The Sean McDowell Show - The Latest Textual Discoveries of the Bible (ft. Dan Wallace)

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

What recent discoveries have there been of biblical manuscripts? And what do they mean for the textual transmission of the New Testament. In this video, I talk with Dr. Daniel B. Wallace, one of the leading textual critics today. He is the CEO and Executive Director for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM), and the author of multiple books on Greek, the historical Jesus, and textual criticism. READ: Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament, by Dan Wallace (https://amzn.to/3Zk4nJv) *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

Do we have reason to believe that the Bible we hold in our hands today has been faithfully preserved from the original? I mean, I don't know. Nobody knows. How are manuscripts discovered today? There's no one better to discuss these issues than our guest today, Dr. Daniel B. Wallace from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. A manuscript is something that is handwritten, not printed. He's an author, professor, and he just returned this year from trips to Jerusalem, Vienna, and Oxford, in which his team has done some deep dives studying ancient manuscripts, and we're going to get an update. Dan, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Hey, Sean, what an introduction. Thank you. Yeah, good to be with you again.

Well, I've really been looking forward to this for a long time because I want to hear myself what's going on. So it was a fun introduction. But before we get to some of these adventures and the questions we cited earlier, maybe just tell us what is an ancient manuscript? What are we talking about when we mention that word? A manuscript, by definition, is something that is handwritten, not printed. Now, at the same time, it has a wider variety of uses. When an author turns in a manuscript to be published now, it's something that they type up on their computer.

But when we speak about manuscripts of the Bible, we are talking always about handwritten documents. When we are speaking about manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, the New Testament was originally written in Greek. When we're speaking about that, we are talking about manuscripts on either papyrus or parchment, animal skins, or paper that were copied by hand over and over and over again for centuries, about 1500 years, until the first Greek New Testament was published on a printing press 507 years ago this past March. So up until that time, the only way you could get a copy

of the Greek New Testament was to see a handwritten manuscript. We couldn't have anything that was printed until the Gutenberg printing press. And that happened just 65 years before Erasmus published the first Greek New Testament. That's super helpful. Now, I kind of consider you a modern-day Indiana Jones, trekking around the world, finding ancient manuscripts.

We will get to that. But I'm really curious, what is your personal training like, was Constantine Tischendorf, a man who found the ancient world, or the Mediterranean world, I should say, in the 1800s, and discovered the oldest complete New Testament in the world, Codex Sinaiticus, at St. Kitts Monastery in Mount Sinai, which now is housed at the British Library. He's considered to be the most absolute, the finest New Testament textual scholar of all time because of his indefatigable industry of finding manuscripts, finding monasteries, going all over the place, way out of his way, and then publishing them.

He was immense, and he died, I think, at age 59. He burned himself out. Wow. Interesting. So that's an awesome backstory. Tell us what you did. You went to school. What your training was like to be able to do this yourself.

My training was in Greek more than in manuscripts. I studied Greek. I had four years of Greek at Biola University as an undergrad, but during that time also studied under Dr. Harry Sturz, who was a very fine texture critic who had studied under the great EC Caldwell at Claremont College. Caldwell looked at the manuscripts and he was trying to determine how can we tell how one manuscript is related to another and so he's the one who worked out all sorts of methodological things on these manuscripts so that to this day if a a new discovery is made, there are ways to tell

if it's, all the manuscripts flowed through streams and families and had not just 5,000 manuscripts that come independently going back to the original. That would be silly. They always follow in groups, in herds, if you will. And some of those herds they might split off. But what Caldwell was trying to determine is, okay, does it fit in with this stream, or this stream, or this stream? And he came up with some methods for determining this. That was a critical thing that I learned well from Harry Sturz. And I took the course on textual criticism, which is the examination of the Greek New Testament manuscripts and other witnesses to determine the wording of the original.

I also took that course in seminary under Zane Hodges, and I didn't agree with Hodges in his views. He felt that the majority text, or the Greek New Testament that largely stands behind the King James Bible, is the true one. But I still wanted to learn from him and get everything I could. Now, how about the manuscripts? We actually never looked at a single manuscript in either one of those courses. But I had a hunger for it. We had at Dallas Seminary in my master's program a copy of Codex Sinaiticus, a facsimile done around the early 1900s. And I spent days in the library just looking at that.

It's the oldest complete New Testament that Tishonov discovered by half a millennium. The next oldest one comes 500 years later. It was written in the mid-4th century. This is astounding. And so I started to get a deep interest in the manuscripts. I said, I want to see these things in the flesh for myself. So I had, I guess, I ended up triple majoring in Greek New Testament and single majoring in Hebrew Old Testament in my master's program.

And then I went on for my doctorate and majored in New Testament. And while I was on faculty, even as a doctoral student, they asked me to teach the class on textual criticism to other doctoral students because nobody on the faculty at Dallas Seminary knew the field as well as I did. So I started teaching it long before I finished my degree. Wow. One of the things I did was I said, let's go look at manuscripts. Charles Ryrie, who was on faculty at Dallas Seminary for many, many years, a top-notch theologian, also was in a picture of wealthy. And we would visit his homes once a semester over this text critical class and he had just

an amazing array of ancient documents and manuscripts including three Greek New Testament manuscripts those were among the very first ones those were the first ones I ever actually handled and Ryrie allowed us to come and see those he had what he considered to be the finest edition of the 1611 King James Bible in the world. And he had a Luther Bible that was only one of 11 Luther Bibles on vellum. It looks a lot like the Gutenberg Bible. Okay. It's just beautiful, and I saw just amazing things.

But I got kind of a bug for the manuscripts there. So I'm self-trained as far as that is concerned. Okay. But that self-training has come through reading the best literature, living in, for example, Metzger's Manuscripts of the Greek Bible that all of my students know well if they're going to be able to decipher manuscripts. And then I've learned from others on how to deal with them. There are a couple of rules when you go into a library about handling a manuscript.

One is do not chew gum. You might foul out on the manuscript. Okay. All right. Two is don't go in without clean hands. If you had Cheetos for lunch, you better wash up to your elbows. I mean, you've got to make it very, very clean. And the third is do not ever let a pen get anywhere close to a manuscript, not even on the table.

Now, they've got some other rules. Like you never bring drinks and things like this. But the examination of the manuscripts, it used to be that all of the libraries said you have to wear cotton gloves and turn the pages. But that's been passe for several years now. They said instead it's better to have bare hands. So we are keeping up with technology and with what curators are doing on manuscripts. So we have bare hands. We have to have them clean, not oily.

And you do everything you can not to touch the ink on the page. What you do is you pull it by the edges, of course, like just a normal book. You never do this. Ever do that. You're putting your tongue where the bubonic plague used to live. I mean, that's literally true. But I've examined well over 1,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts in the last 20 plus years.

So I think I have a pretty decent sense of how to do it. And I've trained many other people on how to handle these manuscripts, what to look for, and especially how you prepare them for digitization, which is a fascinating field all its own. And that preparation is writing up a lot of metadata. But it really is fascinating. We've, uh, CSNTM has come up with its own methods on, uh, metadata preparation so that we are actually looking for things that nobody else is looking for, documenting things that nobody else has documented. We're going to get into some of that. Uh, you're like me, you talk with your hands, which is creating a little bit of rustling

with the sound. So just a little heads up as we move forward. I'll staple them to the table. Good luck with that. Now, what I do want to know, we're going to get into what the CSNTM does, but how are new manuscripts discovered? I mean, how do you come across new ones that haven't been really recorded like this before? Manuscripts are discovered, there's really two ways.

There are still some manuscripts that are discovered in the sands of Egypt, but that's far less common nowadays. And all of those would be on ancient papyri, which was kind of the ancient world's paper. It's actually stronger than paper. But the vast majority of manuscripts are already in libraries, European libraries especially.

And they are manuscripts that no one has gone through carefully and examined and determined what they have. So when we say we've discovered a manuscript, it means actually one of two things. It either means that we did actually discover a manuscript in a library that the librarians, the catalog system, did not know was in their catalog wow and one of the first things we do is we say can we see the catalog it's usually something that was typed up a hundred years ago and it's in-house in language so when we're at the national archive in in uh uh shirana yeah anyway sorry yes you oh my wife was there saying hi don't worry i hope you can edit some of that out. This is part of the fun. I just might leave it in. Keep going.

I love it. It's Tirana, Albania is the capital. And when we went there, I asked, do you have the 13 manuscripts that we have a report from the official cataloger of New Testament manuscripts that you have at the library? And the curator wrote back and said, yes we have those 13. Well when we got there, much to our surprise, they had four dozen Greek New Testament manuscripts that we noticed as we worked through the catalog and found what these were. So this was the biggest discovery CSNTM has made at any one time. We believe about 28 of them were brand new discoveries. Some of them have been in monasteries in Albania that

when the communist government came to control Albania, they gathered them all up, put them in the National Archive. And Westerners simply didn't know where they were. So this was a discovery that the library knew about, but Western scholarship did not. Here's how we count a manuscript being discovered. Once we have images of it and we let the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Munster, Germany, know about it and even send them some images. That's when a manuscript is considered to have been discovered. Because until New Testament scholars know about it, it's not a discovery. So you have archaeologists that are discovering all sorts of things, but if they don't publish it, then nobody knows about it.

So that's how we discovered it. I'd say about half, maybe more than half, a little bit more than half of the discoveries we made are manuscripts that the library did not know they have. That's incredible. Even when we were at the National Library of Greece in Athens for two years, digitizing all 300 of the Greek New Testament manuscripts. 150,000 pages altogether. We trained 44 people. It cost us over $800,000, all raised by donations, so we could get those manuscripts digitized. My job was to prepare

all of them for digitization. And in the two years that I was there, I discovered, I think, 21 manuscripts. And only about half of them did the library itself know about. And that's because we're discovering manuscripts inside of other manuscripts at times. That's a fascinating thing in and of itself. That is really incredible to hear. So do you think, you said there's two ways that manuscripts are discovered, kind of by papyri in the sands of Egypt or in libraries. Do we have reason to believe that there still are some manuscripts, Greek or others, buried somewhere that we're going to find with some kind of technology? Are there still some out there that are worth

searching for in that method rather than going to a library in the way you described? I'm sure there are. The town of Oxyrhynchus, or the sharp-nosed fish as it was called in ancient Greek, is a town in Egypt that was excavated by two British, very young scholars in their 20s, way back in the late 1800s. And they went to the ancient garbage heap where things had been put after they were no longer in use to people.

It could be that some of these had been left in a home and the next owner of the home, maybe the people died, the next owner sees these actually Christian manuscripts and says, oh, I don't want these, so he throws them out. There's a number of ways in which these could get into the garbage heap. But that's how an awful lot of our New Testament papyri, dozens of our New Testament papyri, have been found in Oxyrhynchus. Well, that started a revolution in manuscript studies and biblical studies going to the sands of Egypt and finding these papyri.

Up until 1895, most scholars would say, well, okay, we've got these letters written on papyrus from average-day folk. They're not literary. They're not theological. They're not from Scripture. They're worthless. That was until Adolf Deismann in 1895, a pastor at the time, he was also a doctoral student or had earned his doctorate,

he published a little book in German, Bibelstudien, or Translated Bible Studies, innocuous sounding book. And what he did was he said, I've been looking at these papyrus discoveries that have been published, and what I'm finding is that there are a lot of words and phrases in the New Testament

that we have never seen in any other literature. Of the New Testament vocabulary of about 5,000 different words, 500 of them were actually words not found in any other literature prior to the New Testament. And so one scholar back in the 1800s said, well, this is—the New Testament is Holy Ghost Greek. That is, it's a language that could only be learned if you're a Christian and the Holy Spirit inspired, but it's not the way anybody else would ever talk in that ancient world, and you can't even understand it unless you

are a Christian. So that was really the prevalent view back in the 1800s until Deismann came along. Going through the library and looking at this papyri, he publishes this book and of those 500 Greek words that had never been found in any other literature, he says there's only 50 left after he looked at the papyri. He found 450 of those words in the letters between common folk or petitions to an official or perhaps somebody saying I'd like to come to Cairo and live in an apartment and you can't send a picture in your resume so you Describe yourself and one of them

The person looked like they must have been ugly clean to the bone. I mean, it's it's almost humorous reading to see this The dice been found in these letters, one of the things he found for example was the word greetings in Greek which is an infinitive chyrine. I won't get into the etymology of those kinds of things. Okay. But we see in the Old Testament only in Acts 15 and in James 1. Both times by the same James by the way. Nowhere else in any Greek literature had we ever seen Chyrine, a greeting like that, in any Greek, until Deisman found it plentifully in these papyri. And he said, this is the way people would greet each other in a letter. It just,

it revolutionized biblical studies, and it almost completely outdated commentaries that were written before 1895, and the ones after that that at least took account of Deisman's discoveries, really became a basis for understanding the text since then. So your team has done metadata on dozens and dozens of manuscripts from around the world. What are some of the things you... You're selling this short. How about hundreds and dozens of manuscripts from around the world. What are some of the things you've... You're selling this short. How about hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts? Hundreds and hundreds. Fair enough.

Thank you. From around the world. You said yourself you've even looked at a thousand or so. What are some of the things you've observed? Just some of the big patterns that jump out that might be of interest to apologists, skeptics, and even students? Oh, good grief. You're throwing me a curveball here. My mind is filling up with all sorts of possibilities.

One of the things, though, that is, I get, I find that examining these manuscripts is both one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done in my life. Wow. And it's extremely tedious uh i'm hunched over my back my back is hurting my neck is hurting my knee is hurting i've had surgery on my back and my neck knitted on my knee but i get done with all that and i'm fulfilled long days and yet it's it's just thrilling labor i should start by saying what we're looking for when we write up the metadata and along the way what we discover that is of significance beyond

that. But first I should mention this. CSNTM has as its initial purpose to make sure that every single Greek New Testament manuscript in the world is digitized and made available to scholars worldwide for free. Now, I knew that we wouldn't be doing all of that, but we are doing most of that. There are other institutes that are digitizing their own collections, but we're also coming in to help them. So we have an agreement with the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where we are writing up the metadata and we're collaborating with them for them to digitize in-house. So when I prepare a manuscript, the first thing that I do is I count how many leaves

are in that manuscript. That sounds awfully mundane. In fact, you go to the back of the book and you might say, oh here's 176. That's how many leaves there are. They typically did not write, paginate them, they foliated them. That means that the scribes or a librarian typically put a number on just the right page, not the left page, the back of it. And so, you know, folio one is one, then the back would be page two. The next page would be three, but they call that two.

So that's how manuscripts are examined. What I have found, and this is consistent, is that about 80 or 90% of all Greek New Testament manuscripts have been foliated. And about 80 to 90 percent it's been done wrong in some place oh wow so you can't count that number in the end as the correct number necessarily what will happen is a librarian sometimes as early as the 1600s, perhaps even earlier than that, will go and they'll write a number on the page. So let's say they're up to number 27, and 28 is because the manuscript had not been stored properly over the hundreds of years, humidity had gotten to it and it's kind of

stuck with folio 27 and so he skips that one and goes to 28 which is actually 29 but he didn't know that we go through these very very carefully and sometimes they duplicate another so you'll have 47a and 47b well we it's it's critical that we get an exact count of the leaves and where the numbering is off, so that when the photographers first come in, they know where the pitfalls are, and that they know when they see this number on the page, it is really going to be this number. So it's critical that they take an image of every single page. We take pictures of all six outsides, the covered spine, the three sides, the back. And we also photograph a page if it's been ripped out,

which many, if not most manuscripts, have had that problem. But there's still at least one half of one letter on that fragment that's just kind of stuck out in the margin. That counts as a page for us. And in fact, that's how we've discovered a lot of manuscripts. But anyway, that count is critical. And as I work through these, I count the choirs. This is something that has not always been done, and it really is very revealing.

A quire, q-u-i-r-e, is sometimes called folds or signatures. This is where you have four double leaves, and you lay them down, and you fold them in half. And those double leaves make eight leaves, or 16 pages. And what is done in the middle is then that middle section is sewn into the binding uh in the back so that uh the the spine is holding all these you know you've seen this on on hardbound books you see the threads in them sometimes paperback books do that but hardbound books at least most of them and all of them used to be, were sewn in books.

They last longer that way. And it's an ancient technology that really goes back to the second century. We have this technology. And it wasn't very long before a choir was a standard size of eight leaves. Now, when we go through these manuscripts, we are counting the choirs and labeling them. So if we see on the first eight leaves of a manuscript, the letter alpha, which Arabic numbers the Greeks didn't know hadn't been invented yet, there's an alpha and a bar over that means don't read this as a

letter alpha, read this as a number. And you go eight more leaves through and you might see a beta. And eight more leaves, you get a gamma. It goes through like that. And that will be on the first page of the choir. It's not always there. These manuscripts have been trimmed and sometimes that choir signature is gone. But by going through this, what we've discovered is what scholars used to think was a complete manuscript is actually missing, a leaf here and a leaf there. And we can tell that in an hour or two.

What would normally take somebody many hours to determine if there's any leaves that are missing. So when we were in Oxford for example, there was a leaf that was a palimpsest in one of these manuscripts. Palimpsest is an old Greek word, being scraped again. And what's interesting is you have a lot of our parchment manuscripts where the Greek has been scraped off and then something was written on top of it. This is one of the ways we make discoveries, great discoveries frankly. That somebody is, maybe they're finishing a book and they don't want to go and kill

another cow or a lamb and make the parchment for the book, so they'll find an old manuscript, scrape off the letters, stick that in their book. You know, trim the sizes to make it fit that under text by definition is always older than what's on top and these scribes can often do a very very good job of erasing that under text they they scrape it off and then they do some other things to get rid of so I train people to look for palimpsests. And there was one that we discovered in Oxford where scholars for many years knew of one folio that was a palimpsest.

And the upper text was something else. But that choir was complete. completed had all eight leaves so it's almost impossible that only one folio would be a palimpsest because it's a bifolio sewn into the binding it has to be on both leaves and it just so happened that this was the outside leaf of the choir all eight leaves were there and the other half of that palimpsest was just staring me in the face. It wasn't quite as clear because it had been scraped off better. But now we have the other half of that manuscript. And this hasn't even been published yet. But it's fascinating to discover manuscripts this way. Wow, that's so interesting. I hope folks are appreciating just how tedious and laborious

this work is. So we can preserve as many manuscripts are out there as possible to study. Now, let me jump to the question that I know a lot of folks are asking, and I'm curious how you answer this as well, is you've handled hundreds, maybe a thousand manuscripts yourself. Your team has analyzed these in depth for years. Why do you think we have good reason to believe that we hold in our hands today in the essentials and in the vast majority of particulars what the apostles and their associates originally wrote down in the first century? One of the great joys of my life has been to examine these manuscripts from the very

oldest to the more recent ones all the way up to the 16th century. And what there is, is there's a stable continuum of the core statements of Scripture that do not go changing in any witnesses. I talk about, in one of my lectures, John 1.1 it says in the word in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God was fascinated about that is every single manuscript of John 1 1 no matter the date no matter the language says the same thing about Jesus what's interesting is there's a couple words that may be played with a little bit.

But when it says, and the word was God, they all say that. And our oldest manuscripts from perhaps as early as A.D. 200 say that. In Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, he said, well, Constantine, Emperor Constantine invented the deity of Christ. And he was basing a lot of his novel on what some other scholars had written, where they said there are no

manuscripts of the Greek New Testament before the 4th century. Well, that's just not even close to true. There's at least 48, and by my count, it's probably now up to 70. So here's a manuscript, P66, that's at least 100 years older than when Constantine reigned, that actually says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. You can multiply that regarding every single cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith. God has so superintended over Scripture so that not one essential belief is hanging on a textual variant that's only found in a few manuscripts

or this manuscript. But the core doctrines of the Christian faith are rock solid. Even a guy like Bart Ehrman, who's a very famous agnostic apologist, and he's a longtime friend of mine. He studied under Bruce Metzger at Princeton Seminary, one of the world's great texture critics, and he abandoned his faith at certain points. But what Barth recognized in his book, Misquoting Jesus, when the editors asked him a question. It came out in 2005. If your readers or listeners don't know about it,

they need to read Misquoting Jesus. It's an important book because Ehrman, it's a popular book that talks about how the manuscripts have changed over time. And when it came out in 2005, within a few months, he was on the John Stewart Daily Show. He was on Colbert's show.

And after he was on Stewart, I think it was the next day it hit number one on Amazon. This was his first New York Times bestseller. And it's right down his alley of the field that he knows and does very well. They wanted to bolster the sales. A few months later, they only sold about 300,000 in the first, or 100,000 in the first three months. So let's keep this thing going. It's a great party, you know. So the editors added an appendix in the paperback version. And what I want to encourage your readers to do is, I want to encourage your readers to get that paperback version, half-priced book, someplace like that, and look at page 252.

There in the appendix, the editors ask Ehrman, why do you believe against your professor, Bruce Metzger, that the Bible has changed so radically that even the doctrines have been changed in Scripture. And Ehrman said, well, now that you put it that way, that's not what I believe. There's no essential doctrine that's been altered by any of these textual variants. That's remarkable. Hundreds of thousands of college kids have read that book as a textbook in college. And I can't tell you how many I've heard about every week of somebody abandoning the faith because of what they think Irma was saying.

But when he is actually asked the question point blank, he cannot find any essential doctrine that's jeopardized. And we'll go further than that. Are there any beliefs that's jeopardized. And we'll go further than that. Are there any beliefs that are jeopardized? Well, I found one in Mark 9 29, where the disciples tried to cast out demons, and they asked Jesus what's going on, and they couldn't do it. So he said, this kind can only be cast out by prayer, although a number of manuscripts add in fasting. It would be the only place, as far as I know, in the entire New Testament, that a matter of orthopraxy,

that is right practice, not orthodoxy, right belief, is affected by the variant. Because this would be the only place where by implication, if somebody is doing exorcisms, they need to pray and fast. Now, in the two or three exorcisms I've been involved in, I hedge my bet. I'm not sure if it says just prayer or prayer and fasting, so I make sure to do both. But that's where it's critical to think about these issues. Is that it? Is that the only one? I suspect there's more, but they're so minor they haven't affected anything that I know of.

What happens in these manuscripts is it is true that in some verses where it may have affirmed the deity of Christ in some manuscripts, it doesn't mean by the lack of affirmation that it's a denial. And we have so much material on the deity of Christ in the New Testament, it's almost embarrassing. Ed Komaszewski and Rob Bowman have published a great book, Putting Jesus in His Place, that deals with the deity of Christ, and they're coming out published a great book, Putting Jesus in His Place, that deals with the deity of Christ. And they're coming out with a new one, The Incarnate Christ and His Critics, that's even twice as long. And it's an overwhelming statement on how the deity of Christ is seen in every page of the New Testament. I've used passages with Jehovah's Witnesses to show that even in their Bible, they have not been able to translate out the deity of Christ.

So even in translation, as much as they try, where it's very direct, then they'll change the text without any accuracy to it. But there's no cardinal doctrine. There's no essential belief that is jeopardized. The virgin birth, the bodily death, the bodily resurrection, the trinity, the fact that we are justified by faith, the deity of Christ, we can go on and on and on and on, are found in the manuscripts. And none of them hang in the balance because of this manuscript has it and this one doesn't.

We chose this manuscript. It doesn't one doesn't. We chose this manuscript. It doesn't work like that. That's just amazing. That is really amazing, given how many there are, different languages, different places, that similarity is powerful. Now, you mentioned that you have personally worked on a thousand manuscripts. Now, presumably, manuscripts will go up to about 1,500. Of course, after the printing press, people are still copying them by hand.

But are some of these manuscripts that you're discovering in libraries helping to further the case for the reliability of the New Testament? Or are they helping in other areas? Or both? Oh, they're doing both. One of the things that's interesting, there are literally hundreds of thousands of textual variants among our over 5,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts. Now, what that means, a textual variant means that the wording is different in at least one manuscript from the rest. And every time you find one of those, like let's say one manuscript has, there's this thing

called the movable new in Greek where the letter N goes on the end of a word if the next word starts with a vowel. It's like our indefinite article, a book and apple. Now what if I came across a manuscript that said a apple and that's the only one that does it. That constitutes one textual variant. What if a thousand manuscripts have A apple, and, you know, however many have an apple? It still counts as only one textual variant. There are hundreds of thousands of these. In fact, my estimate, based on some work that others have done on counting these variants, is that we have about one and a half million textual variants in our Greek New Testament manuscripts. Of those, well over 99% affect nothing. In fact,

that movable new is the most common textual variant we have among the manuscripts. So it might tell you that this guy's from Arkansas, you know, if he says A-Apple, who knows? But it doesn't really affect anything. And there's a large, a very large proportion of the variants are nonsense readings, or they may be something that is so idiosyncratic as to really be impossible. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 2.7, there's a famous textual problem where Paul says, we became little children among you, or we became gentle among you. One word in Greek is napioi, little children. The other is apioi, gentle among you. The word that comes before that is...

Oh my gosh, let me... That's okay. I'm still jet-lagged from... Let me just check my Greek text real quick. You're good. We want to get it right. Egon Nathan, I think, is what the word is. I need better glasses too. I can't see this. No, I appreciate that you want to get it right. That's why I hope folks can see this concern for getting details right on a YouTube video

extends to your desire to get things right when you're setting these manuscripts. We need somebody like you on it. So that's great. I'm sorry. No, you're good. It's very kind of you to say that. Well, you're probably going through your own book on Greek there, just for the record. No, I'm going through the Greek New Testament looking at it. So, in 1 Thessalonians

2, it says, egonathimen, before. That's the word we became. It ends in an N. Now, our New Testament manuscripts were, Paul's letters in particular, were dictated to a scribe who's copying it out. And this is one place where the scribe who's copying this, agonathemon napioi, or agonathemon apioi. Did you hear the difference? I heard the difference, but explain it to us. Okay, but it may not have sounded that

different I mean you have to discern this very carefully when the last word starts with it in and the next one could or could not you run those together again a human a Poy what did I say is it little children where's the gentle and I think the error in copying started at that very point where whoever wrote the letter for Paul by dictation heard one thing. And Paul, because he says

in some of his letters, I, Paul, write something to you. He validates in 2 Thessalonians 3.17 that I, Paul, this is how I end all my letters, which means he's reading through that draft and making sure that it's correct and so I think this place in Romans 5 1 and there's one other place I think where this may have happened where Paul takes the pin from his secretary says no this is what I said not that so he adds the new before a Poi to make it little children okay

now I would that was a long explanation for a very significant texture problem and I think a scribe would have wanted to have a Poi instead of an API because immediately before this it says like a nursing mother we became little children. What? That doesn't sound right. It sounds like he's confusing his metaphors. There's a hard stop at the end of like a nursing mother, though. We became little children among you starts a new sentence.

And so Paul uses family metaphor where he's a father, he's an orphan, he's a mother, and he's a child. All in 1 Thessalonians 2. He's mixing his metaphors, his family thing, just to show how much he loves these people. Okay, so that's a major textual problem. Scholars still debate it. But what's interesting is one very late manuscript has, we hippoi horses we became horses among you now my guess is that this scribe may have been a trojan fan you know he went to usc and he wants to have the horses there and all the others were UCLA guys that didn't want to have horses. But it's comical.

On one level it makes sense, but it's obviously a nonsense error. You put all those nonsense errors, and there's tons of them, the largest majority of our variants are either spelling differences or nonsense errors or you simply can't translate the difference that's well over 99% of all the texture variants in fact when you put this down to that and even some things that are synonyms that don't change the meanings there's some manuscripts that say Jesus others say Lord well what this does is it tells us that that's not going to affect the meaning.

Like in John 4.1, when Jesus knew that the Pharisees had heard that he was making more disciples than John, or the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard. Big textual problem. There's not a single manuscript that says, when Peter knew that the Pharisees had heard. The reference is always the same you can't all those together and it comes to over ninety nine point eight percent of all texture variants so the ones that scholars are

debating are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the whole of Of 1% of all the variants are those that can well affect the meaning and are viable. That is, that reading could go back to the original. It's not just found in the late 14th century manuscript, but in early enough ones or in a good stream of copying, something like that, where it's found in versions and fathers

and these Greek witnesses. So when I look at the text of the New Testament, I say, I keep seeing things over and over and fathers and these Greek witnesses. So when I look at the text of the New Testament, I say, I keep seeing things over and over and over again, where even though there are these very interesting variants, it doesn't really affect anything. It does affect how we preach and teach that portion of Scripture, though. So whether Paul said in Romans 5, 1, therefore, since we have been justified, we have peace with God, or therefore, since we've been justified,

let us have peace with God. It's a difference of one letter in Greek, an O, a short O or a long O, echomen or echomen. Either statement is something that Paul could truly say, but the question is, what did he say here? That's what textual criticism is about. It's the handmaiden to exegesis. We have to know what the text says before we can know what the text means. And when we know what the text means, then we can proclaim it, we can teach it,

we can study it, and we can obey it. Would it be fair to say, kind of in sum, the more these manuscripts, you and your team and others who are doing this, discover and make public, is kind of narrowing down the number of passages that people debate on and giving us more and more confidence

in the scriptures as a whole like i think about this might be a bad example but like what was called vestigial structures in evolution things that we didn't think how to function and as we've learned more and more about the body we go oh there's functions for those so those numbers have gotten smaller and smaller over time interesting yeah is that a similar way like that the more manuscripts we find even though we're further from the events themselves those numbers get smaller and smaller that scholars are debating i i think in a sense you could say yes uh i'd say that even with all the discoveries sometimes well this is a different way to put this

and our Greek New Testament today I'll show you picture I'll show here to you see if you can see this so you can see I'm sorry go get that I can't see now I hope it's there yeah we can see it. Okay. You've got text above the line and text below the line. What's below the line is the apparatus listing variants. And that Greek New Testament was called the Nestle-Alan 28th edition. It came out in 2012. And they continue to improve this. This is done in Münster, Germany, where they examine all these manuscripts in our images to determine the wording of the original.

I would contend that in every instance, or in almost every instance, we have the text of the New Testament either above that line or below that line. So it's not as if we have a multiple-choice option of there's A, above the line, B, first variant below the line, C, another variant below the line, or D, none of the above. That's not an option. We have the New Testament in our hands today in the standard Greek New Testament that's published.

That's pretty remarkable the question with these new discoveries is oh here's a new papyrus that we found that has this reading and now maybe it should be elevated to above the line let me i'll give you a frustration here in 1318 john says the number of the beast is 666. Well, Titian Dorff, whom I mentioned earlier, before he went to St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai as a very young man in his 20s, went to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

And he examined a Greek New Testament manuscript that originally had the whole Bible from the early fifth century, maybe AD 400 even. And it took him two years to decipher it because in the 150 or so leaves of this manuscript every one was a palimpsest. There was something else written on top. So what he painstakingly had to do most likely is as he's looking at each page, he's drawing out the frame of the letters that's beneath those upper letters and then that way he gets

rid of the upper letters in his mind and then he can fill out what could possibly be there. Painstaking work. Took him two years. At Revelation 13, 18, he made an astounding discovery. It says the number of the beast is 616. Now, that manuscript that he went through, it's called Ephraemi Rescriptus, or Codex C, happens to be one of the two most important Greek New Testament manuscripts we have

for the book of Revelation. And often it has the right reading when the other important one does not but at the time this was the only manuscript we knew of that had 616 then in 1998 17 papyri were published by the Egypt Exploration Society that publishes these Oxirichus papyri. And 17 New Testament papyri were published in the volume in 1998. One of them was a papyrus from spreading out over nine chapters in Revelation. It was essentially 26 postage stamp size pieces to the puzzle that you're... or spread out of nine chapters. You didn't have very big chunks but you knew where each one belonged that's a painstaking piece of work there that

would take hundreds of hours just to put these in the right sequence make sure that the same manuscripts and all this this one postage size stamp on revelation 1318 says 616. Now it just happens that that manuscript is the oldest manuscript we have of Revelation 13.18. And coupled with one of the most important manuscripts for Revelation, that's a pretty strong witness. There's another piece of evidence. Irenaeus, the late second century church father, had a chapter dealing with, is the number of the beast 616 or 666? And he came to the conclusion that it's 666, and he said, the older manuscripts have 666. The more recent ones don't have it. How did he know they were older? Well, probably because they were used more, but that doesn't necessarily make them older. Even Erasmus, when he was doing his Greek

New Testament, he thought that a manuscript that was only 500 years older than him at the time was older than other very old manuscripts that he'd heard about and discounted that were maybe a century older than his manuscript. So to determine the date of a manuscript is much more of a modern thing, we understand it in a number of ways. But there's a distinct possibility that 616 is actually the original wording at Revelation 13, 18. So what does that change? It means the text that's in the apparatus now gets put in the text. 666 goes into the apparatus. And the implication is that now seven tons of popular Christian literature have gone to the flames.

I was going to ask you about this one because it comes up a lot. So that's really interesting that you think that solid of a case can be made. I was not aware that Irenaeus, even in the second century, was debating this that close to it and the manuscripts. That is fascinating, really fascinating. I honestly cannot tell you which reading I think is original. Okay. Tuesday morning, i wake up the first thing i think aha number the b666 by friday no i think the number six one six is the first things to go through my mind i love it well i've got just a maybe one or two more questions for you you you made a statement earlier about the number of manuscripts before the fourth century and if i heard you

correctly you said most would say there's in the forties or fifties, but you believe that number is up to around 70. Talk about that. Over 60. Over, over 60. Okay. Would you, would you talk about that? Cause one of the, one of the criticisms I get, which I think are not in criticism, very fair questions is people talk about when there's the number of manuscripts, most are the fourth fifth eighth tenth twelfth centuries but when it gets closer we have less which reduces our confidence in the original because there's so fewer closer to when it was actually written down so how would you respond to that and why do you say in the 60s plus?

I would say that, first of all, we have paleographical dating of these manuscripts, which is a science in and of itself. How do you determine the date of a manuscript when no date is written on it? We don't have our first eight centuries of manuscripts. Not a single one of them puts a date in there. Later manuscripts do at times where the scribe has a call-off on, a statement at the end about his work, and it says this was done on Friday, February 12th in the year, and then the year will be, I think it's 5500 approximately B.C. plus whatever he takes in because they counted dates from the creation of Adam. so you got to work through all that then put it into our numbers but

the early manuscripts don't have those what we do have though are other manuscripts from other literature where you can have firm dates and papyri in particular you've got these letters that are written to prefects and governors and even the emperor sometimes, and it tells you the date at times that this was done in the second year of Augustus Caesar, something like that. So we can pinpoint. And what scholars have done is they've looked at the handwriting of those dated manuscripts and compare them to the ones that are not dated. And it's a whole science that has been able to say this particular manuscript can be dated within a century.

And sometimes we can even get it down to within about a 50 year period. It depends on the, there's a number of factors that go into this, but they will look at this and get a sense. Okay, look at these letter formations. Look at this factor at this and get a sense, okay, look at these letter formations, look at this factor, this factor. It's a whole size. How large is the manuscript?

Does it have one or two columns? How many lines on each page? Are the letters written on the notional line or hanging from it? They didn't use lined paper, but they kind of scored the material, even parchments and papyrus where they took a blunt instrument that that used as kind of an indentation say okay i'm going to

follow this and write the letters on that line or have the letters hanging from that line that tells us the date when the manuscript was done within a rough area so when when I say 48, I mean there are 48 manuscripts that scholars know are no later than the third century, second or third century for these manuscripts. That's still a very sizable number. And one of the earliest is P46, probably mid-third century, so in the 250s or so. This was discovered as long ago as 1930, and we photographed it. We published a facsimile of P46 and P45, P47. They're called the Chester Beatty papyri because he was the one who commissioned the discovery in Egypt. P46 has 84 leaves out of an original,

I'm sorry, 86 leaves out of an original 104. And almost every leaf is 80 to 90% complete. That's astounding. It was just of Paul's letters. And you can make some massive comparisons with that with later manuscripts. So yeah, we have about 48 that are dated up to the third century. Then we have maybe another dozen or more that are on the cusp where scholars say we're not sure if it's third century or fourth. But once it's claimed as fourth century, then we call that fourth century.

So that's what I'm doing. I'm looking at what the standard dating is that is published by this institute in Munster. And then I'm saying, what are the dates that they are sure are third century or before? What are the dates that could be on the cusp between third and fourth? That makes sense.

I have so many more questions for you, but last one, tell us about just kind of what you're doing at the, and it doesn't roll off the tongue. Every time I have to pause and think about it, the CSNTM, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. Just tell us a little bit what you're doing, how people can follow what you're doing, maybe even support these efforts. Oh, yes, please. doing how people can follow what you're doing maybe even support these efforts oh yes please csntm and as you correctly said is the center for the study of new testament manuscripts it's it's

it's a mouthful but you can remember it this way you know who c.s lewis is you got the first two letters down okay and you've probably watched the wizard of Oz, right? Okay. Auntie M. All right, there you go. Okay, there you go. That's how I've always illustrated it for people to remember. That's funny. I pulled that to my first year Greek class last year, and I drew blanks. How many of you have seen The Wizard of Oz?

Most of them had not. I can't believe that. That's an annual event in our home. So I guess I'll have to come up with something different nowadays to remember it. What CSNTM does is we travel all over the world to find where these manuscripts are, and then we work with these, we collaborate with these libraries. Over 50 of them now we've worked in, and I've been in 35 countries doing this work. We collaborate with them to get these manuscripts digitized and then post it online for scholars to see. Anybody can see our images. They're at csntm.org, and you can go over to resources and click on

manuscripts, and you get nice full pictures. We started with a four megapixel camera in 2002, which was state-of-the-art amazing Use is a one hundred and fifty megapixel that I've yet to come across an institute that has a better one Even at the Bodleian Library at Oxford their best camera is a hundred megapixels now once you get up to about a hundred hundred and twenty megapixels or so it's a real minor difference but the more megapixels you have the larger you can

blow this thing up and see what's what's going on and it really does help to reveal things we also have a multi-spectral imaging camera which is designed to see these scraped off texts that have become invisible to the naked eye because all you can see is the upper text. And this is a game changer because we're at the cusp of a new renaissance where we're discovering things that have been in plain sight for centuries and yet we couldn't see them. Do you have eyes to see and yet you do not see? Well, that's the case when it comes to these palimpsests.

The MSI equipment was, the whole idea started by NASA to see camouflaged military installations from space, satellites. And one of the people who did this, Greg Bierman, who was a professor at Caltech, the jet propulsion lab, he was an orthodox Jew and he decided, well, if we can do this from space, we can actually do it on manuscripts. And so he looked at a manuscript, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that had been burned pretty badly. It's called the Apocryphon of Genesis, I think. And he's looking at 200 words

in Hebrew that he could read. The rest of it was burnt, blackened. Couldn't read any of it. He applied MSI to this, and now he discovered 300 more words, the rest of the manuscript, with that kind of equipment. It's a game changer. And so one of our tasks is to find out

where these palimpsests are. So when we write up the metadata, we are doing something for the sake of the library, giving them... It's a fingerprint on that manuscript. And I should mention this too. That's really critical because if I say here's a manuscript that has these dimensions, we always mention measuring in millimeters, not inches. And it has this content. Say you have a manuscript with Matthew Mark in it.

And we have the dimensions, what the material is. It's made out of paper. This many columns, this many lines per page, and what our date estimate is. And then we find another manuscript that has just Luke and John in it that matches that fingerprint. We have been able to reunite digitally manuscripts that have been in separate libraries for centuries. And we've done that with several. Oh, that's cool. It's just amazing. So I could give stories, but we'll just leave it at that.

Our initial task is to search out what the manuscripts are, examine them, get permission from the libraries to digitize. They always get a copy. And they own the copyrights. We don't keep that ourselves. That's for them. We just want to take those manuscripts and put the images online and that's our first step ultimately what csntm is about is helping other scholars determine the exact wording of the

original in the few places where we don't know what to do now Now, let me conclude with this. These variants are all very, very interesting to me. A lot of them are interesting, not because they tell us what the original wording is, but they tell us how scribes changed the text in different areas, and how attentive they were. You get into the scribe's mind when you transcribe the text of an individual manuscript you almost know what the guy had for breakfast i mean it's really really amazing to see how this works but uh we do that i'm sorry i lost lost my my uh track of mind where i was going what was it i was talking about this is old age hitting me it's you know brain fart no no it's okay you were given a final kind of word and encouragement

and then you went into some of the different variants across and i thought you were going to maybe make the point that they're super interesting but how much they affect your faith right okay so so these variants are very, but do they affect my faith? No. But I want to know about how the New Testament has been transmitted down through the centuries. And I'll leave with this one example. There was a manuscript at the Bodleian Library in Oxford that one of our guys was examining. It has the genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3, as any Luke manuscript would. Well, that genealogy is usually put into two or three columns going down like this. What he found was that the scribe who copied it thought his exemplar was going across like this. And so he screwed up all of the

order of, I mean, God is in the middle of the genealogy in some of these manuscripts. Well what this scholar who was on our team did, Andy Patton, he's finishing his doctorate at the University of Birmingham, he said there's another half dozen or so manuscripts that do this with the genealogy and they also have this particular note. He said they're all family. So we're able to put that group of manuscripts together and say we know that they come from a common ancestor, some intermediate between the original text and later centuries. And that's the fun of tracing the family tree of all these manuscripts, ultimately coming up with the genealogy so we can get back down

to the original wording. That's one of the great tasks. So not just are we digitizing these manuscripts, but we're publishing on the field and we're writing articles, we're speaking at conferences, and we're writing books that speak about the reliability of the text. Now, you asked about supporting us. We have a massive amount of places that we can go to right now where we already have contracts, but we just don't have the money this has been the lowest giving year in recent memory and the donations can be made grants can be made from foundations people can donate stock they can give to us directly just go to csntm you can find how to donate but we need a lot more money in order to accomplish

this. We're right there where we can digitally preserve every handwritten copy of the Word of God, and all that we're lacking is the money. This is important. These manuscripts are not going to last forever. They all deteriorate because they're all made of biological material. And so it's critical that we digitize them so at least they're digitally preserved for posterity. We need help. And we're tax deductible. That's awesome. Well, Dan, at this point, I usually invite folks to subscribe, study with us at Biola. But what I want to do is primarily tell folks to go to CSNTM, follow what you're doing,

and seriously consider supporting what you're doing. We've benefited a ton at Biola. A lot of the books that I've written with my father, we cite you and lean on your research. So the amount of effort you've put in, I can't thank you enough. I know it's come at a physical cost like you described, but I'm just grateful for your sacrifice in know it's come at a physical cost like you described, but I'm just grateful for your sacrifice in doing that. So I want to end with that note, encouraging folks to go to CSNTM to check it out. And if you've been moved by this and want the scriptures to be recorded for posterity and none to go away, this is a great investment of your resources. Dan, appreciate your work. Really

appreciate your friendship. Thanks for carving out the time to come on right after you literally just got back from Oxford. Thanks, Sean. It's been a pleasure to be on your show. First time for me. Hope it's not the last. We'll do it again. Okay. Thanks.