The Sean McDowell Show - The Bible: Tough Qs and Answers

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

How did we get the Bible? How many variants of the early manuscripts are there? Can we trust our biblical texts? Joining me today is New Testament scholar Dr. Peter Gurry and Old Testament scholar Dr. John Meade to discuss the trustworthiness of Scripture and how we can have confidence in our biblical text. READ: Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible, by John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry (https://amz.run/68IN) READ: A Rebel's Manifesto, by Sean McDowell (https://amzn.to/3u8s2Oz) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 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://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

How do we know we got the right books in the Bible? How many variants are there in some of the early New Testament copies we have in Greek? And do they undermine our confidence in the text? Bottom line, how do we know we can trust the Bible? This is the issue we're going to get in today. I've got two guests I'm thrilled to have on because they've written a recent book together called Scribes and Scriptures. And those of you watching this know that I've done some work in this area on a popular level with the book Evidence That Demands Verdict.

And even reading this book, I learned some new insights. So I'm confident you will as well. My first guest, a welcome back to the show. Peter Gurry is a New Testament scholar. John Mead for the first time who did his phd at southern baptist like i did as well but a scholar in the old testament fellas thanks for writing a great book and thanks for joining us thanks for having us for having us on sean well let's just jump right in i know there's always a story behind a book so i'm going to start with you john since

you focus on the old testament why write write this book? What makes it unique? Yeah, great question. So I'd have to say we wrote this book out of having surveyed the current popular literature, the how we got the Bible kind of titles that you can think of by folks know, by folks like, say, Neil Lightfoot, or maybe Why We Can Trust the Bible by Greg Gilbert, you know, these sorts of works. But I think, you know, Peter and I are friends, we're colleagues at Phoenix Seminary. We direct this Texting Canada Institute. Maybe we'll talk more about it. We just kind of thought,

maybe it's time to have a dual-authored book that really comes out of our different expertises, you know? So often books like this, it's one author trying to cover a whole lot of areas, you know, and it's difficult to cover all that terrain, especially if you're not familiar with it. So between the two of us, we were able to cover quite a bit of that terrain of certain elements of how we got the Bible. So anyways, that's what I would say. Well, you covered the terrain well, and we're going to get into some of that. Peter, anything you'd add that makes this book unique or what motivated you to write it? Just one thing we'd add is that the material in the book we had presented at churches for several years before we wrote it, and so that gave us a chance to field test it, and that's really kind of what pushed us to say, hey, I think we ought to put this in a book form.

We felt like, one, we had something to contribute in that we could cover both Testaments pretty well, like John said, but then also we found that people who love the Bible often don't know how we got it. They really don't. And so we were repeatedly surprised in these conferences we would do by how much people don't know they don't know about the Bible. That's a great way to put it. Well, the subtitle, The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible, it really is an amazing story. But what I love is you guys also tackle some of the tough apologetic questions that come up

while we talk about how the Bible was put together. So let me ask just a broad one and get your response. There is an unending list of claims that there's a big scandal or conspiracy behind the making of the Bible. John, what are your thoughts when you hear some Time magazine come out and talk about some conspiracy and some new manuscripts that they discovered is there any reason believes there's a scandal of conspiracy behind the making of the scriptures sean i'm usually excited when i see those because it usually means christmas is right around the corner so uh um but no but no, but no, to get to your, to get to your question, it, it, it always makes me cringe

because anytime Time Magazine, Newsweek, New York Times, what have you is, is going to start to sensationalize a particular story or angle of the story of how we got the Bible. I'm always just cognizant of the numerous times that has happened. Oftentimes it's bunk. It's not really based on history at all. You know, I'm sure you've covered Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code on here many, many times. We refer to it in the book just a little bit, just to kind of show the kind of scandals and myths and legends that sort of surface in that arena. So I would say Peter and I didn't find any scandal when we surveyed the material once again for this book.

But I always cringe, and I always know people are misled by it. I think the last time I looked for the book, Brown's Da Vinci Code had over 83 million copies sold. Oh, gosh. It's incredible. It's incredible. That's what we're aiming for, Sean. We're aiming for that as well. Yeah, that's right.

Your listeners can help us out. So I mentioned that because our book has no chance of that,, that's right. Your listeners can help us now. So I mentioned that because our book has no chance of that, and that's okay. But that doesn't include the numerous more people that saw the movie, right, with Tom Hanks, right, that came out. And it's fair to say that on Twitter, on Facebook, your next door neighbor, if they have a view about how we got the Bible at all, it's been influenced by Dan Brown one way or another. So that's kind of, in some ways, that's an extreme example, but I like it because it really, I think, hits most people where they're at. And so obviously there are far more sophisticated, more scholarly views that we have to deal with as well. But I would say your neighbor has been

influenced by Dan Brown more than he or she knows. You know, it's amazing. We're still talking about the Da Vinci Code two decades roughly after when it was first released for a range of reasons. But Peter, these books and these stories sell, right? It almost feels like Indiana Jones. Everyone wants to be an archaeologist, but the work of archaeology and the work of textual criticism is much more sitting in a library, laborious, not dramatic, isn't it? Yes, this is true. Yeah, it's true. We tend not to go in caves as often as Indiana Jones did. But one of the exciting things about working in this field is we do get new material to work with. And so just a quick story for your listeners. Just yesterday, I was,

I'm here in North Carolina, actually. I'm not in Phoenix with John, but I was over at Duke's Library. And they've got a papyrus published only four years ago. That's a sixth century copy of Acts. It's a pretty curious one, Actually, I won't go into all the details. But before 2018, we didn't have access to that. And now we have a new 6th century papyrus to think about and to study. And that happens sometimes every year, every couple of years, every three years that we get something like this. Some new papyrus is published, at least on the New Testament side of things. But even on the Old Testament side, you have things like the Cairo geniza that's still being studied and there's just a tremendous amount

of material to work with and john i like to say the cool thing about the history of the bible is it's a history of a material artifact a material thing right because it's written down we're talking about a book right it's a bit in different formats different languages uh but it's a physical thing and you can sort of there's just so much to study around it let's get into some of the common objections that we hear and as we look at them this will help us understand the larger story of how the bible is put together and we'll go back and forth between the old and the new testament to keep this conversation going let's jump into some of the particulars and the questions about the old testament reliability that'll help tell the story of how the bible is put together john as an apologist i've heard sometimes that

there was not even an alphabet uh during the time of moses so he couldn't have written the first five books of the bible is that true no there's no way that's true and it doesn't matter when you date moses either if uh you know there's a good debate about when Moses would have lived, when the Exodus happened, either in the 1400s or the 1200s. The earliest evidence for the alphabet comes from a place in Egypt known as Wadi el-Hol, and it dates to the 19th century or the 1800s. What was fascinating, though, is even as I'm writing up this section of the book, there was another scholarly article published with new evidence of the alphabet and what we call linear script from Syria, modern-day Syria, and dated to the third millennium, the late third millennium B.C. That would predate the established evidence of scholars by three or four centuries. So this field is super exciting. I'm not an expert, honestly, in all things ancient alphabets. I probably armchair this, but I've done a ton of reading.

It's an amazing, amazing field that just continues to yield all kinds of insights. Just yesterday, people were putting up Canaanite inscriptions, new texts written in so-called Canaanite script. It's unbelievable what archaeologists are pulling out of the dirt when it comes to the history and development of writing. So Moses would have had an alphabet. I'm very convinced of this. In fact, it's interesting. I don't think it's necessarily coincidental even that much of the evidence for the early alphabet comes out of Egypt. And again, we don't have to go into crazy areas that Moses or the Israelites invented it or something like that. But providentially, there is an alphabet, and there is a system of writing, and there's even developing scribal culture in the alphabet,

I would say by what we call the Late Bronze Age, so just before 1200 BC. There's not just an alphabet, but there's actually signs that people are learning to read. People are learning to write. Now, I know evangelicals, but evangelicals have blown out of proportion sometimes, high literacy rates and these sorts of things. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just saying that there's some evidence for learning to read, not just reading and writing, but learning to read and write by the late bronze age early iron age uh so so just below 1200 bc on that that's great now of course that doesn't prove moses wrote it but it removes a common objection that we've heard over time correct correct

historically we could account for it gotcha now i'm going to ask you a couple more questions about scribes then we're going to come to new testament scribes with you, Peter, in a moment. But tell us about the earliest scribes of the Old Testament. And I'm asking for context because a lot of our Bibles today are based on the Masoretic text, 9th century AD at the earliest. What do we know about the earliest scribes? Either the period of the Dead Sea Scrolls going back BC a couple centuries, or what you kind of call this middle period, 3rd century to the 8th century A.D. Yes, that's right. So you're right to say, Sean, that the Masoretic period may begin at earliest the 9th century A.D.

These are Jewish families that received a text and preserved it. They also innovated it in certain ways, too. So one thing that's important to know, that ancient Semitic writing in general did not incorporate vowels. So highly consonantal texts. Now, there were some consonants that functioned as vowels, things like that. But the Masoretes did innovate, even as they preserved, by incorporating those vowel signs. But, okay, so what did the text look like before the Masoretes then? How well can we say they copied it?

Well, we actually have a full copy of Isaiah from Qumran, right? Amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. And that's the only full manuscript that we have, okay, of a book, I should say. And when you compare that with later manuscripts, what we find is that for over a thousand years, the book of Isaiah was copied extremely well, okay? And well preserved, well conserved. But there are some other issues now. As scholars have continued to find more manuscripts kind of through the decades, I guess I should say this, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. So we're celebrating the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls this year, which is exciting. But I also mention that for your listeners your listeners, so that they know,

it's not like we've been studying these for that long. 75 years of scholarship is actually a drop in the bucket, okay, in a lot of ways. And so, so 75 years, they've been discovered. The last edition of them was not made available to scholars generally until about 10, 15 years ago. So we've simply not been studying and analyzing these scrolls for that long. With all that said, the scribes of that period show two tendencies, and we talk about this in the book. They show a tendency to conservatively copy the text. That is letter for letter. OK, and we can show in numerous examples that certain books were copied this way. In fact, probably all books were copied this way.

It's just that we don't have evidence for every single book coming out of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And by the way, maybe I should mention this to Qumran is the major place when we're out of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And by the way, maybe I should mention this too, Qumran is the major place when we're talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, but there were other sites, places like the fortress at Masada, places like Nahal Hever, or the Cave of Horrors, okay. There were other caves along the Dead Sea as well that yielded manuscripts. So on the whole, manuscripts copied conservatively, but the Dead Sea Scrolls also showed that there were tendencies to freely copy the text in a sense where maybe the scribe was trying to update the language,

or maybe some words had fallen out of use, and we didn't know what they meant. English speakers know this. When you turn to your King James Version, you don't know all the vocabulary from 1611. You just don't. And so language is updated. Well, scribes, Hebrew scribes, may also do the same thing, okay? And so even amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, we see a popularizing of the text. And the scribe doesn't tell us why he did that. Like, that's one of the biggest mysteries to scholars right now is why do we have different and sort of many forms of the text okay we've got this conservatively copied stream but we've also got this freely copied which looks like an updated copy of the same book and scholars are still trying to sort out for what purpose so maybe some copies we find were for

liturgical reasons right like like synagogal worship service type copies. You know what I mean? Some copies definitely show an early kind of commentary writing. They're more expansive. They're more explanatory type translation or copies. I shouldn't call them translations at this point, but copies that may show like an exegetical kind of purpose. So the question is, were the Qumran scribes thinking

that they were writing a different Bible or copying a strange Bible? I don't think so. I just, when I look at the evidence on the whole, I see two different scribal models that were not competing against each other, rather two models that were complementary, okay? And so there was a need for that conservatively copied text, almost like our NASB kind of English translation, alongside of a more interpretive or paraphrastic translation, something like the message, if I can use that as an example, where the message is far more comprehensible to someone who doesn't know the Bible than, say, the NASB. So I think early Jewish scribes worked along two lines. In fact, scholars have shown, Sean, that sometimes the same scribe is responsible for the two different modes.

Yes, that's very interesting. And so we can actually start to make conclusions like that. So still, the jury's still out why all the copies why are the different kinds of copies we have but two different modes working in harmony with each other not not as competing or something like that i think is the best way to put the evidence together so far now one quick comment then i'll let peter go on the New Testament. It's that period from the 3rd century AD to the Masoretes, right, in the 9th century. This is sometimes known as the Dark Ages of Hebrew Bible copying. There are only a handful of fragments of the Hebrew text known from that period. And so that's a major hole in our knowledge of how the text was copied. We have indirect statements in rabbinic works, like the Talmud and things,

but we don't have a lot of direct evidence of what the text looked like and how it was being copied from the end of our Dead Sea Scroll era, so let's say 2nd, 3rd century AD, up to the period of the Masoretes in the 9th century. That's super helpful. Now in a minute, I'm going to come back to you with two questions. Number one, how we should then trust the scriptures, given that there's different traditions of 1 Samuel 16 through 18 in Jeremiah. And we're going to get into the differences in the height of Goliath. Fascinates me. I can't wait for that. But let's shift up to the New Testament. Peter, what do we know about some of the earliest scribes of the New Testament? How they compare with maybe later scribes?

In particular, Bart Ehrman has said that our earliest manuscripts have more mistakes and differences than later ones. Is that really accurate? Yeah, that's a good question. I'd start with that second claim first. And statistically speaking, that's just not the case. For a very simple reason that we have far more late manuscripts than we have early manuscripts. So if you were to draw in the book, we show a little bit of a timeline. There's a huge peak in the Middle Ages of copying.

And that's because Christianity is the dominant religion in the East. And you've got monasteries all over the place in the Greek speaking East, Eastern side of the empire. And so, and they need copies for churches and their own, you know, their own study of the scriptures in the monastery. So you get this huge explosion of manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Now, overall, I think what Barth is right about is, in general, those later scribes were more careful, and the text tends to coalesce around one particular type of text, what we call the Byzantine text.

So it begins to dominate but those later scribes would have to be down right um amazing to have fewer variants in the later manuscripts than we have in the early manuscripts because it's simple math when you have fewer manuscripts in the first period you're going to have overall a smaller number of variants yeah now i think probably what bart is thinking of is that what most scholars I think are thinking, sorry, when they say that is that most of our most interesting variants and most of the ones that we still argue about are already apparent in our early manuscripts. Does that make sense? In other words, there are variants that only show up in the Middle Ages, but they tend to be in one manuscript or two manuscripts. Like they're just clearly scribal

mistakes. So nobody really pays much attention to them. Whereas the kind of variants that we all as New Testament scholars still argue about, or that get discussed in commentaries, those ones tend to show up early. Yeah. Which frankly is the reason why we still argue about them because they are early. That makes sense. So the later – so it seems like you're saying there's this movement towards more precision and care in copying. Does that follow that the earliest scribes were therefore careless? Right, and no. And here, Sean, I'm going to help you out. I'm going to give you a basketball analogy, all right? Oh, perfect. Now you're talking. All of us on this video know who the greatest basketball player of all time is. His initials are M and J.

Yes? John, are we agreed on this? Amen. Do we need? Amen. All right. So we all know Michael Jordan is the best basketball player, and LeBron James is not as good.

He's just not. Okay? But that does not mean that LeBon james is a bad basketball player the fact that lebron james is worse than michael jordan does not make lebron james a bad basketball player in the same way the fact that our earliest manuscripts even if they are just in by some measure not as good not as careful as our later manuscripts it does not follow from that that they are bad okay what we actually find in the early manuscripts is we find both we find some manuscripts that are not as careful a manuscript like P72 is one of our earliest copies of, say, 1 Peter. And overall, its text is not as good as a later manuscript like Codex Vaticanus from 100 or so years later. like p75 from the same period as p72 okay p75 very good manuscript it matches very very closely

to that same fourth century manuscript codex vaticanus where they overlap in luke's gospel so i think it's just you can't actually make a blanket statement the earlier scribes are x what we actually have is we have some very good, some of our earliest manuscripts appear to be very, very good. And some are not as good. Overall, though, I would say almost all of our manuscripts are really good. They're maybe not all Michael Jordan's. Okay. They're maybe not even all LeBron James's.

Okay. But they all could play in the NBA. Let's put it that way. All right. With a few exceptions. I would like to say there's a few exceptions. Codex Beza is a fifth century manuscript of the Gospels and Acts. It's a few exceptions. I always like to say there's a few exceptions. Codex Beza is a 5th century manuscript of the Gospels and Acts. It's a weird manuscript.

But the reason why we can identify it as weird, Sean, is because we have so many other manuscripts that look different than it does. Does that make sense? In other words, when you put it against the bigger crowd, it still stands out as having the orange hair, let's say. Do you know what I mean? Like if everybody's got dark hair, and then all of a sudden one guy's got orange hair, you're like, well, that guy stands out for some reason.

Kodak's Beza is a little bit like that. But it's not typical. So Kodak's Beza is the Dennis Rodman to stick with the basketball analogy. That's a perfect analogy. Man, I'm going to steal that. Thank you, Sean. Yeah. You might want him on your team sometimes because the guy can rebound. Do you know what I'm saying? Yes, he can.

There's times where Codex Beza has the original reading and it's 5th century, so that's significant, right? But man, you don't want him as your spokesman. okay we're going to come back to some of the variants and what they mean and give us an example of how textual critics in the new testament judge between different readings but john i've been waiting to ask you this question probably 10 years ago i was at the evangelical theological society heard a presentation about the height of goliath and was stunned that there's reason to think he's not nine feet tall, biblically and extra-biblically. Explain what some of that debate is, but maybe what follows from it for what confidence we can have in the Old Testament. Right. Well, let me actually just start there. I love this example because it illustrates a lot about how variants work and how differences maybe arise. But no one's theology is going to be shaken down to its foundations or core based on this example. So let's start there. This is the height of Goliath we're talking about, not the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Okay, so I want to be clear about that, okay? But even saying that, right, I do think this is an interesting variant. It does shape the way in which we read this story, okay? Because we, in our children's ministry curricula, right, we always envision David like down here, and Goliath is like way up here you know like nine foot nine inches okay but the fact of the matter is there are there's a Dead Sea Scroll 4q Samuel a the set many manuscripts in the Septuagint or the the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible tradition that have Goliath at four cubits and a span, which puts him at six feet, nine inches.

Okay. And, but then there's the Masoretic manuscripts that we referenced earlier, and a number of translations that follow them, Greek and Latin and Syriac, all have Goliath at that nine foot nine inches. So what text critics do with a problem like this is they try to figure out, first of all, is it an accidental mistake of the scribe? Is there a way that we could determine the original text between six and four cubits. And so one scholar, Frank Morecross, many, many years ago, he suggested, well, it's possible maybe that we could show the four cubits as original because the scribe's eye would have skipped down several lines to the description of Goliath's spear,

which is described as weighing 600 shekels. Okay. And 600 would have looked a lot like six cubits, okay, in Hebrew. And so maybe the original reading is four cubits, and we can explain the move from four to six because of an accidental eye skip on the part of the scribe. Problem is, it's a little too far down. So most scholars are not really convinced by this mistake. So moving out, moving some of those sort of common scribal mistakes, if that doesn't account for it, then what internally might motivate a scribe to make the change one way or the other. So, so if we start again with four cubits, a shorter Goliath, you could potentially see a scribe wanting to make

Goliath taller so that David's victory over Goliath is much greater, right? So, so this is possible, possible. Or, or let's, let's work it the other way. Let's say Goliath, the original text, is he's nine feet, so six cubits tall. Why would a scribe want to introduce a secondary reading making him shorter? Well, we learn earlier in 1 Samuel that Saul is already taller than all of his countrymen. We learned that in 1 Samuel 9 verse 1 and 2. So maybe a scribe wants to bring Saul and this Goliath kind of more eye to eye to further underscore Saul's cowardice, you see, in this narrative. Other features of Goliath is his height is only mentioned once, but he apparently was a boss on the battlefield.

So in single combat, obviously he hadn't lost yet. And apparently he had quite a number of notches on his belt. So in Saul's mind, as this narrative plays out, Saul is actually more worried about Goliath's skill in killing people in single combat, okay, on the battlefield, than he is really about his height. So I could see this going a number of ways, but right now i lean towards the taller goliath as original and a sec yes i know and then a scribe kind of making him shorter to underscore the the the saul issue okay but i could i could see it kind of going each way and sometimes it depends on what day you ask me so um yeah yeah now i i feel like entering into the debate on a height of goliath but i'm pretty confident i would lose this

one since it's not my lane but i do find it interesting that the brothers of goliath he has four brothers seven feet tall much more likely somebody's three inches shorter than two feet taller. That grabs my attention. But bottom line is scholars come across these differences, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Masoretic Text, and they look and try to figure out why is there this difference. But then you also look, so that's extra biblically, so to speak, but then you look within the text itself and say, what is the story itself? Give us any hints and just try to piece together. But the bottom line, whether he's six, nine or nine feet, there are these differences in the Old Testament, but they're not substantial to take away our confidence in the text as a whole. Is that fair?

That's right. That's fair. Yeah. And the fact that we can piece it together, right, based on sound evidence on both sides, come up with very plausible, probable explanations for why one or the other. This shows me we've got a pretty well-preserved text here. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, John, when David goes to fight him, he doesn't say, how can I fight him?

He's nine feet tall. He says, how can I fight him? He has trained since he was a youth, so it's more his training than his height. He's got the skill. That's right. Nonetheless. No, I'm with you. I'm with you.

I tend to – I could see it that way for sure. Can I just jump on that point really quick, guys? Yeah. Because I haven't thought about this until just now. I've heard John talk about this a bunch. But one of the things it actually illustrates is the way that sometimes it's important for us. And the way text criticism can help us see the way we read the text, it's different from the way that they did in other words if you read the text closely and actually goliath's height is not the thing that's emphasized but his prowess as a fighter then the height difference in

the manuscripts is not that as big a deal to you does that make sense uh-huh right that's right i think i'm losing you guys yeah no we got you that does make sense that's that's a great point so you know it's it's we get everybody's really interested in the height of Goliath. And Sean, I was exactly like you the first time John told me this. I was like, wait, what? The height of Goliath can't be an issue. Like, it's Goliath. That's my Sunday school class.

Right. But we are so fixated on the height issue and him being a giant that maybe that's actually led us to miss something that's more important in the actual, the details of the story as we have it, you know? So one of the reasons why I know both John and I appreciate textual criticism as a discipline and telling people about it is because it helps us read our Bible more closely. Amen. That's sort of like, you know, I know it's not an apologetic point per se,

but I think that's really important for people to know. For sure. That's super important. On that note, let's shift back to the New Testament. Then I've got some more questions for you, John, about kind of manuscript quantity of the New Testament compared to the second highest ancient book would be Homer. You say a better comparison is specifically the Gospel of Matthew with the Gospel of Thomas. Why do you think that's a better comparison, and what do we find when we compare the two? Yeah, I like to compare those two because they're both sort of in the same genre.

You know, they both have the title gospel. Now, Thomas is obviously a very different type of gospel. It's a sayings gospel, not a narrative. But it's also close in time. You know, it's within a century, whereas Homer is long before Matthew's writing. So in some ways that feels a little bit less fair to me, although he is a very popular ancient um that's a very popular ancient work so but thomas is uh thomas is also a helpful comparison because people are kind of people have rediscovered it in our own day you know um and it gets a lot of sensational attention so but with matthew you have you know something like 2000

copies just in Greek that we can work from whereas Thomas we know that the gospel of Thomas is written in Greek because we have three fragments of it in Greek they're all fragments very fragmentary the only complete copy we have the gospel of Thomas is in Coptic which is a translation and so what I think that shows that people are willing to say well I think the of Thomas, if they're not willing to doubt the Gospel of Thomas on its textual grounds, which actually I don't think they should do, frankly, that they certainly should not doubt the Gospel of Matthew. I actually think we have one complete copy of Thomas and scholars debate whether there are some places where either through translation or miscopying it may be corrupted. But there's probably not that many of those either. And it just goes to show you can have one copy in translation of an ancient work and people still use it to do historical work. Right? How much more

did we be able to do that for the gospel of Matthew? Now, to be fair, the fact that we have so many copies of Matthew actually does create a lot more work for us because there's whole sections of thomas where we don't have any text critical work to do at all because we've only got one manuscript right we're just looking at it and going does it make sense okay then we just assume it's right and we move on whereas with matthew we've got so many manuscripts that if you use a large enough database you're going to have decisions to make in every verse most of them are very easy um and they don't they don't make it to the attention of most people because they don't need to but do you see the point the point is we yep the number of manuscripts of the new testament is what we call blessing and a curse but it is also in some ways the solution to its

own problem because it gives us so much material to study to learn about the kind of mistakes that scribes make and that makes us better in determining where scribes have actually made a mistake. So if I heard you correctly, Peter, a lot of the copies of Matthew create more challenges and problems, but also helps us better reconstruct the original. And it creates more work, which enables you to have a job. That's it. That's it. All right.

Job security. Job security. right let me let's shift back to the old testament then i have a specific example i want to come back to uh for you peter let's let's really narrow down uh you talked about kind of the the careful copying the conservative copying of the the old testament manuscripts but then kind of this free-flowing copying that was in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well. So Isaiah matches up almost identically. Brilliant. But Jeremiah and 1 Samuel 16 through 18, of course,

which contains a story of David and Goliath, it's not that close. There's a significant variance. So what does that tell us about which text we can trust as a whole? Yeah. Okay. So let's sort some things out here. Let's start with the David and Goliath problem. So this is basically 1 Samuel 16 to 18. Okay. And what I need to point out, Sean, is that what's interesting is the Dead Sea Scrolls are not what leads scholars to say

that there's a big difference between the Masoretic text and, say, another version of the David and Goliath story. The most recent analysis of the David and Goliath story in 4Q, Samuel A., that's the fourth cave of Qumran, 1 Samuel document. It's a very fragmentary text, but it and Goliath narrative, it actually agrees with the longer version of the text, of the Masoretic text. What we're talking about, too, I should back up. We're talking about 1 Samuel 17 and the second biographical introduction to David. I think it picks up around verse 11 maybe, and it spans like 20 or so verses.

They're all in our English translations based on the Masoretic text, those verses, but they're not in the Septuagint or the Greek translation of 1 Samuel. That's actually where the difference occurs. Where we have Dead Sea Scroll evidence, it actually agrees with the Masoretic text. Okay, so, which, yeah, so what 4Q Samuel A has shown and more recent analysis of that manuscript has shown is that the MT longer reading is much older than we initially thought. See, this is why you must be,

this is why we must be careful, right? Before we go off making major, major claims, okay? So as the dust starts to settle, better analysis kicks in, we actually find at Qumran, they had the longer version of the David and Goliath narrative. Now, so the big difference then is really between all extant Hebrew manuscripts and the Septuagint or the Greek translation. And this is maybe a bit new because Peter, I'm sure, and most New Testament scholars, they study ancient translations, but they don't use them for textual criticism

as much as Old Testament text critics do. I felt a slight coming on there. Was there a little... There's a little edge to that comment, folks. I don't know if all our listeners caught it, but it was there. Go ahead. Okay, okay. Yeah, I don't want to make it sound like they don't,

but they revel in all these early and many manuscripts in Greek. And I'm jealous, frankly. I'm jealous. We're blessed. All right. Yeah, very much. All right. But Old Testament text critics, for a very, very long time,

centuries into the discipline, have used the Greek translation of the Old Testament as a major source. Okay? And what's interesting, when you look at the way in which 1 Samuel was translated from Hebrew into Greek, so this is well before the time of Jesus that this happened, what you actually find is that the translator is more given to an NIV-ish type tendency. And what I mean by that is he's not slavishly following his source, but rather he's actually introducing something. So let me give you an example. Remember that part in the David and Goliath encounter where where goliath says you know am i a dog that you come out to me with a stick you know and this sort of thing and uh and i think basically you know the mt or our english translation has something like well no but but this but the greek translator adds no rather you're

worse than a dog and he like gets really salty with Goliath on the battlefield in the Greek version. So what that actually shows, though, is that the translator is given to slightly expanding his text, never reducing it, you see. So what this has shown scholars is that the Greek translator must have had a shorter Hebrew copy in front of him that had already reduced the text. It had already omitted the second biographical introduction

to David in chapter 17, because David, right, is also properly introduced in chapter 16, you see so perhaps perhaps a scribe worked in a in a reducing capacity and that's the copy that the greek translator had in front of him but again i you see i'm using the word perhaps yeah probably plausibly this is tough because again with 4q samuel a the the translator wouldn't have had that text in front of him. Okay. So in other words, there's no Hebrew evidence for what I'm saying. All we have is the Greek translation. Gotcha.

And the 10, does that make sense? Yes. Yep. And we've been able to describe the tendencies of that translator. So that's what puts together a plausibility case. But this is tough. This is tough. So that's one. of Thomas, where this all of a sudden there's this errant theological teaching that a woman is saved by becoming a male, or are they just the kind of details that expand the story but are faithful to the text itself?

Yeah, right. No, I think they're mainly faithful to the text itself. Now, there are differences, and what's fascinating, your readers need to know this too, because the Old Testament issues, they are bigger, okay? It's's not just we can't just put them in a nice box maybe i'm being salty here myself it's not a john 8 mark 16 okay let's get our let's get the big ones in a box you know and we've got it there's there's origin of alexandria the church father when he did his detailed comparison of the greek copies of the old testament with the hebrew copies in the late second early third century a.d when he did that

when he got to the what the tabernacle building in exodus 35 to 40 i mean he noted, he notes this in his letter to Africanus. He says, it looks like there's two minds behind these. Not because the material was different, but it had been rearranged. One or the other had rearranged the material. Does that make sense? So things occurred in a different order. And so Origen, looking at this sort of stark difference, he wonders whether there's like sort of two designs or two minds behind it. You know, I like this example because it does show us that we're not modern scholars discovering these problems for the first time. Christians have known about these problems for a very, very long time. Okay. And notice. And notice the faith is still here. This hasn't rocked the faith down to its core. It hasn't. But rather, it has created a faith-seeking understanding. Text critics need to continue to slowly and methodically work through these problems.

And I think more and more light is being cast on a tabernacle type issue. But that's a place where the Septuagint and the Hebrew copies really do disagree with each other. And it even looks like maybe two different accounts. Even though a tabernacle is built, the glory of Yahweh descends upon it and fills it. You know, priests are unable to carry out their responsibilities, right, while that happens. Like, all of that's the same. But there's a different ordering of the material there. I'm trying to think of some other examples of this sort of thing.

I think that's great. That makes the point that we're looking for, that there are some questions that remained. Old Testament scholars also have job security. But the more we the more we discover it seems like you're saying we do have confidence and we're finding plausible solutions to these i think so rather than the problems or unsolved issues creating more problems i think it's how you stated it for for sure for sure okay the dead we've only known about the dead sea

scrolls for 75 years that's astonishing like there astonishing. We need to be patient. We need to be faithful in our work. Let me shift to you, Peter. There's a ton of debate and discussions about how many variants there actually are and what significance they have so two-part question let's just stick with the greek manuscripts how what's your best estimate of how many variants they are and why is that significant and then maybe i guess it's a three-part question maybe unpack the example you give in mark 1 2 where there's a citation obviously you know from the old testament referencing the coming of jesus and john the baptists uh foreshadowing how textual critics determine which reading is most likely accurate yeah great all right so that's a couple questions so simple answer to the how many variants there are uh the best estimate and i'm biased because it's my own estimate, is that there are about half a million non-spelling differences in our Greek manuscripts.

So that does not include spelling differences. It is an estimate. Why is it an estimate? Because I told you earlier we have a lot of manuscripts. Nobody has gone through all 2,000 or so manuscripts of Matthew's gospel and compared them at every point. Why? Because it's extremely tedious to do that and frankly there probably isn't that much that we would gain from

doing it okay um eventually we probably will because we like to do things to the nth degree as text critics but for now it's we can live without that but so it's an estimate based on those places the new testament we do have really robust data to work from on the number of variants and where all the manuscripts say of john 18 or the book of philemon for example have been compared to each other all right once you have that number that's a huge number about half a million that's a lot okay but then you have to ask yourself the question how many of them matter and who do they matter for okay and so you can take something like john 18 where again we have this really robust data to work from and if you look at your uh let's say

okay let's start with commentaries if you take some technical commentaries you'll probably find them discussing five maybe six variants in that whole chapter okay so out of thousands of variants that they could discuss if they wanted to which they don't want to uh they discuss about five okay five or six by the time you get to an english translation which is trying to present you know the variants that really affect english translation i don't know of a single english translation that has a footnote about a variant in John 18. In other words, the translators are that confident that they can either dismiss the variants or resolve them, that none of them rise to the level where they say this affects translation and it's a difficult problem.

We need to alert the reader to none. Okay. Now that's John 18. Not every chapter is the exact same in the New Testament, as you can imagine. But I do think that gives you a sense. You could probably think these sorts of percentages are always a bit tricky to work with. But the Greek New Testament that is designed for Bible translators, okay, I would say about 1% of the text based on that edition involves variation that could affect translation

and where the decision may be somewhat difficult. Although even there, the difficulty of decisions ranges. Okay. So, you know, I find that probably per New Testament book, again, it depends somewhat on the book, but you can think there are maybe three to four pretty significant variants in Matthew. Okay. Now, again, it depends on who you are, whether they're significant or not.

I'm writing a commentary on Jude and 2 Peter right now, and it's a commentary that's mainly designed for a wider audience. I'm not going to discuss near as many variants in that as I would say in a technical commentary or that I might push my students at the seminary to go through, but it's still going to be more than I would discuss if I were say preaching it or teaching it. And it's not because I'm trying to hide it from people. It's just because they don't rise to that level of importance to the meaning of the text, right? They're usually smaller matters that you have to be, you have to be doing pretty detailed work before they matter. Does that make sense? And they don't affect the the meaning of the text i'll give you the well let's do the mark we can do the mark one example okay that's maybe

a good example this is a bit of a tricky one um most of our bible translations say just as it is written in isaiah the prophet and then introduce a quotation that seems to be a combination of yes isaiah 40 but then also something from either either Exodus 23 or Malachi 3. Okay. And so we have a variant in the manuscripts, which is not terribly surprising, where some manuscripts, instead of saying, as it is written in Isaiah, the prophet, have as is written in the prophets. Okay. And so we have to wrestle with this, which one of these readings explains how the other one came about? Okay. And one argument is to say, well, if prophets is original, then some scribes wanted to be more specific.

Okay. So they clarify the text by naming the most famous prophet of their options they had there. And Isaiah is certainly more famous now. I suppose you could say Moses, but it's not the clearest citation of Exodus 23 there. So you could see them pointing to isaiah 40 also isaiah 40 is the one that's quoted in the other synoptic gospels right for this to make this exact same point to anticipate the coming of john the baptist okay on the other side you could say well no isaiah is original and scribes were a little bit troubled that they recognized that other texts besides just isaiah were quoted here and so they just changed it to the plural prophets to sort of smooth out a potential problem in the text.

I think that explanation is more likely for two reasons. One, I think scribes tended to make the text easier rather than more complicated in general. And then the second reason is the reading in Isaiah the prophet is found in our earliest, and in my opinion, our best manuscripts as well. So in my opinion, there are two arguments in favor of Isaiah being original. One, it's what we call the more difficult reading, slightly more difficult. And then the second is that it's found in the better manuscripts. So that's the type. Now, you know, some people would read that and say, oh, well, if it says on Isaiah the prophet, that's

wrong then. It's not wrong. It's an indication of the way they cited scripture at this time. Isaiah is by far the most prominent of the people Mark quotes here. Isaiah's theology is hugely important in Mark's gospel, if you read it carefully and know Isaiah well. And so actually it makes perfect sense with Mark's own theology that he would want to highlight Isaiah in particular as the one who writes about the coming of the Son of Man, right? So that's just an example of the way we kind of work through these problems on the New Testament side of things. I want to narrate for our viewers here that we've looked at two examples,

one from the Old Testament, Hida Goliath, which is super interesting, but nothing theologically or biblically significant rests upon that difference. And same with this intro and mark, whether it's prophet, prophets, Isaiah, Malachi, Exodus, these are important nuances, but we can't miss the forest, so to speak, for the trees. And this is often what happens. So to say that there's amidst some of these variants, less than 1% of them are significant in terms of what the meaning is. And even that meaning isn't something essential is really, really important to keep in mind. Now, we're running somewhat short on time, but maybe I'll shift back to you, John.

Maybe we'll do a full show on this at some point. But one thing we often hear is that it was just kind of a conspiracy and accidental about the books that we have in the Bible. I realize the Old Testament and the New Testament are different questions. How do we have confidence, kind of just a quick, give us a summary of how you approach this in your book when it comes to the Old Testament books. Yeah. So the Old Testament, the way we cover it in the book is there are three formative periods that bring us our Old Testament. Okay. There's what I like to call kind of the pre-New Testament, pre- old Testament. Okay. There's, there's what I like to call kind of the pre new Testament pre Jesus period. Okay. What, what can we learn from these dead sea scrolls? Philo, the, well,

the new Testament documents themselves about what books the Jews thought were the, the oracles of God, right? The divinely inspired books. Okay. Well, newsflash, I mean, except for a quotation in what's known as the Damascus document of Jubilees, okay, or at least a reference to Jubilees, pretty much Qumran writings only quote books that are in our Old Testament or in the Jewish Tanakh. Okay. So I, it's interesting, not all the books are quoted i think that's where scholars try to find more wiggle room you know and just philo of alexandria

same thing he he actually just quotes the pentateuch moses first five books like a lot uh but he does make reference to jeremiah other prophetic books as well. We're going to be more familiar with how the New Testament quotes these books, just like Peter referred to earlier. So the question is, though, is like, what do you do with a book like Esther? What do you do with a book like Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, books that are nowhere quoted in this earliest period. And yet, by the time you get to around 100 AD, the Jewish historian Josephus is talking about how the Jews have only ever had, or at least for a long time have had, 22 books that they can look to. And again, we go through this in the book how how did jews and christians number books and that sort of thing i won't get bogged down on this but um but basically

after that after josephus who i think is a major milestone really uh after that though you in in the christian period you get early canon lists, or I like to just call them early tables of contents for the Bible, okay? And these are the clearest statements of what a Christian writer or regional synod or council thought was in the Old Testament, okay? What I expected to find there, Sean, was the Roman Catholic canon throughout. I expected to find all of what they call the deuterocanonical books, what we sometimes call the Apocrypha. I expected that those lists would include those books. I was surprised that of the 12 early Greek Christian lists, none of those books are listed as amongst the canon. Okay, that's interesting.

That is very interesting. In fact, several Latin lists don't contain them either. The list by Jerome, Hillary, Rufinus of Aquileia, they do not include these books. Now, our favorite theological homeboy though, like Augustine, he does include them. And they're not separated out or anything. They're fully integrated amongst his canonical Old Testament books. We work through this. We sort through this. But there's a way to get there.

But we also, I want to just make one last statement here because i know we're running short on time in the reformation period we do discuss uh the can't the old testament canon there because it comes to a head at the council of trent but there's a fascinating prehistory even just a few decades or so before we tend to think well martin luther wouldn't have accepted this wider canon he would not have accepted the book of tobit as canonical or something like this which is true what we would not have expected to find though is that say a catholic scholar like erasmus he also didn't consider tobit to be canonical you see or um who is the other one we talk about peter oh cardinal cardinal cadgeton yeah cardinal cadgeton heajetan. He's the one responsible for reviewing Martin Luther's doctrine at the Diet of Augsburg in 1518.

Yeah, but Cardinal Cajetan, when he comes to the end of his commentary on the historical books of the Old Testament, he makes it super clear as to why he's not writing a commentary on first and second Maccabees, because they're not part of the Old Testament, he says. They're history, yes, but they're not part of the Old Testament. And he goes on to explain why, in a way that Martin Luther, I think, would have agreed with, you see. And then he also talks about the books of Tobit and Judith and Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus in the Latin tradition, what we might call Ben Sira. Those books for Catholic Cardinal Cajetan are not in his canon, you see. I think that's fascinating. And those statements are in the 1530s, 10 years before the council of trent okay so when trent decided and again we found man we found all kinds of fun stuff when we delved into trent for this book because i can tell yeah

it well it turns out there was a lot of different opinion even at trent so anyhow yeah but the decree is history let me ask you a question i feel like there's probably an obvious answer to this and i'm just missing something. But when you talked about canonization of the Old Testament, I don't believe you brought in the Septuagint. If that's the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament available in the New Testament day, don't we have confidence about what the Old Testament was by the first century? Well, kind of. There's a misnomer out there, Sean. We should never talk about a Septuagint canon.

Okay? No. Septuagint, that anglicized Latin word for Septuaginta, meaning 70. Okay, we've actually invented the term Septuagint. But Septuaginta would only refer to the translation of the first five books of the Old Testament, okay, properly speaking. Eventually, it was a term that was adopted to try to encompass the entire Old Testament or something like this. And eventually, it's meant to encompass those extra books not part of the hebrew canon but it was part but but but those deuterocanonical books were part of the septuagint

canon in fact in fact this one right here this includes the enoch fragments as part of the septuagint no no no no no no so so so you stepped on a landmine here sean i just gotta i'm just gonna i'm okay yeah that's right yeah sean's like what did i just do but but i guess my my point is is that all those early christian canon lists that i referred to earlier most of them actually refer to the Hebrew canon. They actually say the church has 22 books, just as there are 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, right? Just as we know the Jews in their synagogue are reading, okay? I think that's astonishing, and that's a part of this history that not many Christians know about. And so when the Protestants, just to fast forward way ahead again, they basically say, no, our canon should mirror the Hebrew canon.

They're not just sort of spitballing this. Like there's a massive tradition behind them, not just Jerome, but we could look at Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Jerusalem, all of these fathers compare their 22-book canon to the 22-book canon of the Jews, you see. So it's actually a widespread tradition. In fact, in the book, I mean, I try not to skew it too much, but with Augustine and basically North African churches, you have a different thing going on where they are seeming to expand the canon beyond the Hebrew canon, you see. But in any case, I got to say this from conclusion, the Septuagint plays no role, no role in this history. None of these fathers ever claim the Septuagint

as their authority for the canon that they have. Origen talks about the Greek copies of the church. He hardly ever refers to the 70. Okay. Uh, at Augustine may refer to the 70, uh, but he's even aware of some problems because he knows, he knows that the Maccabean books could not have been translated by those same 70 translators, for example. So he, he's got a few things to work out in his own chronology, but, but, but still he, even he's not pointing to a Septuagint canon or something like this. That's super helpful. I tell you in some, I did open a can of worms on this, and there are so many more questions. Maybe we'll come back and do a whole one on canonization,

I think would be really helpful down the line. Let's plan on it. But we're pushing time. Let me ask you guys just one last quick, quick question. You probe into the depths in the Old Testament and the New Testament in ways that I don't. How does your scholarship affect your faith? Peter, go for it. I would say, you know, I've been doing this for, I'm not that old, but I've been doing this for a number of years, Sean. So it's like, you know, for for me these questions are not new um and so i've

resolved a lot of the theological questions to my own satisfaction for for a while quite a while now so at this point in my life the scholarship that i do i would say the simplest way to say is that it fires my faith that that i love it you know i mean i study the bible because i love the bible i love the bible because i'm convinced that it's true. And, you know, there was certainly a period in my student, in my life as a student, where these kinds of questions raised difficult theological questions for me about, say, inerrancy or inspiration. And I've worked those out. just man i see you know i look at a manuscript and i think this is a copy of god's word and i feel incredibly thankful that we have it and that i have copies of god's word you know i think it's helpful to remind people i think sometimes we as modern people think that we kind of approach it the same way we approach morals okay i'm going to try to be careful here sean not to get too off on

this but we tend to think that we're sort of the the best there's ever been morally speaking you know that history is a straight line of progress and we're up here at the top right and we're just getting we've gotten so much better than everybody who's gone before us and certainly i think some of that is because technologically we're so advanced you know the fact that i can get on an airplane and fly across the country just makes me think we're better at everything else anyways i think sometimes that tempts us to think that we also ought to have the best Bible there's ever been. And anything less than the quality of the Bible that we have now is somehow not up to par. And I always remind my students when we're studying manuscripts,

I think, look, all these manuscripts that yes, they have scribal mistakes in them. These were people's Bibles. And they were more than good enough. And our Bibles today are built on so much more manuscript information than any Bibles in the past that it just seems to me like it seems to me the height of ingratitude to worry almost. I mean, that's putting a little bit too extreme because we do need to sort through these things. And John's raised some important questions and we all have to work through these. And some of this is me speaking as somebody who's worked through some of them, right?

But I do think, when I think about the history of the Bible, my first response to it is not like, oh, thank goodness I can now trust the Bible still. Although it is that, but it's actually more at this point in my life, just like I should be so much more grateful for it than i am wow like so many people have have given their lives in the case of somebody like a william tyndale and translating or these scribes of the meticulous

work of copying it so that i can have a bible that i can read and have really good confidence that this is god's god's word and he's speaking. You know, am I going to sit here and complain because I'm not a thousand percent sure whether it's in Isaiah the prophet or in the prophets when the fact is Isaiah did prophesy about this guy hundreds of years before. It's like what you said before, let's not miss the forest for the trees.

That's great. You know? Think about what the Bible claims about Jesus. Those are the big things you ought to be wrestling with. Not whether Mark 1-2 has plural prophets or singular Isaiah. There's a place for that. I'm not denying that. Again, I'm a text critic.

I think about this stuff. I'm happy to. But I think at the end of the day, we have to ask bigger, more important questions like, what does this book say about who Jesus is? What does it say about who I am in relation to God? And frankly, that is not stuff that is in the least bit affected in the ultimate sense by these kinds of questions we're talking about today. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's a great answer.

I'm not trying to say what I do is unimportant, Sean. I'm not. We know you want job security. That came across loud and clear. I think it is important. I just think we ought to make sure we keep it in its place. And let's answer the big questions first and then think through these questions as well. Right.

That's right. Yeah. Good. Yeah. folks is scholarship done from, say, the disposition of faith-seeking understanding and how that might differ from scholarship done with sort of tabula rasa type approach, okay? Faith in the sense that we're going to remain doing this work as committed Christians, but we're also committed to understanding. That is that we are committed to going where the evidence goes. But rather than despair, as I think some maybe have done in the past when they see differences with the David and Goliath narrative or the fact that Greek Jeremiah is shorter than Hebrew Jeremiah and these sorts of problems, for what what it's done for me is it's expanded my

view of god's providence like things i've known as a child think like you know knowing the story in genesis 50 of of god's providence over uh how joseph gets to egypt right how his brothers and family wind up there and how god ultimately saves a people through some pretty normal evil, yes, but pretty normal means is the way God saves this people. the canonization process, the translation efforts, we get a great appreciation for the human side of things and just how messy that can be at times and all that. But I also step back, I take one more step back though, and I go, wow, what a mosaic God has created here by the preserving of his word through these diverse means. So anyways, I feel like as a Christian, I look back and go, well, God's just as much as in control of this as I say he is about everything. So that also should say to us too, this goes to Peter's larger point,

we should be content with what god has preserved for us and and not sort of putting greater or lesser uh certainties upon that data so anyways that's a great answer i definitely want to commend this book to our uh viewers today scribes and scripture uh christian or skeptic novice or expert you'll be encouraged and you'll definitely learn. It's a great book. And we need to do that follow-up show in due time, John, in terms of canonization. And Peter, we'll definitely have you back. Appreciate what both of you do in your writing.

You're speaking with clarity, your faith. Be encouraged. And those of you watching, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other conversations, some some other dialogues some other videos coming up and if you've thought about studying uh textual criticism check out phoenix seminary doing a wonderful job there if you want to study apologetics check out biola university we have the top rated distance program and we have full classes on the topic that we discussed today fellas thanks so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Sean.

Thanks, Sean. Appreciate it.