The Sean McDowell Show - 5 Ancient Manuscripts That Confirm the New Testament’s Reliability

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Dr. Dan Wallace has spent decades photographing and cataloging Greek New Testament manuscripts. After all of it, he says he has more confidence in the reliable transmission of the text than ever. We walk through five of the most important early manuscripts and what each one tells us. CHECK OUT: The Sean McDowell Collection (manuscriptshop.com/seanmcdowell)  CHECK OUT: Logos Bible 60 Day Free Trial (https://logos.com/mcdowell) CHECK OUT: Consider Supporting the Ministry! (https://seanmcdowell.org/give) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [smdcertdisc] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org Timestamps 0:00 — How AI is changing textual criticism 1:16 — Why he got into this work 3:55 — AI, indexing, and paleographic dating 8:31 — P52: the credit-card fragment 9:32 — F.C. Baur and ninety years of German scholarship 11:04 — Why Christians popularized the codex 13:02 — How Roberts dated it 16:19 — P66 19:22 — P75 and Codex Vaticanus 22:19 — Why the earliest titles say "According to John" 23:55 — On the claim that Constantine invented the deity of Christ 27:08 — P46 and Paul's letters 29:47 — The creed in 1 Corinthians 15 31:20 — The 500 witnesses 32:33 — P45 and the Western Order 35:15 — P72 and 1 Peter 3:15 37:07 — Six more early manuscripts 38:55 — The "first-century Mark" fragment, and what he got wrong 40:34 — A syncretistic text with Matthew and Thomas 42:50 — The hardest variant for a doctrine of preservation 45:00 — His most significant discoveries 48:51 — "The hand that wrote this is rotting in the grave" Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

As parents, we want our kids to boldly live out their faith. Encourage your kids to take part in Bring Your Bible to School Day on October 1st. This nationwide event by Focus on the Family gives students a simple way to start conversations about the gospel with their friends and classmates. It's also a chance to help your kids exercise their religious freedoms and stand unashamed for Christ. You can sign up today at bringyourbible.com. That's bringyourbible.com. Life Audio More than 500 brothers and sisters at one time saw the risen Jesus.

We today do not have any way to produce mass hallucination. There's no drug that can produce a hallucination that everybody believes. He met many of these people and he heard about the others, so he verified it himself. This is remarkable. Has AI, and if so, how has AI transformed our ability to get back to the original words of Jesus in the apostles. The use of AI will eventually help us to decipher fragmentary text or blurred text or text that's got smudges or something with a very high degree of predictability. What are five of the most important early New Testament manuscripts? What do they tell us about

the transmission and reliability of the New Testament text? Dr. Dan Wallace, perhaps the leading authority on ancient New Testament manuscripts, joins us to talk about the latest discovery in textual criticism and about how and why after decades of study, he has more confidence in the reliable transmission in the New Testament than ever before. Dr. Dan Wallace, welcome back to the show. That was too much buttering me up, Sean, but thanks. Good to see you again. Well, let's jump in because we're going to talk about five of the most important early manuscripts to the New Testament, but remind us why you got into textual transmission in the first place. and just what you love about it.

Well, I made a commitment to Christ, a radical commitment to Christ when I was 16, and I actually dedicated myself to full-time Christian vocational ministry and spent the rest of my education training for that. I come from a family of engineers, so it was kind of out of left field that I went in this direction. But I was 16 years old, and I immediately became an evangelist, really.

and I went to, I grew up in Newport Beach, so you know Newport Beach. Yeah. And coast highway goes right along the coast there and from Mexico up to Canada. So I saw this big billboard on a real estate office and it said, Jesus saves. So I thought, oh, that's my kind of guy. You know, I'm just in my sophomore exuberance. I'm going to see him. And we started talking about the Bible and things.

And he told me, I could buy a whole box full of today. day's English version or good news for modern man if I paid if I bought the whole box it would cost me 25 cents per paperback New Testament. So I would do that and I'd drive up and down coast highway pick up hitchhikers, share the gospel, give them a New Testament and keep coming back to talk to Brother Michael. Well, after a few times, he started to say, you know, the Bible doesn't teach that Jesus has got. And I thought, what do you mean? He showed me passages that he said, showed that Jesus was not, in fact, called God. He is not deity.

Brother Michael was no brother at all. He was an Aryan, not a Jehovah's Witness, but he followed the Aryan heresy. And so I decided, if I'm going to commit my life to Christ, I've got to make sure he's worth it. So at that point, I decided I'm going to learn Greek, look into the Greek New Testament, see what it says. And then I discovered textual criticism once I started at Biola under Harry Sturs. And so both Greek grammar and what the text says, textual criticism, were two early loves of mine that I have never been able to shake. That is incredible.

I'm so glad I asked you that. I've never heard that story before, that your concern for textual transmission comes out of your heart for the gospel and your changed life. So let me ask you one more question before we get into these five manuscripts. Can you tell us how textual transmission has changed in the 21st century and specifically has AI? And if so, how has AI transformed our ability to get back to the original words of Jesus and the apostles? AI right now, CSNTM is using it for scripture indexing. That is, there are over 2 million pages of Greek New Testament manuscripts.

And the vast, vast majority of these have never even been indexed so that you know what verses are on each page of manuscript. CSNTM is really on the cutting edge of using AI. We've hired a guy to work with AI and software development in conjunction with OCR, optical character recognition. And what this is doing is it's helping us to accurately index each page of manuscripts that we have. Over 2 million pages, that's a lot to go. But AI is also helping us to date manuscripts paleographically by analysis of the handwriting. And what we're doing is we're feeding in texts of manuscripts that we know the dates. Some of the manuscripts actually have dates on them, very few.

but we also have non-Christian manuscripts, early papyri, that we know what the date is. And we're feeding that into the AI program so it can start learning what letters look like and how words were formed in ligatures in a certain period. And it will help us to be more certain about how we date manuscripts, paleographically. This is a very exciting use of it. Another thing that it's doing is, and this is something that has hardly been done when scholars were using microfilms. 80 to 90 percent of all of our Greek New Testament manuscripts are on microfilm at the Institute

in Munster. But the microfilm quality is so bad because it's microfilm, not because these scholars are bad, but because it's microfilm, you really can't read the margin. text very well. And a number of these microfilms have, were out of focus. There were problems with it in a number of ways. And of course, with microfilm, like any film camera equipment, you take a picture and you develop it when you get back home. And only then did they discover that up to 25% of all of the microfilm images are worthless. You can't read anything on them. So all all that work that they did going around the world to microfilm these manuscripts, that's,

forget about it, a fourth of those. They could not read the marginal notes. And marginal notes sometimes have corrections by scribes, comments in there that are just fascinating, really help us to see what is going on in the text. So this is a huge area where its AI is going to be very, very helpful. For example, a number of our manuscripts come with comments. And the commentary is usually what's called a frame commentary. You've got smaller text around three edges and the biblical text in the middle, in a larger text.

And it's that smaller text where we have this commentary by Church Fathers. Many times they're identified, we know who the Father was. That's how we find out what Patristic Riders had to say. But at the same time, it's difficult to read that. You have to go and see the manuscript itself to be able to read that marginalia. AI is going to solve this problem where we can do it just from the images. And of course, finally, the use of AI will eventually help us to decipher fragmentary text or blurred text or text that's got smudges or something with a very high degree of predictability.

All of this, by the way, is checked by human beings. We don't let AI dictate to us any of this, but it's a tool that we use and we are the masters of AI. So that's some of the changes that are going on in the 21st century. All right, Dan, one way to look at the reliability of the New Testament would be to look at, like, say, the number of manuscripts. People bring that in often. But what we want to look at is some of the specific, most important early manuscripts and what they tell us about how the text was copied

and whether it's reliable or not. most scholars would consider p52 the earliest fragment of the new testament i'd be curious when you date it and why and maybe what you think it reveals and doesn't reveal about the transmission of the gospel john such a great question to start with p 52 is known by layman because of its significance It was discovered. I think it was in the 1930s right around then. Let's see if I'm right. Oh, yeah.

It was discovered in 1934, I think. And, yeah, C.H. Roberts discovered it. Let me give a little background in this fragment. It's only the size of a credit card, very, very tiny. It has John 1831 through 33 on one side and on the backside versus 37 and 38. Now, in 1844, Ferdinand Christian Bauer, F.C. Bauer, the father of theological liberalism in Germany was applying Hegelian dialectic to the New Testament. Now, all that means, Hegelian dialectic, maybe if people are still waking up on the West Coast,

they might not want to hear technical terms like that. We all know it by thesis, antithesis, and then the two come together. as a synthesis. That's a Gellian dialectic. Bauer actually studied under Professor Hegel at the University of Dubingham. And what he did, what Bauer did through philosophical means, using this dialectic, is he figured out when books of the New Testament would have been written. Not historical evidence, philosophical presuppositions. And he said that John's gospel is really an amalgamation, a synthesis of the earliest Christianity, the Petrine or the Jerusalem Apostles Christianity, and Paul. And he argued that John could not have been written earlier than

AD 160. In fact, he felt it was written about 170. That was 1844, and it held sway right up until 1934, when C.H. Roberts, without doing philosophical work, but actual looking at the evidence, and as I've often said, an ounce of evidence is worth a pound of presumption. In this case, two tons of presumption. He looked at a manuscript at Manchester University, and what he discovered was this little fragment that had handwriting on both sides. What that tells us is this manuscript was written on a codex because papyry were written on scrolls only on the inside or sometimes they do it on the outside. John speaks about this in the book of Revelation where he said it's written on both sides. It was a scroll he's talking about. It was very unusual, but they did that sometimes.

But Christians were the first to popularize the codex form. And C.H. Roberts actually literally later wrote the book called The Birth of the Codex. He was a the world's expert on it. And the codex form, for the first five centuries of the Christian era, over 90% of all Christian manuscripts were written on a codex. That's our modern book form, down on one side and cut pages, you know. Right. But with reference to the rest of literature through the first five centuries, less than 15% of non-Christian manuscripts were written on a codex. So for the first and probably the only time in the history of the church, we were actually ahead of the technological curve. So Roberts is the one who discovers literally the oldest codex manuscript, P52.

Now, as I said, it has John 18 on one side, 31 and 33 and 37 and 38. It's interesting. Verse 37 says, Pilate says to Jesus, are you king of the Jews? Jesus responds, you say that I am. And then verse 8, 38, pilot says, what is truth? We have this in P52. It's a remarkable passage that speaks to the reality of what this manuscript is attesting. Now, Robert stated it somewhere between 100 and 150. He actually did it by way of comparisons of actual dated manuscripts, which is the way you're supposed to date these. manuscripts anyway. And he found the same letter formations in two manuscripts especially, but there were several others that he looked at. One was dated AD 94. That was his closest manuscript to the script of P52. Another one was dated 152 and all the others fell within that range. He sent pictures of this to the three leading papyologists of the time. Every single one wrote

back and said, I say this is a manuscript written between 100 and 150, and a fourth one, a German scholar said, no, I think you're all wrong. I think it may have been written in the 90s. So today, P52 has been dated somewhere in the middle of the second century, 125 to 175. But I think that's because of certain things that some scholars have said, but still the best dating for it is 100 to 150. It's a small fragment. It doesn't tell us much. But as Bruce Metzker noted, just as Robinson Crusoe found a footprint in the sand on a deserted island, and he knew another man was there.

So P52 tells us that John was almost surely written before 160. Normally, copies are not made before the originals. at least that's where I was taught in school when I was growing up. And this sent two tons of German scholarship to the flames. One wag actually said the ink of the original must have been barely dry by the time this manuscript was copied. So that's a little bit of information about P52, fascinating manuscript. That's remarkable. I'm going to grab a facsimile of P52 behind me now that you mention it.

I've actually got one right here. I know you've worked with manuscript shopped. make these so carefully, but people can see the size of it. It's like that, like you said, like the size of a credit card, but probably the earliest physical one that we have is stunning. Now, that one's small. It's significant, like you said. Let's talk about a manuscript that is bigger, which is P66. Tell us about that one, if you will. Yeah. Well, P52, I spent a lot of time on because it's the earliest. P66 should be dated in the early 3rd century.

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Sign up for the Good Word today at lifeadio.com forward slash the good word. That's life audio.com forward slash the good word. Originally it was dated as early as 150, so right in line with where P52 is dated. And some still think it was late second century. But here's the thing about P66. It has most of John in it. And the scribe was more concerned about calligraphy, about making pretty letters than he or she was about making the text as accurate as possible. And this scribe cut out any words that they thought were extraneous.

Now, if we look just at P66, we see that it agrees with the Alexandrian witnesses to a very large extent, namely Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vatican. which are considered our best witnesses to the Alexandrian textual stream, not text type, but textual stream. But there was a corrector, probably in the same scriptorium as P66, who corrected the manuscript towards this standard Alexandrian textual stream that are found in Oliphon B or Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. It's very, very important. It's significant because the pericentia. of P. Adulteri, the story of the woman, Cotton Adultery, is not in this manuscript. It's not in P-75.

Another one we're going to talk about. It's not in Ollif. It's not in B. It's not in Codex C or Codex Alexandrinus. These are the six earliest manuscripts we have for John's Gospel, and it's not found in any of them. So as much as the story of the woman in Cotton Adultery is really famous in one, known, it probably is not original. And P66 is one of those manuscripts that helps to show this. It was discovered early in the 1950s, and it suggested to many that Vaticanus, which is, I believe, our most important biblical manuscript by far, was a fourth century edited text. Because P66, which is, you know, 125, 150 years earlier in Vaticanus, doesn't seem to be following as closely this Alexandrian textual form.

But when you look at the corrector, now it does, and people were kind of ignoring the corrector, done at the same scriptorium probably. And so it's a very, very important manuscript. I don't think it's as important as another manuscript, P75. and I think you want me to talk about that one next, right? I would love it. Let's jump to P75 then.

Okay. P75 was discovered a few years later, also in the 1950s. These two manuscripts are called the Bodmer papy or some of the Bodmer papyri. And P75 has most of Luke and John in it. Now, it's also dated to the early third century. And the remarkable thing about P75 is that this manuscript turned over what some scholars were thinking about P66 almost immediately, and it did something else. For a long time, it was assumed that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were manuscripts that were edited, and by a standard in the 4th century, maybe for the 50 Bibles that Constantine ordered to be brought to commissioned Eusebius and His his workshop to make and bring to the capital city, Constantinople, because Constantine was the

first Christian emperor. But what P-75 did is it showed readings that were very, very close to Vaticanus, and they must have shared the same ancestor. P-75 is not the ancestor of Kodecanus, but they are both copies from an earlier ancestor. And the way we know this is that Vaticanus has some readings that P-75 changes, makes them, it adds material. So Vaticanus would have included that if it were a copy of P-75. But this shows that Codex-B was not edited in the fourth century, but was produced very carefully in a long line of accurate copies going back to the earliest times. And we know that in the city of Alexandria, which was the main city of the ancient world, for book production. And by the third century BC, second century BC, there were rules on how

to copy books that were followed by the scribes there that have made this really our most accurate stream of transmission where we get these magnificent manuscripts, but they're not always right. Now, these two manuscripts, P.75, and Vaticanus are the two closest manuscripts in terms of what they have to read of the first eight centuries. And that is really significant. This tells us, if P75 is dated 200, 225 right around there, that tells us that the ancestor, almost surely was first century. Wow.

Now, yeah, it's really, really, or at least late second century, mid-second century, something like that. P-66 and P-75, at the beginning of John's Gospel, these are two earliest manuscripts that have a title for any gospel, and they both say the Gospel according to John. What's interesting is that Codex B and Olive, I'm using that interchangeably with Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, of course, These are fourth century manuscripts, but they both have not the gospel according to John, but simply according to John. If they had access to manuscripts that had the gospel according to John, why didn't they put the gospel in there? According to John, I think, is the earliest title that was given to these manuscripts.

They didn't know yet what to call it. Now, Mark calls his a gospel, and I think that's what finally took off when he speaks about the gospel, the story about Jesus, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, he says, in Mark I-1-1, that became, by the second century, the standard way to refer to these four books. But until then, they were just called According to John. That again tells me that this is probably going back to the very early second century, maybe first century, for Olive and B. Now, P-66 and P-75 have John 1-1 as well as a number of other verses in it, and it says exactly what these great maguscules, what almost all the manuscripts say, in the beginning, was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

there have been some who have said that Emperor Constantine invented the deity of Christ in the 4th century at the Council of Nicaea, AD 325. That would be true, I guess, if he were maybe 150, 175 years old, and he saw these manuscripts, you know, and so, or he infected them somehow. I don't think he was that old. So that kind of view just needs to be relegated. to the dump heap. It's a dumpster fire of an argument. It's just stupid to say that Constantine invented the deity of Christ. It's ridiculous. In fact, every single manuscript, every single

translation, early version, and the church fathers, they all say the same thing in John 1-1 with some minor differences that do not affect the statement and the word was God. This is hugely important, and it shows this very early evidence. Not just do we have this. these early papy, but we have church fathers like Ignatius who wrote in about AD 110, very beginning of the second century, who speaks about Jesus Christ as God himself. So P75, one more thing I should mention about it. Yeah. I think it's our second most important manuscript in front of Sinaiticus. And the Bodmer Library and Coloni on the edge of Lake Geneva, they were trying to get some renovations done and they needed to sell some of their manuscripts to make

these renovations well they chose to sell their very most important manuscript p75 Yale University offered them 50 million dollars for this papyrus they turned Yale down and it ended up at the Vatican and I suspect the Bodmer's were trying to get out of many millennia of purgatory with this as a gift. So I don't know, but that museum is still under reconstruction. It's just amazing. So very, very, very important manuscript. That's remarkable.

One of the pages of P-75 has the end of the Gospel of Luke 24 and the beginning of John 1. And of course, in Luke, we're told in Luke chapter 4, when Jesus is being tempted, worship God alone. And then full circle at the end on the same manuscript as John 1-1, it has them worshipping God. So I think you have two attestations in P-75 of Luke and John 1 of his deity just to further solidify your case. Absolutely. Yeah. I want to ask you about one more. And by the way, I've mentioned this. I've started to work with manuscript shop because they make these facsimiles. And so I just got one of P.

66, which is one of my favorite manuscripts because I've written on the resurrection. I teach a class on the resurrection. And this is a very significant manuscript. I would love for you to tell us about P46. Do you mean P46? Yeah. If I said P66, I meant P46. Thank you. Very important. Tell us about P46 and why that one is so significant. P46 is early third century, maybe second century. in the University of Michigan where they have 30 of the 86 leaves of this largest papyrus manuscript of any of the New Testament. They dated it for 150 originally. Now, it could be in the second century, but it's probably best to call it early third, so in the early 200s. And what's remarkable about this is that all 86 leaves are almost completely intact, typically

90% of the original text is still there. It was found in the 1930s, along with P-45 and P-47, and it includes nine of Paul's letters, which have Hebrews as well. That was always associated with Paul. And remind me to tell you sometime about Hebrews struggle for canonicity. It's a fascinating story, and we see some things in the manuscripts that reveal some things. Hebrews, for example, in P-46, comes right after Romans. And so the Greeks thought it was by Paul.

The Latins did not. But anyway, Galatians. This manuscript has Paul's earliest letter Galatians, which I would date to about AD 48, just before the Jerusalem Council on Acts 15, which was AD 49, and Galatians may have been as much as a year earlier. This has Galatians 2, 1 through 9 and 12 through 21. And here in Galatians 2, in verses 2, 5, and 7, the word Eongelian, gospel is mentioned. And Paul says that his gospel was confirmed by Peter, James, and John.

Now, whenever Paul preached the gospel, it always included the resurrection. There is no gospel without the resurrection of Jesus. So this is strong affirmation that what Paul wrote in Galatians that we see in P-46, is intact and it's the same as what other manuscripts say. So it's very strong evidence that the resurrection is what Paul taught. Galatians is one of those seven letters that even the most skeptical scholars say, yeah, this is by Paul. We admit it. There's another passage, though, that I think maybe perhaps even more important. That's 1 Corinthians 151 through 6. This is dated about six years after Galatians, about AD 54. And here Paul speaks about the carigma of the Jerusalem

apostles. That is, it was handed down to me that Jesus died and rose from the dead on the third day, and it goes on and talks about this. Now, this corigma of the Jerusalem apostles, this gospel that they were preaching, virtually every scholar, including skeptical scholars say this happened no later than AD 34 or 35. So we're talking about a corigma, the gospel message in 1 Corinthians 15 that goes back to the early 30s. And I think Jesus died in AD 33. So we're talking about a very, very early testimony to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we see it in P.46. That's unbelievable. I was hoping that you brought in that passage on 1st Corinthians 15, because of course Paul is passing on what was delivered to him about Jesus dying,

Jesus being buried, rising again on the third day and appearing to people. And it's this creed that predates when Paul wrote it sometime in the mid-50s. And so P-46 has the earliest physical copy of this, which you said probably late, second century, maybe early third century, P-46 would be. Yeah. Okay. Unbelievable. Now, let me add in 1st Corinthians 15, Paul also says here about the, he speaks about the 500 brothers and sisters, more than 500 brothers and sisters at one time saw the risen Jesus. Now, this is the, I think, the biggest stumbling block for skeptics on the resurrection. We today do not have any way to produce mass hallucination. There's no drug that can,

produce a hallucination that everybody believes. And Paul goes on, and he says, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep, most of these more than 500 brothers and sisters are still alive. Well, how did he know that? Well, he visited Jerusalem in Acts 15, AD 49, and perhaps a little bit later as well.

He met many of these people, and he heard about the others, So he verified it himself. This is remarkable. How in the world can you have a mass hallucination? And then Paul can say, I met these people we talked. And of course, the gospel say how Jesus ate with his disciples after the resurrection, this kind of thing. It's very, very powerful evidence.

I love it. Let's shift to another early manuscript, which is P-45. Tell us about that manuscript and its significance, if you will. P-45. is a manuscript that is written sometime in the third century. It only has 32 leaves. And by the way, when we published our two-volume set of these early papari, we found a couple of fragments that we knew were from P-45,

but we didn't know where they belonged in P-45, and now we do. So one of our scholars, Stratton-Latterwig, was able to identify it and place it in there. So this is a pretty significant find. This has portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Axe. But not in that order. The order originally was Matthew, John, Luke, Mark, and X.

That's called the Western Order, and we believe that it was the earliest order of the Gospels. why would it be earlier than the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John order? The reason is because it's the apostles first, Matthew and John, then Luke, who gets his gospel while Paul is in prison, he's interviewing people throughout Israel, and then Mark, who gets his gospel from Peter. But the Western order, I think this is as there's an emerging canon consciousness, and it must have been in the very, very earliest times, I think late first century is probably when the Western Order started to come out. And it was before the Gospels were all fully recognized as Scripture.

Obviously, they believe that the words of Jesus were Scripture. But the Western Order puts the apostles first almost as if to say their testimony is more important than Luke or Mark. But that's P32. It's the oldest manuscript of mark that we have, except for a very small fragment that was published just eight years ago, papyrus 137. And it has a text that's independent to a degree, but really, really important manuscript. And very, very difficult to read in a number of places. Parts of it look like shredded wheat.

And we've been able to use some computer enhancing tools to identify, what the text actually said in a number of places. And it's been, it's a real challenge, but a very, very important manuscript. I love it. Super helpful. Now, I do have to add a bonus on here, I hope is okay,

because 1 Peter 315 is like the most beloved passage for apologists. Yeah. Can you tell us about P72? A P72 has 1st and 2 Peter and Jude in it in their entirety. It's the oldest manuscript that does. It's dated late third, perhaps early fourth century. But P72 also has some other material that's not Christian in the end of it.

So it's an interesting manuscript. Did the scribe regard these things as scripture? Did you regard them as important? Why didn't you combine all these books or manuscripts in the same place? But P72 has 1. Peter 315 that be ready to give an answer to anyone who ask you, you know, it's dealing with the apologies. Well, you can quote it better than I can, so. No, keep going.

No, I hear you. But sanctified Christ, the Lord in your heart, always be ready with an answer for the hope within, give it with gentleness and with respect. There you go. Okay, it's all there. So I think it's important to show that this was a part of how the Christians viewed scripture and how important First Peter was. First Peter

was accepted very early on. Second Peter had some struggles. Second Peter had the biggest struggles of any New Testament book to get accepted into the canon. And that's for another topic someday. I believe Peter wrote both of them. Oh, I would love to explore that in Hebrew. So I have to have you back and go down some of these rabbit trails, Dan.

But are there any early manuscripts I should have asked you about? You brought in some of the other ones. But any, you're like, Sean, this has got to be a part when we talk about early manuscripts that I didn't ask. Yeah, there's six of them. Oh, wow. Okay. All of which are second or perhaps early third century. So the first four are considered second century.

P90, which has John 1836 through 197 is another early manuscript of John. So here you have this P52, and if you have P90 that's also second century, then that gives us, we have more paparian John than any other New Testament book. It gives us strong evidence that what we have in John is a date before AD 100. I would date John in the mid-60s, actually, for various reasons, but at least virtually everyone recognizes this is a first century document. P98, which doesn't have a lot of material and it's difficult to read it. It's Revelation 1, 13 through 21. And scholars date this is the second century with a question mark,

but they don't give any other suggested date. P 104 is also second century, and that's got Matthew 21, a few verses in Matthew 21. And then P129 is considered second century. The dates I'm giving, by the way, are all from the, the Institute for New Testament Textual Research. There was one scholar who said, I was reading him last night and said there are 25 New Testament papyri that are dated to the second century or to AD 200.

That's a really high number and I think it's a little bit too high. I think we might have as many as a dozen that are second century or up to the era of 200. Now, P-37, this is this fragment. It was formerly called the first century mark fragment, which I got in a lot of trouble for because I spoke about it in my debate with Bart Ehrman at his school at Chapel Hill. I'm sorry, North Carolina, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said a very reputable paparologist dated this to the first century. And a little bit after that debate, in order for me to actually see images of the manuscript, I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and I had to keep my mouth shut for six years.

That was 2012 was the debate, and people were angry at me. Why don't you tell us more about this? Well, when it was finally published, it was considered a late second. century, perhaps early third century, but it becomes our oldest fragment for Mark's gospel. It's still remarkably important. But what's significant here is that the scholar, I'm significant for my own reputation, the scholar who initially dated it to the first century changed his mind before I was told about it by someone else. And that someone else knew that the scholar had changed his mind and he didn't tell me.

So I got a lot of egg on my face for that. And I own up to it for not having verified the information myself. That's fair. Okay. The last one is one you probably do not know about. It's oxyrinkus papyrus 5575. Okay. This was published about three years ago.

I was one of the co-editors, along with Jeff Fish and Mike Holmes. And it's late second century. Now, it's not a gospel or New Testament manuscript explicitly. What it is is a syncretistic text. It is our oldest manuscript from the Sermon on the Mount. It's got portions of Matthew 6 in it. It's remarkable. That's cool.

And it has portions from the Gospel of Thomas in it as well. Now, it's a syncretistic text in that it has Matthew and Thomas, and portions from Luke's sermon on the plane. And so this was produced by someone who was probably moving towards Gnosticism. And Gospel of Thomas is this, it's a proto-nostic kind of a gospel. And at the same time, what this shows is that the Gospel of Thomas was added to this text of the Gospels by someone who recognized that Matthew and Luke already existed, then Gospel Talis was added on top of that.

This is extraordinarily important. It's Oxo-Rincus papyrus 575. We published it, I think, about three years ago, and I can send you the text, if you'll ask me later, I can send you the images. I would love that. Yeah. I had not heard of that.

I didn't think you had, yeah. No, I appreciate that. That's fun. Man, Dan, time is flying by. I have so many more questions for you. What you said about Hebrews, potentially, the authorship. You said about John in the 60s. We're going to have to have you back to explore some of these.

And folks, if you're watching or listen to this, what questions would you have for Dan Wallace? If we did a show on this, it would be really helpful to just inform, entertain, educate you. I would love to know that. But maybe if you could, maybe two more questions before we wrap up. What textual variant do you think presents the strongest challenge to an evangelical or conservative understanding biblical preservation? And how do you deal with it? Well, you're probably not going to like my answer. Okay.

But about 40 years ago, I published an article called Inspiration Preservation. Yeah, I think Inspiration Preservation's. and inerrancy, something like that. And in that article, I pointed out that there is no biblical basis for a doctrine of preservation. It is a doctrine that came up during the Reformation era. We don't find it in the early creeds. We just don't find anybody who's arguing that God has preserved the text. And here's how I developed this.

I noted that in the Old Testament there are numerous places where we have to have to have conjectural amundation. And a number of these conjectures were later confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, but at the time, they were conjectures. So we know that, at least at that time, God had not preserved every word of the original. Now, in the New Testament, there are maybe only a couple of places where a conjecture would be the right way to treat the text. I'm skeptical of them. But at the same time, you can't have a Marcyonite view of the same. You can't have a Marcyonite view of this doctrine where it's true for the New Testament, but not for the old. Our view of the Bible is the same for both Testaments. So I would argue instead of having a biblical doctrine that is

empirically incorrect, and biblically speaking, the texts and the passages that seem to affirm this do not really say what scholars or those who hold to it say. But I would argue that historically we can argue that God has preserved his text almost completely in the same. intact, not entirely, but almost completely intact. And I'd say 99.999% intact, something like that. That's a lot of confidence. So I'm good with that, actually, believe it or not. Now, one last question for you, Dan, maybe just take a step back. What's the most significant fine that you and your team have done? In other words, like, you sit down a meal and somebody goes, Dan, tell me the coolest thing that you'd discover, like that moment that just excites you. Tell us that. story? Well, I don't know if I could do this quickly. There's actually four or five things I'd like to say. I'll try to be brief on them. Okay. First of all, when we went to Albania, we were going to go there

to Tehran of the Capitol at their National Library and Museum. And we were going to shoot 13 manuscripts that we knew they had. When the team got there, dozens more were discovered. This made news throughout the world. It's made the news in more than 100 international newspapers. I was actually interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about the discoveries. And we're still trying to determine all that we've discovered. We took all the photographs, we're determining a number of these things. But there have been whole volumes published on these discoveries and what the manuscripts have to say. Very, very important. The second thing was in 2004, Albania was 2007 and eight. In 2004, when we were working at the ecumenical patriarchate

of Constantinople or Istanbul, but I won't call it Istanbul, we discovered a palimpsest, a manuscript that has been scraped over and text was written on top of it. It's the the undertext, which by definition is always older. It was just two leaves in the back of a book. And it had Mark Chapter 3 and Mark Chapter 6. And this has become the oldest manuscript that we have discovered. And it's the only magi-sculal manuscript that we have discovered until recently we discovered a maguscular, but that's a different category.

This manuscript should be dated somewhere between the 7th and 9th century. very very fascinating but we haven't done multispectral imaging on it and we need to do that one of these days when we can go back to see all the details of what it has okay third thing multispectral imaging which is using the wavelengths of light from infrared to ultraviolet it's a very complex process we take dozens of pictures of a particular page and these different light waves are going to show us what's in the text that cannot be seen by the naked eye. It's very promising equipment for palim tests, for water damaged manuscripts, for fire damaged manuscripts. And it was originally developed for NASA to see

camouflage military installation from satellites. And then it's been applied to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Right now, we have a team in Oslo that is shooting some of those very Dead Sea Scrolls, including one where the text just could not be read, just a little bit of it was read. It's called the Genesis Apocryphon, very important, but they're shooting it with this MSI equipment. And you can go on to Facebook and type in CSNTM, and you can see some of these videos that we've posted on the excitement that is being discovered in Oslo. I could go on and give you a couple more, but let's just leave it at that because I know our time is pretty brief. Let me just mention one other thing.

This was the first time I found such a manuscript, but it was already known, but it was the first time that actually saw one. And I'd like to conclude with this. At the end of a particular manuscript in the New Testament, there's a colophon. A colophon, The colophon is where a scribe writes a personal note. And this colophon says, this is by the writer and calligrapher Andrew who wrote this, and he gives the date, and it's February 1079. I won't get any details further than that. But he says, if I have written anything, if I missed anything and what I wrote, for the sake

of Christ, please forgive me. then he goes on and he says, the hand that wrote this is rotting in the grave, but the words will stand until the fullness of time. Over a thousand years ago, and I'm looking at that manuscript and reading it plainly. He was right. That has become the motto for CSNTM. Our business is to get all of the Greek New Testament manuscripts digitized, made available for free on the internet forever.

and at some point the hands that took the pictures will be rotting in the grave, but we hope that those images will last till the fullness of time. That is a mic-drop moment to end on. And of course, we know Jesus said the scriptures cannot be broken. They are true. They will be fulfilled. And they come from the mouth of God. So I love what you're doing at CSNTM, which is the center for the study of New Testament

manuscripts. If you've stayed with us this far in this podcast or this video, you obviously love manuscripts, so check out what Dan and his team are doing. Think about supporting them. Dan, I love that you have history at Biola and Talbot going way back, and especially that you're motivated by a heart-free evangelism.

It's just right at home with what we do here in this channel. I do want to let people know that I'm working, and I know they sent you some of these facsimiles, but manuscript shop.com, I'm working with them to make available some of these like, P-46. I mean, it's incredible, just the care and accuracy on real ancient papyri that you can hold and share and talk about. So many of the ones that you mentioned today we have available. So people are interested. Check that out. There's information below. We'd love to have you

come study Apologiacs with us at Biola, at Talba School of Theology. We have full classes on the scriptures and talk about the very topics we discussed today. And of course, make sure you hit subscribe because we've got some other shows coming up not only reliability scriptures but the evidence for god social issues near-death experiences and far more you won't want to miss. Dan, appreciate it, my friend. We'll do this again. If you're willing and available, I'll do it anytime. We'll have you back. Okay, thanks, Sean. Appreciate this very much. Thank you. Hey friends. If you enjoyed this show, please hit that follow button on your podcast app. Most of you tuning in haven't done this yet, and it makes a huge difference in helping us reach

and equip more people and build community. And please consider leaving a podcast review. Every review helps. Thanks for listening to the Sean McDowell Show, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, where we have on campus and online programs in apologetic, spiritual formation, marriage and family, Bible, and so much more. We would love to train you to more effectively live, teach, and defend the Christian faith today. And we will see you when the next episode drops.

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