The Sean McDowell Show - We Have Early New Testament Manscripts...Here's What They Reveal

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Can we actually get back to what the apostles wrote? That question sits underneath every other question about the New Testament. Before you ask whether the story is true, you have to ask whether you have the story at all. Dr. Michael Kruger came to Biola to walk me through it. His own interest started in a crisis, sitting at nineteen in an intro to New Testament class at UNC Chapel Hill taught by a young Bart Ehrman. CHECK OUT: The Sean McDowell Collection (manuscriptshop.com/seanmcdowell) CHECK OUT: Logos Bible 60 Day Free Trial (https://logos.com/mcdowell) CHECK OUT: Consider Supporting the Ministry! (https://seanmcdowell.org/give) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [smdcertdisc] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: X: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org  Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

When someone you love is hurting, what do you do? We're often quick to say, if there's anything I can do, just let me know. But what have we stopped waiting to be asked and simply showed up? On the If There is Anything I Can Do podcast, Pam McConnell shares real stories, biblical wisdom, and practical ways to walk alongside people through grief, loss, and life's hardest moments. Learn how to show up and make a difference. Subscribe now at k-lovepodcast.com, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Looking back 20-some years later from the new atheist, I have more confidence that God exists, that the Bible's true, that we can trust that it's been copied.

One of the things that some listeners may not know is that, you know, the second century was known as the golden age of apologetics, right? And when you look back in the second century, what made Christians better thinkers and better articulators of their faith? The answer was the attacks on it. So in one weird sort of paradoxical way, we can thank our critics because they force us to be more precise. They force us to be more careful about what we say. What does textual criticism allow Christians to say confidently about the New Testament? Think deeply about the Christian claim for a moment. The Christian claim is that when apostles wrote, they wrote with a certain level of authority.

They're with a certain level of ability to speak for Jesus. So we really care, not just what anyone wrote, we care what the apostles wrote. And the question is, do we have what the apostles wrote? We have the essential words of what Paul wrote in Romans. We have what John wrote in John's Gospel. We have what Luke wrote. But we've got to start at the basis. And the basis for the whole thing is that do we have the words or not?

And I think we do. What do the early manuscripts in the New Testament from the second century and beyond revealed to us about its transmission? How much confidence can we really have in our New Testament text? Dr. Michael Kruger, I can't think of somebody more equipped and interested to talk about this than you. You're legit, one of the experts on early Christianity and manuscripts. Thanks for coming to Biola and be willing to sit down with me and talk about this. Absolutely. Love the conversation, love the topic, and looking forward to it.

Before we jump in some details, I'd love to know, like of all the things you could study, what interested you personally in the textual transmission and tradition of the New Testament? Yeah, I get asked this a lot. It's a very niche field. It's very sort of narrow. When people think about what a New Testament scholar does, they normally think about New Testament theology or biblical theology or, you know, different types of exegetical things. But there are people like, well, how'd you get into text and canon? Actually, I got in the text in canon as an undergraduate. I was at UNC Chapel Hill, which was my alma mater, and I found myself in a religion class, and it was an introduction to the New Testament, and the professor just wanted to talk about text and canon all the time.

And some of the listeners may know that professor's name was Bart Ehrman. So I actually have Bart Ehrman to thank for my interest in textual and canonical issues. That is super interesting. Now, was this just briefly, was this like a crisis moment, a challenge moment? Like, how was that response to somebody who clearly had different views than you pulled out? It was a bit of a crisis moment for me, actually. And I tell the story in some of my books and talk about how, you know, I found myself in a religion class as a committed believer.

I was, you know, 18, 19 years old. I didn't know what I was in for. And I sat down in this class. And Herman at the time was pretty much a rookie professor. He had just arrived. Young guy hadn't really made his name yet that everyone knows now. And I just started getting bombarded with ideas about the New Testament, that it's filled with fabrications,

that it's internally full of contradictions, that the text has been corrupted over time, that the canon was a mess, and it didn't get solved until the 4th century. And there I was a freshman at 19 thinking, what in the world is going on? So I started to probe into how to answer those questions. And then when I probed in how to answer those questions, I was like, you know, I really love this field. And that's what started me on it. Oh, I love it.

That's fascinating. Have you had discussions with him afterwards or stayed in touch or maybe just moved separate ways? We pretty much move separate ways. We interact occasionally in various ways, mostly in print. I've reviewed a lot of his book. and interact with them certainly in print, but not so much on a personal level. Fair enough. I had him one time on this show to talk about his more recent book about Love Thy Stranger

and kind of the moral argument from Jesus. One of my favorite conversations in a while, but maybe let's take a step back. I know many of my listeners and viewers know what textual criticism is, but remind us of what it is. That's two fancy words. And what is the goal of it? Is the goal to reconstruct the original, or is it maybe a little more complex than that? Yeah, so textual criticism is one of those words that when most Christians here, they think, that sounds scary. You know, we don't want to do anything as Christians that are critical, so why would we want to do textual criticism?

But actually, it's a word that spans lots of disciplines outside New Testament studies and biblical studies. Because we have to understand that in the ancient world, whenever you had a document, an historical account, any sort of literary production, you could not produce that without copying it. And when you would copy it, you'd copy it by hand. And whenever scribes copied things by hand, they would make mistakes. They would make scribal errors. This was normal, ordinary slips of the pen that was just part of copying books in the ancient world. So what that means is that since we didn't have a printing press back then, by the time we got these books to us, what we realize is that there's probably different scribble variations in them. So what is the goal of textual criticism to sort of work through those scribble variations back to the original? Now, you mentioned, is that all that it's about? Well, historically, that's what it's been about.

We want to know what the text originally said. But in recent years, there's been all kinds of conversations about, well, textual criticism tells us more about the text and just simply what it's originally says. You can learn things from the changes. So, and Erman's actually one of the people who advocates this, which is that, you know, by looking at the type of changes Christians made, or Christian scribes made, then we can understand a little bit of the dynamics that were happening in the early church. So there's those layers. But generally speaking, the goal is to get back to the original. Now, in some ways in principle, we would agree with Bart Ehrman on that, that if somebody introduces a certain change, it might be because of certain theological motivations.

Even if we differ over some of the motivations he might ascribe to them, it seems like he's right in principle that those are very telling. But what the question you raised, it's similar. My father, you know, is skeptic outside the faith, trying to disprove Christianity. Yeah. Looking at the manuscripts, in part was what drew him to the faith. Now, he's not a PhD textual scholar in that way. But he would say, do we have what was written down and was what was written down true? So textual transmission is not what was written.

written down true primarily. That's exactly right. It's the first question. Has it been copied carefully over time? So when people talk about the reliability of the New Testament, usually it's centered around whether it's accurate, right? Whether it's historically credible, whether these things really happen, as the New Testament said. But there's a deeper challenge to it that scholars have made with textual criticism. So the issue isn't so much whether the text is true. The issue is, do we actually have the text? In other words, is it not so much now whether the story actually happened. Now the question is, do we actually have the story at all? So you can see that the textual critical question goes deeper, and it's actually more foundational than normal questions. So what

that means is you can't really start talking about the historical credibility of something until you first establish you actually have the words of the historical account. So it's a deeper, more a foundational challenge. I think we're in really good shape there, but it's a different kind of challenge in historicity. We're going to circle back to that because I want to hear your case of why you think we're in good shape there. Absolutely. But I think sometimes people misunderstand that, you know, my doubt would make the case, there's 24,000 manuscripts, you know, in Greek, maybe 5,500, 5,600, and because there's more, people assume, therefore, it's true, but if we found a hidden cache of like 50,000 Odyssey manuscripts, it wouldn't mean that it's true.

That's right. It might just give us more confidence that it's been copied carefully in principle. Okay, that makes sense. So why do you think Christians in general and maybe evangelicals have come? kind of been afraid of textual criticism? And is it more fear or is it more just like we don't even know about the field? It's both those things. So historically, very few evangelicals were actually into textual criticism. There weren't that many. It was sort of a world outside of most evangelical scholarship. So it was sort of a foreign world. Now, that's changed. I wrote an article recently for the

gospel coalition and the title of it was, is textual criticism cool? And the point of that article was to sort of established that, wow, amazing how things have changed over the years. It used to be that evangelicals weren't really into this at all, and now it looks like it's a really popular thing, and people are talking about it. So at one level, part of the fear of a textual criticism is that no one was doing it, okay? The other fear, though, is a fear I talk about quite a bit, which is there is a thing among many evangelicals in certain spaces that sort of have an overly pristine view of the Bible's history, so that it's almost like it was lowered from heaven on golden tablets, you know,

that... In the King James. Yeah, exactly, in the King James. And, you know, like the angel Maronae in the Book of Mormon. You know, it's lower from heaven on golden tablets. There's no historical process. There's no story. There's no background.

And some people have this idea that if I believe in inspiration, that I have to believe the Bible was delivered that way. And what textual criticism reminds us of, and this is a good thing, is that God decided to deliver the Bible through normal historical channels. I think those normal historical channels have preserved it excellently. But nonetheless, God has worked that way. He didn't deliver on golden tablets. And I think that's, for some people that just doesn't sit well.

And I think that's important for us to talk about because we want to eliminate views of of inspiration of the church that are a little shallow because the more shallow those views of inspiration are, the more easily picked apart they are. So when people feel like their faith is vulnerable, it's maybe because they had a view of it that isn't actually historically accurate. I'm going out of Liam here. I'm trying to think, why would Christians not be engaged in textual criticism? And then it becomes cool.

If I had to guess, and this is purely a guess, maybe there'd be a certain strain of fundamentalism that academia is is secular and there's a fear that's there and I could be totally wrong about that what would be and maybe I guess the other piece would be maybe we weren't interested until like people started really challenging the Bible and then that's it that's it so there's a number of layers to it but I think you can you can actually realize that in the early iterations of textual criticism there wasn't a lot of challenge to the New Testament there because most people who were doing textual criticism actually recognized that the evidence from the New Testament was quite good. And so it was sort of a neutral field of sorts.

I mean, some people had complaints about reliability, but generally speaking, there wasn't a lot until 2005. 2005, Bart Ehrman published his book, Misquoting Jesus. And this took the world of textual criticism to popular audiences and challenged their integrity of the Bible, the New Testament on that basis. And then what happened is Evan Juckles felt the need to respond. And that's exactly what happened. Now, I'm not suggesting that 2005 is the first time evangelicals got into textual criticism. Of course. That's not my point. But you can actually see a shift there where people start doing real public work on textual criticism from an evangelical perspective designed to combat the thing that's come up, namely Irma's book. That's really interesting. When you said evangelicals weren't doing it, I thought you were going to go back to like the 1800s and the 19th century and some of those challenges that came with the Enlightenment.

But really, it was Erman that seemed to kick it off. In our modern day, yes. I mean, as I said, there's a long history of T.C. stuff. But generally, when you look at the world of textual criticism in those early generations, it wasn't really saying radical things. Most of the challenge of the New Testament's integrity and post-enlightment thought has to deal more with historicity and philosophical objections to the divine and the supernatural. So what you see coming out of the Enlightenment is really an anti-supernatural move, which is the Bible can't be trusted because of anti-supernatural move. So the T. The T.C. rule was largely, you know, dormant, generally speaking, until the modern day when it started to be used to actually challenge the integrity of the New Testament in more overt ways. It's fascinating he wrote this. Around the time the new atheists are emerging, which in many ways woke up other areas of Christians in apologetics, whether it's science and other areas of history to respond. So in some ways, we can thank our critics for raising challenges, which to me, looking back 20-some years later from the new atheist, I have more confidence

that God exists, that the Bible's true, that we can trust that it's been copied. Do you feel the same way? I do. And in fact, I've written about this historically. So one of the things that some listeners may not know is that, you know, the second century was known as the Golden Age of Apologetics, right? And when you look back in the second century, what made Christians better thinkers and better articulators of their faith? The answer was the attacks on it. And so in one weird sort of paradoxical way we can thank our critics because they force us to be more precise. They force us to be more careful about what we say and to be more persuasive about what we say. And I think that's true now too. So lots of things that we deal with in the role of apologetics actually is a response.

That's right. It's a response to something that someone has said or challenged and then we bring up an answer to that challenge, which is totally legitimate. But some of these things would not be discussed if it weren't so some of the significant challenges have been raised. So you co-edited a 2012 book called the early text of the New Testament. Very academic, scarly. You describe how there's an influx of newer material and newer methods since the 1980s. And that was 2012. So that's like about 15 years ago. Oh, yeah. I'm curious what you meant like, so how things change radically from the 80s, 40-some years ago? And then maybe even like the past five years with AI is this transforming textual transmission. So textual criticism was fairly stable for generations.

mainly in the 20th century, it was built around what are called text types, right? So you have an Alexandrian text, you have a Byzantine text, you have a Western text, and for our time, that's what's called a cesarean text. This was sort of the lore of textual criticism during this time. And everyone sort of bought into it, generally speaking. But then as time ticked on, more and more in-depth studies started happening, and people realized, wait, maybe this text type thing doesn't work. And over time, new methods were developed.

The latest is what's called the CBGM, the coherence-based genealologist. method, which is for those people who are deep into textual reconstructions, this is their thing. By the way, this is not my thing. I'm more on the codicological side. I'm more on the paparological side. So I look at manuscripts more as physical artifacts. But for those who are into the reconstruction of the text themselves, this new method is sort of the new news. Is everyone agree that it's better? Well, no, there's dissenters. But generally speaking, relies on a new method of genealogically tracing manuscripts and it's driven by a lot of computer help. I don't know how much AI is factoring into this because the AI thing is so new. Some of my friends who are more on the forefront of sort of

the textual reconstruction side could probably speak to the AI side. But I think we're all worried about what AI I will do. And is it going to help? Maybe it will help reconstruct the text in more reliable ways. We'll have to see. I might have to ask you later for who that person is because now I'm really cute. Hey listeners. It's Kelly from Life Audio. We know life gets busy. and sometimes it's easy for your faith to get pushed to the side. That's why we created the Good Word, a free weekly newsletter designed to give you a moment to slow down,

be encouraged, and reconnect with what matters most, God's Word. Inside, you'll find devotionals, guided prayers, podcast recommendations, and other faith-filled content we think you'll love. No ads, no clutter. Just good content to help you stay rooted in God's Word throughout your week. up for the good word today at life audio.com forward slash the good word. That's life audio.com forward slash the good word. Curious, because I think of studies like Thomas Schmidt on Josephus. Yes. And the famous

testimony in Flavian, where he is potentially challenging and overturning the consensus of scholarship. Yeah. And part of it, amongst other things, is arguing that the language within that passage, when you use AI, is very much in line with the way that, Josephus would speak otherwise. Okay. But it's really with AI that he made that argument. So it makes me wonder with the manuscripts how you could apply that. Let us know in comments if you're like, that would be an interesting angle to go. I'm sure people have gone down that path and I may not be tracking it because AI is such a new thing.

But I'm sure the future of textual criticism will include some form of AI. So we're going to jump into a few manuscripts. We're going to talk about the codex and some of the evidence that convinces you. Yes. But how does like the internet conversations change? Because I find that there's, there's kind of a scholarly world that I live in. We'll go to evangelical theological society and debates and discussions will take place. And then online, there's like completely different conversations sometimes that are happening. How does that online dialogue, whether it's on YouTube or on Instagram, is that raising the bar? Is it lowering the bar? Or how does that affect kind of what you do, if at all? Yeah, so one of the things about any conversation that's about historical matters is there's people who know the field, who are experts in the field, and then there's people who comment on the field who may not be experts in the field. And there's always going to be a gap between popular level discussions and what the scholars are talking about. And some disciplines are more susceptible to mistakes in that gap than others. And I will say that when it comes to canon and textual criticism, that gap is pretty big. What I mean is it's a field that's easy to make mistakes in. It's a field that's complex and intricate. It's a field that people speak too assuredly about things they don't

understand. And so one of the problems with the internet conversation and the YouTube conversation is that a lot of people are jumping into the fray and they just don't know the field. And that can that can really hamper discussions because they end up saying things that lead people down certain paths that simply aren't true. And by the way, this is on both sides. There's people who are hypercritics of the New Testament who are saying things that aren't true. true. And there's people who are hyper defenders of the New Testament that are saying things that aren't accurate in this area. So I find that a lot of my academic time is spent sort of correcting misconceptions. And I do this more on the canon side, of course, because canon is my essential thing.

And like I said, on the world of manuscripts, I'm more on the codicological side. But I spent a lot of time helping people see that they don't really maybe have an accurate perception of the way these things were. Fair enough. That's helpful. All right. So, maybe it's sum up for us before we jump in the evidence. If you were going to say, as a scholar, but in popular language, what does textual criticism allow Christians to say confidently about the New Testament? Well, at a minimum, we said a little while ago that central to the Christian claim about inspiration is not only that we claim that these stories are true and that they reflect reality, but that we actually have the stories. We actually have the words of the original writer.

So imagine, think deeply about the Christian claim for a moment. The Christian claim is that when apostles wrote, they wrote with a certain level of authority, they're with a certain level of ability to speak for Jesus. So we really care, not just what anyone wrote, we care what the apostles wrote. And the question is, do we have what the apostles wrote? And we have books that are attributed to apostles, but do we actually have their words? And so what I want to say to anyone listening is that if textual criticism done by New Testament scholars proves to be reliable, and I think it does, then that means we actually have the stories. We actually have reasonably what was written down by these authors. And if we do, then we can ask questions about whether those things are in fact true,

which is a secondary question, but we can't ask that question until we actually have the stories. But I think we can say we have those words. We have the essential words of what Paul wrote in Romans. We have what John wrote in John's Gospel. We have what Luke wrote. now we can ask the question whether what Luke said was true or whether John said is true. Those are separate questions. But we've got to start at the basis. And the basis for the whole thing is that do we have the words or not? And I think we do.

Good stuff. Well said. Okay. So let's get into some of the evidence that would maybe support this. But we'll start with the codex. Yeah. So what's a codex? And why did early Christians adopt that as in comparison to say scrolls?

Yeah. So one of the things I'm fascinated by when it comes to manuscripts is asking the question about whether early Christians that were copying books, did they know what they were doing, right? Were they amateurs? Were they rookies? Was there a sophisticated scribal culture? Or was just just random haphazard, make it up as you go, okay? What you'll find in certain scholarly circles is they try to portray early Christian scribes as just that. They're rookies, they're amateurs, they don't know what they're doing. They have no understanding of the way ancient books worked. And there's even some claims that say certain Christian scribes maybe couldn't even read.

They were just, they were illiterate, but they were just copying the letters on the page. Okay, so these things get said. And I think there's reasons to doubt whether that's very accurate about early Christianity. So what are some things that tell us about early Christian scribble culture? Well, one of those is the codex. People don't realize that when Christianity burst on the scene in the first century and then really started expanding in the second century, there was a certain book technology that was already in place. It was already in place in the Greco-Roman world for literature they wrote and was already in place for the Jewish world.

literature they had in their Bible and in their books, and that was the scroll. Everybody used the role, right? And, you know, you roll it up on each end, and you've seen, people seen this in, in different venues, and the writing is on one side of the page. But then along comes Christianity, and they have books, too. But stunningly, they don't use the format that their Jewish heritage had, and they don't use the format of their surrounding Greco-Roman world. They have a brand-new format called the Codex. Now, the Codex is just a leaf book that opens at a spine, and then you have writing on both sides of the page. And as the listener will recognize, they think,

well, that sounds like modern books. I'm like, yes, you're still reading codices today. The Codex book format won the day. Now, Christians didn't invent the codex. But what's interesting is they adopted it for their writings widely and universally, and inexplicably at some level in contradistinction from their surrounding culture. So why would they do that? Well, we can come back to why they did it.

I want to simply point out here that the uniformity of that is really telling. That tells you you have a scribal culture that, as unified, coherent, and networked. Like, who sent out the memo that says every time you write a Christian book, you should put it on a codex? In fact, it became so associated with Christianity that people could look at a book visually and know it was Christian, just by virtue of the fact that was on the codex. That's a remarkable fact. Oh, that's especially important because we're told there's such disunity and disconnection,

and yet who would have the power to maintain, like, the common message of using the codex. And that's not even saying it's a top-down power move. Correct. But you're saying this suggests that not only if they're concerned about writing on the codex, they're probably concerned about preserving the message as well. Correct. What it tells you is that Christians had a defined and rather sophisticated book technology. They understood the way books worked in the ancient world. And there's a number of scholars, not evangelical scholars that have noticed this about early Christian scribble culture, is that they seem to know how books work. We can get back to later to the scribble hand itself and what that looks like in manuscripts and how that

also shows a level of sophistication. But the use of the codex suggests a degree of uniformity and organization and coherence among early Christian scribes, which, as you indicated, would also suggest that when they copy the text itself, they're not just a bunch of amateurs making things up, that they understood the way books work. That should be reassuring for us as we think about early Christian technical culture. Was it more expensive? Is it more difficult to use a codex than a is it the same? Like, were they sacrificing to put it onto the code? Okay, so now we're into the question of why. So this is fascinating. So when scholars ask, there's no doubt Christians did this. Everyone agrees on that. The question that they don't agree on is why? What could explain this

really anomaly, really significant historical anomaly when early Christianity? And as you can imagine, theories all over the map. People have a bunch of different views on this about why Christians did this. And I think multiple different theories have merit, but many of the theories originally suggested that Christians did it out of convenience, right? Codex, codices are more easily navigable than roles or cheaper to make than roles. Those have all been challenged, and they've been challenged in lots of ways. But think about it for a moment. Why were Christians the only ones interested in something that was more easily navigable? Why were Christians the only ones that cared about saving money when they wrote books?

This doesn't explain. You have to have something that's distinctively Christian. In order to explain the adoption of the codex, you have to ask the question this way, what did Christians want to do that really no one else really wanted to do? Or what did they have that was a distinctive need that perhaps explains why Christians adopted it earlier? By the way, it should be noted that eventually everybody adopted the Codex. Christians were just ahead of the game. And the most common answer given has to do a canon, is that Christians with a collection of books, in particular four gospels that they saw as a unit, perhaps wanted to combine them into one volume and a scroll can never do that. The scroll could never hold all four Gospels in one volume, but a Codex could.

Okay, so I was going to answer something. I realized I'm talking to the Canon guy. When you were saying there's got to be something that distinctly explains it, I would have said the ease of spreading the message to the world because the evangelism is built in Great Commission, Matthew 28. But you're saying it's even further than that, that we need at least the four Gospels together to spread that message. Right.

So you're suggesting one possibility of the Codex is that when you do it, evangelism, perhaps you can easily flip to different pages or something. Maybe that's what you're hinting out there. And that idea has been floated. Or maybe it's easier to copy and spread because it's more efficient or am I re-needed? No, no. There's not any indication that it's easier to copy. In fact, codices are harder to construct than roles. Okay. So they're more complicated. So it's not an issue of convenience of construction. Actually, scrolls are much easier to construct. So what you need is an explanation that is that is distinctively Christian. And as I suggested, the idea of combining multiple books in the one volume would have been at the center of this. And scholars have

suggested that it could have been the four gospels that Christians really wanted to combine, or could have been Paul's letter collection. They wanted to combine. And here's where you highlight something interesting about the early Christian book. Wow. The early Christian book, I know we know this intuitively, but it's just worth saying, it's not like other books. When you read a book, you open up the front cover and you read it straight through. But the, but the, but, but, but, but, but, but the, but, but, but, but the, but, but, but, but, but the, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but the, but, but the Christian book is really more of an anthology. It's a collection of little books, smaller writings.

And once you realize that, you realize you need maybe a book technology that can help you get to those individual pieces. And that would have also been an advantage of the codex. It would allow you to find individual books easier. So this doesn't answer which books were in the canon. Of course not. But the idea of the canon and the importance of having multiple books together built in early and is the best explanation of the codex use. that explode on scene amongst Christians as far as you see it? I think so.

And what's particularly in a shame is to observe when that happened. Yeah, tell me. So almost everyone agrees that Christians had adopted the Codex by the turn of the century. So that means by the second century. Yeah. So by the time the first century was over and the second century started, it's clear that this was now the book format for Christianity. If it were chosen for canonical reasons,

that means that there was a canonical consciousness by the end of the first century that would have motivated people to pick the codex, which puts the idea of canon significantly earlier in the mix. Very interesting. We could pick up on that one later, but tell me about something else you studied on. Yeah. Nominas sacra? Yeah.

I might have mispronance that. Okay. What is it? And how do they appear in the scripture? Why is it? Yeah. This is also another little fascinating thing about early Christian book technology.

So the average person who reads the Bible doesn't understand why we have a codex who have just answered that. But the other thing they don't know, because there's no way to know this, just reading English Bibles, is that in the ancient Christian scribal culture, there's a certain abbreviations they used. And these are called in Latin the nomin of sacra, literally means sacred names, okay?

What we realize is that as far back as we can see, there was four names in particular that Christian scribes abbreviated. And they were the Greek words for God, Lord, Jesus, Christ. Okay, those were the four names that were abbreviated. And they are abbreviated in a very unique way, and we won't need to get into this fully, but they would basically take effectively the first Greek letter,

the last Greek letter, and eliminate the other letters in the middle, and then put those two letters together and put a line over the top. Right? So for Curios, for example, it would just be the Kappa and the sigma with a line over the top. Which is the Lord.

Yeah, which is Lord. Or for Theos, it would be Theta and a sigma with a line over the top. And then if it's in the genitive, it would be Theta Upsilon, right, with a line over the top. So regardless of the word, those were the four words that started out at.

And what's interesting about the Nomen of Sacra is that these are very distinctively Christian abbreviations for the divine name. And they apply to both God and Jesus. So built into the nomenosacra is a recognition that there's a view of early Christology here, that they put Jesus and the Lord, Jesus and God, as the same level of divine abbreviation. The other thing about the nomadic that's fascinating is how uniform it was. Just like the codex, it's everywhere. We can hardly find a Christian manuscript without it, as far back as we can go. It's stunning. We can't even find hardly a Christian manuscript that's not on a codex, interestingly. There's maybe a couple possible exceptions out of the many we have. But in

terms of the nomin of sacra, we can hardly even find a single manuscript that doesn't have it. I mean, we do have some exceptions, but it's everywhere very early. So once again, what's the question? Who decided this? Yeah, why? And how does a Christological commitment to Jesus as Lord dominate the Christian manuscripts as far back as we can see? That's a remarkable fact. Okay, so what does this tell us about how early Christians viewed the identity of Jesus then? Yeah, I think this is a remarkable piece of the Christological puzzle. So when you talk about how Christians view Jesus' identity, right? Was he viewed as God? Was he viewed as divine?

Usually we go to the classic text, right? You go to John 8, before Abraham was born and I am, you go to John 1, and the beginning was the Word. You could look at even various passages in the synoptic gospels where the son of God is clearly has divine connotations. Or you could go to the book of Hebrews chapter 1 and where it talks about Jesus is God. But here's a whole other level of evidence. What if you could sort of ascertain early Christian beliefs about Jesus' divine identity by looking at how they abbreviate the name? Now, of course, this goes back to Jewish culture.

We know that in Old Testament manuscripts, they would have their own way of setting apart the divine name in Jewish Old Testament manuscripts called the Tetragrammaton, which is a way of writing the name Lord without vowels or using paleo-Hebrew or what have you. So that whole concept of doing something distinctive with God's name as a way to honor it is now switched over to Jesus. And that, I think, shows you that they view Jesus as Lord, as God, in a way that they would have viewed the Lord of the Old Testament as God.

That's amazing. I want to make sure people are making this connection. So Yahweh, the most personal name of God, Exodus chapter 3, they wouldn't write out as full name. Either, maybe later in a masoretic text, it'd be four dots, as I understand, or they would have the abbreviation. There's lots of ways they would set it apart. And they would sometimes write it in what's called Paleo-Hebrew, which is an older Hebrew, sometimes the vow pointing would be left out. Sometimes there was other things they would do to set apart the divine name. But uniquely to God's name from other things. It was a sign of honor and devotion, right?

Okay, which makes sense. Of the highest honor and devotion for the record. So the earliest manuscripts we have dating in the second century. Yes. Do the same thing with Jesus or with Jesus Christ. It's remarkable. And it's unanimous. And so the best guess of being unanimous, just as you gave your best,

I wouldn't call it a guess, but your theory, whatever you want to call it, for why the codex exploded on the same. Yeah, a hypothesis, you would say, is just such a high view of Jesus early across the different manuscripts and conversations that it was so natural to do this abbreviation. Is that fair? That's right. And there's so many layers to that because not only does it show common theology, but it also shows common scribal practice.

In other words, you might have guessed that they would abbreviate the divine name differently in different places. They have different kinds of abbreviations, but the uniformity of these is remarkable. Now, over time, they expand, by the way. They start off with God, Lord, Jesus, and Christ, and then they begin to get further down the tracks from that. As you might imagine, the other things that are associated with Jesus start getting abbreviated. Weos, the son gets abbreviated, right? Anthropos gets abbreviated, Son of Man.

And, you know, lots of different other words are added to the list down the roads. And it's never done with an angel, never done with Moses, never done with a human being, uniquely. God Theos in the Old Testament or Yahweh, obviously, and then the person of Jesus in the New Testament. Correct. That's powerful. Okay. So I want to jump in a few particular manuscripts. First, I actually have something for you.

I asked ahead of time if you know what P45 is. Of course. I started to work with a company that makes facsimiles. Oh, my. Because of early manuscripts. Can I open this? Please, this is free. You're actually the first person that I've given one, too, because we've just kind of

kind of started this partnership. And I was thrilled. I told my team, I'm like, Michael Kruger, the man is coming to Biola's campus. And they made this uniquely for you. Oh, my. Look at that. Look at that.

Mark 8 and 9. That is amazing. So this facsimile was made by who? Who made this? So I work with a team at manuscript shop.com and the same one that Wes Huff works with. Yeah. And they just started making it.

him to give his gifts, making him to display for conversation pieces. And they reached out to me. And first off, I was like, can I get a few from my office? Like, just like, I have a P52 that's set up, a P66 that we'll talk about. People come in and are like, wait, what is that? And I get to talk about, this is the early copy of the New Testament. And it's just such, it's an amazing gift to me. Oh, that's an amazing, that is beautiful. Conversation piece. And I don't know if the, the viewers can see the fragmentary nature, manuscript here, but this is what Papyrus does when it wears out. It breaks off on the clumps and lines because it gets brittle. And P-45 is one of those manuscripts that does get brittle. And we have

all four Gospels in P-45. It's a third-century text and Acts, too. It's actually one of our earliest four gospel codices, and we'll talk more about that in a minute when we get to the other manuscripts. Amazing. So very kind. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Enjoy. Well, when I ask you, what are three of your earliest specific manuscripts that you find most interesting that you want to talk about. You gave me three. Let's start with the first one. He said P4, kind of P64 and P67. Tell us about that. Yeah. So for the listeners, P of Stor stands for Papyrus. We have these labels for manuscripts, P4, 64, and 67 are thought to be fragments from the same codex. What's interesting about it is

that 64 and 67 are copies of Matthew and P4 is a copy of Luke. And there was a widespread sentence that these probably came from at least the same scribe and probably from the same codex. Originally this was suggested by Kurt Alon who suggested this, and then that was backed up by C.H. Roberts. And then T.C. Skeet wrote a very famous article arguing that this combination of Matthew and Luke was in actually and originally a four gospel codex. So it also included Mark and John. So this is interesting, and the reason I brought it up as a manuscript that's a talking point is it's been dated possibly to the late second century. Some have suggested a third century date, and these dates have fudger room in them because we don't have any precision on that. But the

earliest look at those manuscripts actually dated to the late second century, and T.C. Skeet dated it to the late second century. So what you have is the possibility of having a four gospel codex by the late second or third century. And this is actually part of the discussion point we raised a minute ago with the codex. Is that we think that one of the motivations possibly for why Christians adopted the codex is the idea that can hold all four gospels in one volume. This manuscript may be one of our earliest glimpses of a four gospel codex. And that I think is quite interesting. Now, there's dissenters out there. We don't have time to get into those who challenged it. There's scholars who've said, no, this isn't a four gospel codex. And they've tried to say, Skeet,

wrong and then others have said no skeet was right. But for our purposes in this conversation, I think there's good reasons that these manuscripts are from the same codex. And I think it's at least third century, if not late second. And so this is an early glimpse at the combination of gospels in one codex. And this is a point that really affects canon. And let me explain why. Not only as this affects textual criticism, because you're preserving these gospels, but one of things people don't realize is that in the early Christian centuries, as early as the second century, we begin to come. combine multiple gospels into a single manuscript, which is interesting, because as soon as you combine

multiple gospels in a single manuscript, that's quite I must think they belong together, right? But here's what you don't find. You never find a mix of canonical and apocryphal gospels in one manuscript. So there's never an instance where you have a copy of Matthew, Mark, and Thomas, or Matthew, Luc, and Peter, or something like that in a codex. Whenever you find more than one gospel in a codex, it's always Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That's fascinating. Okay, so there might be a dig where people find gospel of Thomas and gospel of, say, not only Peter, but gospel of like Luke, but on the same manuscript itself is the key point that you're saying. So for example, at the side of Oxirincus, we find manuscripts from all over the place. We're not suggesting that you never find an apocryphal gospel and a

canonical gospel in the same dig, so to speak. But we're talking about in the same codex, actually in the same physical manuscript that holds more than one gospel, we never find canonical and apocryphal Gospels combined together. That's just stunning. If the canon was as much in disarray as people claim, where everyone was reading Gospels, no one knew what Gospels to read, how do we explain the fact that whenever we see them combined, even as early as the second century, it's always Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That's just stunning. That's really interesting. That brings us back to your teacher back at UNC, who has suggested there was a lot more disarray amongst what was read and considered authoritative. And here's one piece that pushes back on that, and say the end of the second

century, arguably, you have the four Gospels together, and there's no examples on the same papyri of, say, Gospel Peter and Gospel Luke together in the same way. That's right. Can I capture that? No, that's exactly right. And I'll add to that that we have very few copies of Apocryphal Gospels from this time period. In fact, it depends on how you measure this. There's really no examples we have of some, like the Gospel Thomas who has some fragmentary

Greek copies of, but their earliest dates, those is third century. So if you go back to the second century, you really look mainly at canonical texts that early. Okay, so you mentioned apocryphal gospels. What about the apocrypha? Yes. Now, what's the difference there? And do they ever appear on the same kind of physical manuscript? Yeah, so the term gets confusing to people, and I totally get it. You know, because you have the noun, capitalized, apocrypha, you have the noun lowercase apocryphal, and then you have the adjective apocryphal, and you're like, well, could someone make their mind up here about the nomenclature? So I get the confusion. But the short version is, the term apocryphal just means hidden, and it's become attached to documents that look like

the ones that almost made it into our Bibles, but were left out. So, and that term applies to both the New Testament side and the Old Testament side. On the New Testament side, something like the Gospel Thomas would be called an apocryphal gospel, or also part of what we call it the New Testament Apocrypha, okay, which means. books that look like they could have made it in but didn't. And the Old Testament side, usually this is stated with the definite article, the Apocrypha, refers to Old Testament books

that were included by the Roman Catholic Church, but not Protestants. So this would be First Second Maccabees, Judith Tobit, and so on. So that's a totally different field than mine. That's Old Testament. And it's also a very different phenomenon because those aren't books that pretend to be written by famous people in the same way.

They're generally historical books, but later considered canonical by. the Roman Catholic Church. So we wouldn't expect them, given that they were written so much earlier and have a different focus, to be on the same kind of manuscript as we would some of these apocryphal gospels. Yeah, so we do find Greek Old Testament manuscripts with some apocryphal books in it. That is true. But on the New Testament side, which was the point I was making, when we find multiple gospels in the same codex and never find a mix of canonical and apocryphal. Okay, fair enough, got it. Okay, so let's jump to P66. Yes. One of my personal favorites. Yes.

And we make, we're starting to make facsimiles of these as well. Yeah, I want that. Next time I come back, I want P66. You know what? If you come back to campus, we will get you a P66. There you go. I have one sitting on my desk. But tell us why this one is so significant.

Yeah, I think P66 is fascinating. I picked these three manuscripts, not randomly. There's so many wonderful manuscripts. But I picked each one because I want to highlight something. I wanted to talk about P464-67 because I wanted to talk about the four gospel codex phenomenon. Which, of course, interestingly, you, you, anticipated with P45.

P-60s is fascinating because it is one of our earliest copies of John and is nearly complete. This is what makes it so fascinating. The dating game around P-66 has been massive. The upshot is it's probably third century. Some have put it late second century. Some have suggested it's the latest fourth century in some recent discussions. I think it's reliably third century. for a number of codicological and paleographical reasons, actually,

in particular the way the small Amacron sits high above the line is a common third century feature. There's a number of other things about P66 we can talk about. But I think it's reliably third century. But what makes it noteworthy and why I wanted to talk about it is that we can see the very first page. Now, people don't realize how rare this is. When books wear out and they're in the form of a codex,

the pages you lose first are obvious, the beginning and the end, right? It's like a book you stick in your book bag all the time. Maybe even your Bible. Like if you have a favorite book, you always stick in your book bag and it gets worn out over time, what pages do you lose? That's obvious. Not the ones in the middle. Those are preserved.

It's the ones on the end that get lost first, right? And so P66 is remarkable because we have the very first page. We don't have the end, but we have the first page. Why does that matter? Because we have the title. Okay. The Eongelian Katowani, we can see the title, the gospel according to John. Now, we can have a further conversation about gospel titles,

which I think is his own fascinating conversation and how early they were added and how reliable they are. But this shows us a very early example of the title in its full form, which has got its own idiosyncrasies about it. And that is noteworthy in its own right. The other thing that's wonderful about P66

is that you can also see the entire prologue, which is such a beloved text for Christians. I have an elective, I do... And this is 1-1 through, say, 18, roughly. So in the beginning was the word, the word was God, the word was God, a very famous text. in one of my electives at Reform Theological Seminary, I actually take my students through a photographic facsimile of this opening page, and we just read it through in Greek.

And it's just fascinating how well preserved the prologue is, how faithful it is to the text, and students regularly comment, wow, it's the same wording as our Greek text now. And they're always amazed at how consistent it is, and that's exactly right. I mean, it gives a glimpse at the textual fidelity. What about the connection to the end of Luke towards the beginning of John on P66? What? Say more about that now? Is the end of Luke on the first page that we have of P66 where John begins as well? No, we don't see the end of Luke there. That's P75.

That's P75. So P75 is another possible four gospel codex. Okay, good. Talk about that. Yeah, which was not on our radar, but that's also a fascinating for gospel codex. It's probably third century, too. And P75 has the transition between Luke and John on the same page, as you noted. So what's great about that is we have the title for Luke and the title for John right next to each other.

It also tells us about the way titles work. You typically haven't at the beginning and end of documents, and you can see it there. But it also tells you, interestingly, that they were pretty committed to saving space on the page. Like, when you ended Luke, you didn't wait to the next page to start John. You just started John. The other thing P75 tells us about is the order of the Gospels. Okay. And actually, all these have interesting things, is that that's,

called, that's the traditional sort of classical order, which would be Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There's a few variants in the manuscripts of different orders, but it shows you that the order is very, very typical Luke than John, which is why many think P-75 was a four gospel codex, even though we only have Luke and John. Almost everyone thinks that P-75 probably originally had Matthew and Mark. So both of those are maybe late, second, reliably third century. If you have John 1-1, and then you skip down to John 1-15 into John 1-18, you have very very clear claims of the deity of Jesus early. Yes.

So the claims, more popular ones that we hear, it was like invented at the Council of Niccia, 325, 4th century. I mean, this is one or two, in this case, solid reasons to reject that kind of claim. Right. And, of course, we think John was published in the first century. So even though our copy's second century, we would argue that view of Jesus goes all the way back to the first century.

Now, critical scholars would say, yeah, but John's the last gospel written, and therefore the deity of Christ has been magnified. We could come back to that if you want. I think that argument doesn't work for a variety of reasons. But yes, you have a very clear claim to deity here in John 1. And back to our earlier conversation, in that opening page of P66, there's the Nomenasakra right there. And it's used all throughout that first page and all throughout the whole codex of P66.

So it is a remarkable manuscript. It's well preserved. It's beautifully copied. The hand is not the scribal hand is not the kind of hand that you would expect in the major four-century code is that are sort of, you know, almost elegant and artistic, but it's a very reliable and competent scribble hand, and there's reasons to think that it would have reliably copied the text. There's discussions about how the text of P66 is a more free text.

That's a word we use. But what you do find in the midst of that free text is a lot of scribble corrections. Someone is going back and fixing the text whenever a mistake is made. So someone's working hard to make sure the text is accurate. So do you think the story of John 753 through 811 was in John? Well, it's funny you mentioned that because P66 does not have that story. There you go. And this is also why I go over with my students.

I take them to the folio that includes the ending of John 7 goes right from 52 to 812. And you realize, wait a second, where's the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman? So I don't know how far down this rabbit hole you want to go. Yeah, that's fine. That's great. I don't think it was original to John. We can have that conversation, but it doesn't affect the overall integrity of the New Testament.

Fair enough. Totally agree. All right. One more that you mentioned, P77 and P103. Yes. So P77 and P103 are thought to possibly be from the same codex. I don't know that I'm convinced. So P77 is really the main one I want to talk about. This seems like a random text for me to mention.

If someone was watching this podcast, he knows about manuscripts, and they think, so Mike Pick Pee's. 77, why in the world? It's a fragmentary manuscript, has copies of portions of Matthew. What's noteworthy about this? What's noteworthy about P77 is its size. P77 is what we call a miniature codex. It's tiny. Okay. Now, you can see P45 has shrunk down here on this image and it's fragmentary, but a miniature codex would be probably about the size in totality. So about 10 centimeters wide, about 15 centimeters high is P77. And it is the beginning of our knowledge of what we would call miniature codices or pocket

Bibles. And these are shrunk down small books. And I've done a lot of work on miniature codices, which is why I wanted to talk about it, because I think they really give us another window into the early Christian textual culture. Christians would carry these books. They would travel with these books. And we have them as early possibly as the second century. and we also have evidence that they would wear these books on their bodies.

They would wear them around their neck. They would sleep with them in their bed. They would carry them from a belt on their waist. Wow. And they were so committed to the word that it was with them all the time. Now, what you have in some of these instances is, and this is an unfortunate part of it, is that some Christians sort of use them magically like an amulet, okay?

And we would be uncomfortable with that. but what we do see here is that is that the books though were valued by Christians in such a way that they always wanted to have the word with them at all the time and in P77 is one of our earliest examples of this miniature codex phenomenon now I saw that you have that book with Oxford Press on miniature co-sacies exactly I talk about this in there have you popularized some of those arguments and articles or another area that's a great question so you know I have friends in mine they're like okay so you wrote this technical monograph with OUP no one's going to read this thing and they're not wrong You don't write a book with OUP

and expect, well, you know, to be on the New York Times about a cell list in terms of copies sold. And it's also wouldn't be anyway because it's just too technical. It's too micro. And so, yes, there needs to be a way to take the popular level of this and sort of say, why does it matter to the masses? So, yes, I have a blog series on my website.

So some may know I have a website called Cannon Fodder, which, of course, is a pun. It's just Michaeljekcruger.com, but I talk about canon issues on there. And I have a whole series on why the miniature codex matters. What does it tell us about early Christianity and early scribal culture? And I think it tells us a lot of fascinating things about book technology, textuality, the importance of physical text. I think it also tells us possibly about private reading.

We tend to think about everybody in the ancient world not being able to read, and that's true largely. But Christians had a lot of these private books. What were they doing with them? I think that raises interesting questions. Now this would take us, we can have a whole other conversation this way, but I do want to circle back and give me kind of your basic take on the naming of the Gospels? You mentioned in P-66. Yes. We have the title, which may be third century reliably. What would be your case that the Gospels we have now, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are correctly titled? Yeah, so the titles of these Gospels is a fascinating thing

to explore. Most people don't realize that the titles aren't really what they think they are. So even in this conversation, when we talk about the Gospels, we use the word of, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Luke. Nothing wrong with that. And that's, that's totally fine to talk about them that way, and we do in print, and we do in popular conversations. What people don't realize, though, is that that wasn't the technical title of the Gospels. The Gospels title was actually not the gospel of Luke, or the gospel of Mark, it was the gospel according to Mark or according to Luke. So whenever these titles were added, and we'll come back to that a minute, they were added in such a way that they wanted to communicate to the reader that

this was one iteration of the gospel, but there were other valid iterations too. So what that means is that whenever the titles were added, it had a sense of the plurality of the Gospels, that you're reading the gospel according to Mark, but it implies that there's other Gospels out there too. Now, it doesn't mean that there was exactly four. We can't get that from the title, but it does give you the sense that there's one gospel of Jesus Christ, but you're reading the one according to Mark, and implicitly there's one gospel of Jesus Christ, according to Luke, and so on. So the titles tell us that built into the title conceptually is that there's more than one gospel. Isn't that interesting?

How early were they added? I think there's a great case we made. They were added by the end of the first century. And, you know, if the Gospels had circulated anonymously, we would expect her to be a variety of titles attached to them. We would expect her to be disagreements over what to call them. Actually, we don't find that anywhere. Every time we find a title and we can see it, it's always the same title. Isn't that interesting?

Mark's never called anything else but Mark. Luke's never called anything else but Luke. That suggests a deep heritage in those titles, and I think they reliably go back to who wrote them. So if I were to sum it up, it would be that we have early physical manuscripts with the titles. Correct. We have consistency with the titles. Yes. But then we could go to the church fathers citing them. Do they add in some ways to the titles, or do they just often cite the scripture without saying, according to Mark, according to Matthew?

No, they do cite these gospels by name sometimes, and they talk about them by name. And this is very early. I'll give me an example of this. So we have a church father by the name of Papius. He was a bishop of Heriopolis and quite a significant player in the early church. He's friends with Polycarp. he knew a lot of people. We actually have Papius's writings preserve for us in various ways. And when Papius talks about the Gospels, he actually cites an earlier source. This is interesting.

Pappius cites a source called the elder. Who's this mysterious elder guy? Okay, we could come back to that. But what's interesting about it is, is almost all scholars agree that whoever this elder is, he's probably from the first century. He's probably like around 90 AD. So this testimony that Pappius preserves is from like 90 AD. And two gospels are mentioned by name, Matthew and Mark. So if someone thinks that the names are attached later to these Gospels, we have a first century evidence that they were there and that people knew who they were associated with. That's remarkable.

I love that. I can't tell you how tempted I am to jump into the elder in Pappius. I know. Because I did my work on the death of the apostles, and his testimony is vital to that, but we'll leave that for another time. That takes a lot of willpower for you to resist that. Oh, seriously. I get it.

I'll bite the bullet on that one. Keep going. So I just have a couple last questions for you. So you're confident that the text has been copied faithfully. You're confident that the four gospels minimally were meant to go together. They're titled correctly. Give me an example of a textual challenge you think that still remains. You'd say, you know what, here's something we're working on.

And I'm not quite satisfied yet if there is such a thing. And how would that make you think about your trustworthiness of the text? Wow, there's so many to choose from here. Um, textual criticism is a messy affair, right? And there's some texts that are more well preserved than others. There's some texts that have a number of variations that are, that we wish we were more easily to resolve than others. And these have been well studied. One of the, one of the, one of the texts that's had a lot of different variations is the text of the Lord's Prayer, okay, which has a bunch of different versions with it. And it gets a little bit messy at points. And, you know, sometimes you have to just work your way back as best you can. We also have a number of places in the New Testament of what we call conjectural emendations where it looks like the text, even in its original form, sometimes looks like, I don't know that that makes sense. Are we missing something here? Or is there something left out. A very famous example of this is in 2 Peter 3 where there's thoughts that maybe we need a conjectural emendation there. So there's a few of these sort of loose ends, you could say, kind of hovering around. But what I want to tell the listener is these are just so much the minimal part of the story.

right? They're not the main part of the story. The main part of the story is that generally speaking and collectively as a whole, we have such good records of these texts. We can think about it for a moment. We have a text from the first century that we can get a glimpse at in the second century. You just got to let that sink in as a listener for a moment. So here we are in 2006 and we're trying to ask what the text of a first century document is and actually can get a look at that text as early as the second century. That's stunning. There's not that many documents in the ancient world that let you do that. most of the time the gap between when a document was published in our earliest copies, not that far from 500 to even a thousand years. And we can look at a good chunk of the New Testament, some of it in the second, and a good chunk in the third. That's remarkably early. And that gives us a lot of confidence. That's awesome.

I appreciate the way you frame that. It seems like we can err on the side of saying we have too much confidence. Bible floated from heaven. Yeah, not at all. Then these small differences really rock somebody. In the other hand, people can take the small differences and tell a whole story about that that misses, no, this book has been preserved very carefully and early. And how would you compare it as best you can to other ancient works that are contemporary

of that time? Now, you gave the gap of, say, four or five hundred years, but are there, are there any of the ways you just compare the Gospels in the New Testament with other texts text roughly of that time? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most important things is what's the earliest glimpse we get? I just talked about that. That's one of the things that really sets the New Testament apart. A very common part of the conversation is number of manuscripts, right? That's commonly raised. It'd be very careful there because, yes, we do have a lot more manuscripts of the New Testament of the documents. Most of them, though, are from the Middle Ages, right? So when we go back into the early century, we don't have nearly as many, although even as early as the second and third

century, we have well over 60 manuscripts from the second third century. So that alone is pretty remarkable, and you compare that to any documents of antiquity. The other thing I would say is that when we look at a lot of ancient texts, we do see significant scribal differences between them when we compare copies. And when we look at the New Testament, yes, there are scribble differences. We do see that. And we talked about this earlier. It's inevitability. We do see scribble variation from time to time. But generally speaking, the New Testament was copied with a remarkable amount of fidelity. You could tell they really cared about getting it right. They had correctors. They had people going back over it. You had lots of steps to make sure that the text was well preserved. I think, again, that bodes well.

for having a trust in the text. So, no, it wasn't dropped from heaven on golden tablets, but at the same time, it wasn't in complete disarray either. And I think what we have is the essence of those stories we can confidently hold to. Even if we go back to the King James, as much as we've learned and improved since then, still a good copy of the New Testament to know God.

Even if you went with the Byzantine text type. Or, you mentioned the Texas receptus that's a line behind the King James. Even if we just said, but that's all we have, we still have the story, and we have it quite reliably. And so we're not therefore suggesting these textual differences don't matter. We care about them because we care about the words. But you also have to ask the question, has the New Testament sufficiently preserved so the message is reliably intact?

And the answer to that is yes in spades. Love it. Now let's bring this full circle. We started with your interest in textual criticism, kind of being rocked in religion class or Bible class back in college. Now that you've studied this X number of years, you don't have to fill in the blank on that one, but presumably a few decades. How does this shape you personally? And before you answer this, you gave a talk yesterday to the Biola Tawa faculty that you said

there's exterior evidence we can look to to show the Bible's word of God, but also just this self-authenticating nature of the scriptures, it's beauty, its excellency, its power. So there is that piece that you have apart from the evidence you've looked at. Of course. But I'd be curious how this study in textual transmission has just affected you personally and your confidence in the word of God. Yeah. So there's two things that happen in studies. And both are really important to say.

And I've experienced both these. One thing that happens when you do a deep study of something, you realize it's often a lot more complicated than you thought it was. Totally true. And that's humbling. And it's also a time to say we want to avoid pat answers, overly simplifying. answers, answers that don't acknowledge the complexity of things. So on one level, the deeper I dive, I realize, you know, there's hard things, there's complex things. There's things that aren't always easy. And there's nothing unchristian about acknowledging that. The idea of like, you know,

pretending that everything's just easy, peasy all the time is not helpful. Sometimes you just have to live in the real world and say those are things that are hard. So that happens when you go deeply. But there's a second thing that happens too, and this is really important. The deeper I go, the more encouraged I am. Yes, things are more complicated than you think. But I continue to see all kinds of things as I dive deep that just continue to encourage me and I find just remarkable.

We've talked about a couple of those today. One of the things that I find just as a studying piece of data that remains particularly encouraging to me is the use of the nominus sacra. The reason I like the nomin of sacra as an encouraging data point is because it's both technical and theological.

It's a form of worship. You realize that to set a part a divine name as sacred is a form of devotion. So you have this sort of devotional aspect in the midst of scribal activity, which people don't think of it that way. I think scribal activity is technical. It's mechanical. You're just in there. No, these guys were in a sense doing worship this way. So I find it interesting and encouraging on that point, but also the reliability factor. It shows the scribble culture was not random haphazard amateur. It was sophisticated in a way that I think gives us extra levels of confidence about the text. It's very similar.

to how I answer the question. When people ask me how to studying the apostles shape my confidence in one, I'm like, I have more questions than when I started. Yes, exactly. There's nuances about dating this and this scholar and debates I wasn't even aware of, but as a whole, I have more confidence in the resurrection,

more confidence in the testimony of the apostles. And it's like we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I'm grateful for your work. I mean, I was shaped a lot by textual transmission, just the work my dad did going back to, gosh, maybe researching manuscripts in the 50s at that time as a layperson before he'd even really studied theology and grew up hearing on a more popular level, the importance of manuscripts, but have somebody do a deep dive and keep doing it is just invaluable. So I hope you'll keep it up. If you come back, I will have a P-66 or a P-75, whichever one you want.

But hold that up for folks. If people want, they just hold up, you know, the cameras that people want. I'm so thrilled. I only have two sponsors this channel. One is Logos because I use Bible software. Every single day I use what Logos does. And second, started working with Man-Script Shop. And people can find the link below.

But to me, just to hold it in my hand and show people is super cool. But folks, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other conversations coming up on manuscripts and other stuff coming up on apologetics. You want to miss. If you want us to have Mike back, tell us we could do deep dive in the can. or some other topic up your lane, we would do that in a heartbeat. Thanks for the conversation. Thank you.

Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. God invites us to cultivate thankful hearts by turning our eyes toward him in good times and bad. To listen to more Abide Christian Meditations, just go to life audio.com or search your favorite podcast app for Abide Christian Meditation. also download the Abide app from more biblical meditations at abide.com.