionally errors of copying, transcription errors, in these copied manuscripts. And some people are tempted at that point to say, well, how can we know then? I showed you last time, I did a little exercise where we picked a verse at random, And we said, okay, what are the variants in that verse? And I looked them up, and there weren't any in that verse of any significance. The nearest verse was the next one, in which there was a minor variant that did not affect meaning. And I said, a lot of these variants are obvious misspellings. They misspelled a word. You know, you look at that, you say, well, I mean, you look at a manuscript where the word that is spelled T-A-H-T, and you don't have any trouble reconstructing the original, do you? I mean, you don't even think about it. Some of them are just misspelling. Some are word order that's very obvious. Some are word order that it isn't obvious. Is it Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus? Well, it could be either. We can't know instinctively what the correct order is. But does that affect any doctrine? Well, obviously not. I mentioned there were two spots where there are pretty significant variances. There are actually three. I forgot one. The two I mentioned were the woman taken in adultery and I commented that that's clearly part of a very strong oral tradition. Nobody's suggesting it didn't happen. We're just suggesting that God didn't actually inspire anyone to include it in the gospel. So would you preach out of it? I probably would. Why? Because we don't know for sure. And if it's there, I don't want to skip it. I want to preach the whole counsel of God. The other one I mentioned is 1 John 5, 7, which is a Trinity verse. And so some people get really excited about that. They're trying to take the trinity out of the Bible. They're dropping that verse. And I commented last time, if you assign someone the project of removing the trinity from the Bible and all he did was take out 1 John 5, 7, how much would you pay him? And the answer is you'd fire him because he didn't do a very good job of getting the trinity out of the Bible. It's everywhere. The third one, the one that I didn't mention, is the end of Mark, the last few verses of the Gospel of Mark. And that's the spot that has the handling poisonous snakes and speaking in tongues. And there are a number of snake handlers who have died trying to prove that that was literally true. Oops. And so there are serious questions about those three passages, one of them quite brief and two of them a little longer. But again, even if these three are spurious, there is no, except snake handling, there is no doctrine that's affected. Because even speaking in tongues is mentioned elsewhere. There is literally no effect on anything we believe. So the suggestion that it's all lost in the mists of history and nobody can figure it out and we can't know and it could be anything is just disingenuous. It is just not true. Now, let's get to how this impacts the King James Controversy. Copies of the Bible tend to run in packs. And by that I mean, you can imagine how this would happen. They got a scriptorium, one guy's up front reading a manuscript. And he's got 30 scribes in front of him, and they're all copying down what he says. By the way, some of the variants are homonyms, and you can see how that would happen. He said bin. Is that B-I-N or B-E-E-N? Well, if he's pronouncing correctly, you can tell the difference, but, you know, who knows? And you can pretty well figure out which homonym best fits in context. It's not a problem. Well, one of the scribes makes a mistake. He transcribes it differently. Twenty years later, they're making copies of that manuscript. Well, the copies made from that manuscript would tend to have the same mistakes as were in that manuscript. And so you can kind of, if you lay them all side by side, sometimes you can make a little tree based on the age of the, I talked about how we know the age of these manuscripts between carbon dating and orthography, a handwriting style. You can say, okay, this one is later than this one. It has most of the same errors. I'll bet you it's part of that family, that copying family. And you can almost put together a family tree of the copies. You can't do it perfectly, but you can make some progress toward that. Now, there are basically three families, but two big ones that everybody talks about. One is the Alexandrian. They came out of the big library at Alexandria that was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Alexandria was a center for scholarship and intellectualism, and a lot of copies came out of that region of the world. And the other is called the Byzantine. And Byzantine is just a fancy word for Asia Minor. Modern Turkey, Constantinople, Istanbul, up in that area. And that, too, was a center of scholarship, Constantinople. And there's a third one, a Caesarean. And that's neat because they start with ABC. And that makes it real easy to remember. But this is a much minor part of the overall picture. Now, these tend to be in agreement on key variants. And we know that both of them have mistakes. but they tend to have the same kinds of variants. Now, here's where the controversy comes in. The Alexandrian manuscripts tend to be much older. They go clear back to the 4th century, 300s A.D., which is very old. Any of you collect any kind of antique anything? No? No antique collectors? I'm not talking about just furniture, but anything. I mean, old salt shakers, old poster stamps, The older something is, usually the more expensive it is, right? Why? Laws of supply and demand. It's rarer because things tend to get destroyed over time. So the older something is, the fewer of them there are. And that's just simple. You don't have to be a scholar to understand this stuff. So, Alexandrian manuscripts tend to be older. Byzantine tend to be Middle Ages. These tend to be 4th century or 5th century. Which are there going to be more of? These. So here there's fewer. Here there's more. Now the question comes, which ones are more reliable? Well, you could make a case for both. And that's the difference between Sam and Ron on their book. Sam says, The older ones are more reliable because they are fewer generations of copies. And so there would be fewer mistakes entering the picture. And that's a very sensible view. That is the position of most of the Bible faculty over at Bob Jones, in case you're interested. Ron says, and Ron is a mathematician by training, and a statistician, and he's a good one. And he says, no. The reason there are so few copies made from those older ones, and we know because there are different sets of mistakes in the newer ones. The reason there were fewer copies made is because they were recognized as defective and they weren't copied. And you should go with the one that there's more of. And that's a perfectly defensible argument. Now, keep in mind through this whole discussion, what difference does it make? What theological difference does it make? 0, none. Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus? And if you believe in verbal inspiration, that's an interesting question. And there are implications, but none that have any impact on doctrine. So this is largely a tempest in a teapot. And one of the things I'm most sure of is that we shouldn't be fighting about it. You can believe what you want to believe, but we shouldn't be fighting about it. Now, it gets a little more complicated because today, You can't get your hands on the manuscripts very easily. They are locked away in museums. And in order to be able to study the Bible in the original language, the New Testament in Greek, you need to get a hold of a rendering of the Greek text that is not a photocopy of a manuscript, but it's just a printed Greek text like I had up here last time. Well, where do those come from? Well, editors sit down with all the manuscripts that they can get their hands on. And they compare them, and they engage in what we call textual criticism. And you can do this. It's not a religious activity. You can do it for any old document that exists in multiple copies. And they just compare them, and they say, OK, which do I think is more likely to be the original reading? Now, that is not exact, and that's why there's a controversy. There are several rules that these textual critics tend to follow. One is you tend to prefer the shorter reading. Why? Because it's more likely that a scribe would add an explanation in the margin which would later, by a later copyist, he sees it in the margin, he says,