Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1014: #1014 - How Reliable Are Our New Testament Manuscripts? Dr. Daniel Wallace

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Dr. Dan Wallace is a world renowned expert of New Testament Greek and the author of the highly acclaimed textbook: Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, which is the standard textbook used in most second year Greek courses. Dr. Wallace has a ThM and PhD from Dallas Theological Seminary and has engaged in Post-doctoral studies at Cambridge University, University of Münster, and Tübingen University. He currently serves as Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary.  https://www.dts.edu/employee/daniel-wallace/

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in Raw. My guest today is Dr. Daniel Wallace, Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He has a THM from Dallas, PhD from Dallas, and postdoctoral studies at Cambridge University, University of Munster, Munster, Munster, and Tubergan University. And Dan is one of the top experts in New Testament Greek in the evangelical church, hands down. If you study Greek and you go more than a year into Greek, you typically will enter into second year Greek where you will wade through this book. If you're on the video, you can see it. Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, which is a 700 to 800 page detailed grammar on New Testament Greek. So this dude knows a thing or two about the Greek languages, which is why I

wanted to have him come on the show and talk about the manuscript evidence we have for the New Testament. Are there tons of mistakes in these manuscripts? Tons of disagreements? Can we trust them? Can we even know what the original text of the New Testament would have said? And so that's what we talked about on this show. And Dan is the most perfect person to talk about that. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Daniel Wallace. When did you start falling in love with the Greek, or if that's even the right phrase? I mean, when did you get excited about the Greek language? Is that early on in your childhood or more later on?

It happened when I was 16 years old. I made a pretty radical commitment to the Lord and basically said, I'm committing the rest of my life to do full-time Christian vocational ministry. And I prepared for nothing else. My dad, his dad, long history on both sides of the family of engineers. My grandfather invented the skateboard and the drafting board and all sorts of other things. He knew how to make a lot of money and lose a lot of money. But he had a thousand employees during World War II helping out the Navy and the Air Force or the Army Air Force, I should say. So I come from that kind of a background, but I didn't want to go in that direction at all. I was, I grew up in Southern California, Newport Beach. And when I made this commitment to Christ,

I just, I wanted to read my New Testament and I read it cover to cover every week for the rest of the semester, for a whole semester, in fact. And I've still got that. It's today's English version. It's taped up with masking tape and scotch tape and, you know, falling apart all over the place. But that was a wonderful semester. I'm a slow reader. It would take me about 40 hours a week to read it. My grades didn't suffer too much during that time. But what I did was I also had a passion for evangelism. And so I found this little real estate office that had a sign over, independent real estate agent. It said Jesus Saves, big billboard right over the office. So I figured this is my kind of people.

So I went and talked to this guy. And he had these today's English version that he was selling by the box load. He said, I'll let you have them for 25 cents a piece if you buy a whole box. So I'd get a whole box, then I'd drive up and down Coast Highway, pick up hitchhikers, give them a New Testament, share the gospel, and come back every three or four weeks to get another box. Well, while this was going on, I'd see him, and he said, by the way, you know that Jesus is not God. And I was shocked to hear somebody say that. My church was Orthodox, but it didn't have much depth to it. And so, we got to talking, and I thought, gee, he showed me places in today's English version that

looked as if Jesus might well not be beating the flesh. And I thought, if I'm going to commit my life to Christ, I want to make sure he's worth it. And so, because of that experience, I decided to get as much Greek as I could. I went to Biola University for college. I got four years of Greek in college, and then I took 14 more semesters of it in my master's program, which was the equivalent of a double major. And I took enough to be a major in Old Testament Hebrew as well. And then, of course, I did my doctorate in New Testament in Greek. So that's been the reason, though. For me, the study of Greek has been a Christocentric reason.

It's not just academic by any means. Wow. Golly. 14. Golly, that's a lot of semesters in Greek. I mean, when you pick up the New Testament, can you read the Greek? I mean, almost as quickly as the English. Is it not like you're not stumbling over words?

Or is it still challenging? I still stumble over everything. Like you're not stumbling over words or is it still challenging? I still stumble over everything in large measure because I had encephalitis 25 years ago just after I completed my grammar. And I lost most of my memory, my languages, of my friends, of my personal history. I forgot my wife's name at one point. Forgot my own name twice. I was in a wheelchair for a year and just it was uh i had to just kind of relearn everything i'm still in process i did not know that did you have to

like relearn like all those years you had to like redo them all over again largely i had about one year's worth of greek oh my god and i'm teaching you know that's well i this happened to me in march of 97 and i couldn't finish the school year, but I came back the next year. The guy drove me to school in his pickup truck so he could put my wheelchair in it for the next year. Wow. By the way, I'm good friends with Joel Willits. And he was a TA for you, right? Years ago.

He was on faculty with me. Yeah. Yeah. He's a good dude i think denny burke was there too and joel and denny are very different um but i think they were hanging out yeah yeah he was he was an intern i'm sorry i think i thought you're saying joel williams oh he was an intern denny burke was jim hamilton and mike spiegel that was all one year, quite different guys. That's a whole other conversation. the New Testament manuscripts that we currently have, there are three to 400,000 differences within the New Testament manuscripts that we currently possess.

And maybe you might need to back up and even explain what does that even mean? What kind of manuscripts do we have? How many, how old or whatever. But I would love to maybe launch from there because I've seen a lot of people read that and say, if that's true, then how do we even know what is in our current english bibles like it just seems like we've been like blind you know like somebody blindfolded us with this whole project so

yeah so maybe explain the manuscript take on that that question what that is, the question is really about the number of textual differences among the manuscripts. There's a follow-up question to that, which is the nature of these textual differences. When people hear the number of hundreds of thousands, they immediately think we can't possibly know what the original New Testament said because it affects the nature or the quality of these variants, which is not the same thing. Now, Bart Ehrman, in his book, Misquoting Jesus, says there's about 400,000 texture variants, and that number has been finally demonstrated not to be nearly enough. It's more like you're cutting all the differences, about one and a half million differences. And so that's what a former intern of mine, Peter Gurry, who's now at Phoenix Seminary,

demonstrated. He published an article in New Testament Studies and said there's about 500,000 variants, but he doesn't count spelling errors or nonsense readings, and that's about two-thirds of them. So, one and a half million differences among the manuscripts. So, the first time there were a number of manuscripts that were examined and compared was in 1707, when a man by the name of John Mill, who spent his entire academic career at Oxford University, produced a huge volume listing 30,000 textual variants among the witnesses, and he looked at all the Greek New Testament manuscripts he could find, which was 99. He looked at ancient translations, and he also looked at church fathers' writings. And when he got this published in 1707, it was the first time in 200 years that there had been a Greek New Testament that really was not essentially the Greek text behind the King James Bible. Now, I should back up and say, actually, the Greek text that he published was still that.

But he listed these variants, and it's the first time that just thousands of variants were listed. And consequently, four years later, a German scholar counted them. He said there are 30,000 of these variants that Mill found. Now, two weeks after Mill got this published, he died, which is perfect timing. That's when I want to go after I get my magnum opus done. Two weeks later, die. I don't have to deal with the critics, you know. Mill couldn't defend himself because he was gone. And there were Roman Catholics who said, look, you Protestants have a paper pope, and he disagrees with himself. He doesn't speak ex cathedra.

And there were fundamentalist Protestants who said, what you've done, John Mill, is the devil's work. Now, my understanding of how we should view the Christian faith is that it is something that has occurred in time, space, history. When Jesus became man, when God became man in the person of Christ, that now subjects both the Bible and the person of Christ to historical investigation. There's no other major religion in the world that does that. Consequently, what John Mill did was a good thing because history is never the opponent of the Christian faith. And he did this kind of research. of the Christian faith. And he did this kind of research. So it took another scholar a few years later, Richard Bentley, who in 1713, six years after Mill's Greek New Testament came out, who talked about how because we have all these variants, we have a better and a more certain

understanding of what the original text said than what we had 200 years earlier when Erasmus published his Greek New Testament based on nine manuscripts. So a few years later in the mid-1700s, a fellow by the name of Johann Albrecht Bengel published a work on this, and he talked about these 30,000 variants. Now, he was a brilliant German-speaking scholar, and he said in his writings that not a single one of these variants affects any cardinal doctrine. That was a critical statement. And so, Bengel argued for what we call the orthodoxy of the variants. They don't jeopardize the deity of Christ. They don't jeopardize the resurrection of Christ, His virgin birth, salvation by faith alone, by grace. You know, you can name any doctrines that are essential doctrines for the Christian faith, and most of the non-essential doctrines as well are not in

any kind of jeopardy because of this. I'd say, you know, there's a couple places like Mark 9, 29 is the only place where Jesus says to cast out a certain kind of pesky demon. You need to exercise faith and or prayer and fasting. The and fasting is a variant. Not all the manuscripts have that. So when Jesus was talking about, OK, here's a here's a tricky demon you got to deal with. Should you just pray or do you need to fast as well? Now, when I've done house exorcisms in the past, I covered my basis and I decided to pray and fast. I'm not sure which one is the original.

I don't think fasting is, but that's not a concern of orthodoxy as much as it is orthopraxy. How should we live? But it's certainly not an essential aspect of the Christian faith. So that's what Bangle discovered. And that orthodoxy of the variants has held true even after we discovered there were about 100,000 variants, 120,000, 150,000, 200,000. The numbers kept climbing higher and higher until Peter Gurry published this article a few years ago. And he based it, finally, he based this on some complete data of different

portions of the New Testament and extrapolated it out. So it's kind of like he did a polling that was within 5% accurate. And so I'd say we have about one and a half million variants, but nothing has surfaced that's going to cause us to change any of our doctrines. The great doctrines of the church in the 17th century, the 18th century, the 19th century, none of those doctrinal statements has changed because of these new variants that have been discovered. So I have a question about that, just for clarity. So the King James, you said, was built on about nine Greek manuscripts, roughly? Is that? The Textus Receptus, the text that Erasmus put together. And the King James, you know, they used some other sources as well, but it was essentially

Erasmus' text, yes. Okay. And now, today, we have how many? Over 5,000? Or not complete, but? Yeah, over 5,000? Yeah. Not complete, but... Yeah, about 5,500 manuscripts. When we talk about a manuscript, we're talking about a handwritten document. And it's before the time of printing or not based on a printed text.

And so there's some that get into the 17th century. The first published Greek New Testament came in 1516 with Erasmus. Up until then, everything was written by hand. If I can, these handwritten manuscripts, there's only 60, about 1%, that are complete New Testaments. However, the vast majority of them are hundreds of pages long. So, P52, is that the oldest or. That's what was considered to be the oldest. There's some rivals to it now that are second century. So, and P 52 is how old again? Well, originally it was dated between 100 and 150. And I still think that's probably pretty accurate, but there's been some push to say it might be a

little bit later than that. And, and so we have so many more now. Is that just, I mean, this is, I guess, a dumb question, but like, are we finding stuff in the desert and discovering libraries? Like it's just in the last few hundred years, we're just unearthing a lot more manuscripts. Is that what's happening? Here's an interesting point. Ever since Codex Sinaiticus was published. This was discovered by Tischendorf at St. Catherine's Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai in Egypt. When that got published, now we had Sinaiticus and we had Vaticanus. Both of these were fourth-century manuscripts, and they were originally complete Bibles, our two oldest complete Bibles, at least originally. And Sinaiticus is our oldest complete New Testament by 500 years. The next one is 9th century. So when these got published, since that time,

there have been other manuscripts that have been published. So this is, you know, this is second half of the 1800s. And since that time, we have discovered about 140 papyri. We've discovered a lot of other manuscripts that rival the date of these great magiscules, but they're not nearly as complete, or ones that are complete, but they come later. And there's not a single, these papyri have been the major discoveries, and not a single word in any of the papyri has promoted itself as this must be the original wording. That is, scholars, if they say, yeah, I think this reading is original, and it's found in these papyri, it's also found in already known manuscripts. So what we have in our Greek New Testament, here,

I'll pull mine out to show this. You can see this pretty easily. You have a Greek New Testament, and what you've got here, let's see if I can pull that up. Yeah. Okay. You've got the text above the line, and then below the line are the footnotes or the apparatus. And below the line is textual variants and the witnesses that have them, whether they're Greek manuscripts or translations or patristic fathers, patristic writings. And we can say that we almost certainly have the original wording of the Greek New Testament,

either above the line or below the line, in the standard Greek New Testament, either above the line or below the line in the standard Greek New Testament published today. So the papyri, what they've done is they've strengthened a reading, but they have not introduced a new reading that we never heard of before. He said, aha, throw out everything we believe. This reading is original. When you say papyri, you're talking about manuscripts that have been kind of discovered more recently.

They overwhelmingly confirm these older, larger manuscripts that have been kind of discovered more recently, they overwhelmingly confirm these older, larger manuscripts that we already had. Right, right. They're written on papyrus and some of them go back to the second century, to the one hundreds. We have now about, it's about 140 papyri, give or take. More and more are getting discovered. They've been, they were excavated in the 1890s,

especially by two British scholars, Grenfell and Hunt. And Oxford University has approximately, I think they claim they've got 500,000 to a million scraps of papyri. Oh, my gosh. Not New Testament. It was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack to find New Testament. It's like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack to find New Testament. But in 1998, they published 17 papyri that were in these piles that they just hadn't gone through. And then some others have been discovered and published. And it's pretty amazing. We continue to get this flow.

I'd say on average, you could say ever since the first papyrus was discovered, about one a year gets published. This is the Greek New Testament. I used to use the fourth revised edition. So that's 1994. So there's been papyri discovered since this. Has it affected? Is there any light that's been shed on what we used to have that might be somewhat significant? I mean, you've already said it's not going to affect some major doctrine or whatever.

It's not like Jesus had a wife or something. But is there maybe a familiar verse where it's like, oh, we now know this is the better way to render something? Well, let's see. There's a few passages I could talk about, but understand that scholars have known what is in the original Greek New Testament for well over 150 years. Okay. Because we have it above the line or below the line. Okay, okay. If you have a multiple choice, it's either text A, text B, or text C. It's never text D, none of the above. Never. There are some who say we have to give conjectures, that is, offer what we think the

original wording was without any manuscript basis. But if we have to do that, it's only in two or three places, and I'm not convinced of any of them. In the last edition of the Nestle All-On Greek New Testament, you were showing the UBS, United Bible Societies, and the Nestle All-On text. In the last edition, the 27th edition, they listed something like 162 conjectures, that is, readings that are not found in any Greek manuscripts, and not a single one of them was printed as what they thought the text was. That's pretty significant. So there's people that have for centuries have come up with, well, we don't think we have the original New Testament here, here, here. And yet, people don't buy those arguments. Think about other ancient literature.

You think of like Livy and all the books he wrote on history. We're missing most of them. We're missing most of the ancient most, except in a couple of rare instances of manuscripts. We're dealing with 5,500 Greek New Testament manuscripts, tens of thousands of ancient translations, starting as late as the late 2nd century, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Old Church, Slavonic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic. It just goes on and on and on, these translations. And we're dealing with well over a million quotations by the church fathers of the New Testament, spanning the centuries, of course. But we could virtually reconstruct the entire New Testament many times over from just what the church fathers wrote. It's that significant. from just what the church fathers wrote.

It's that significant. So if you were to stack up all of our Greek manuscripts and all the manuscripts of the ancient translations, but ignore the church fathers, I don't know how to stack that stuff up, the stack would be over a mile and a quarter high of witnesses to the Greek New Testament. The average stack for the Greco-Roman author, about four feet high. Oh, my word. Four feet versus about, you know, 6,600, something like that, give or take. It's just, it's an embarrassment of riches we're dealing with.

Can you give us, I mean, for a lay audience, most of whom probably don't know Greek, and even if they do know a bit of Greek, they probably forgot the part on textual criticism that they took in seminary 25 years ago. Can you give us, for a lay audience, like what, you know, a scholar is looking at all these manuscripts and there are some differences. Maybe again, theologically, it doesn't really matter, but they still wanted to get it right. Can you walk us through maybe some of the process on how do they determine, are they flipping a coin saying, I'm going to go with that manuscript or what's the process to determine when there are differences? What's the better reading? Let me give you an illustration from Romans chapter 8, verse 1. I'll give a few illustrations if you like. Romans 8, verse 1 says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are

in Christ Jesus, period. However, in the King James, it says there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, period. However, in the King James, it says there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but do walk according to the Spirit. Now, that's some extra words in there. And as you look at the manuscripts, you discover that the earliest manuscripts end it with, for those who are in Christ Jesus, period. Some later manuscripts add the negative, who do not walk according to the flesh. And still later manuscripts also add, but do walk according to the Spirit. So you can see just in the manuscript evidence that the wording has grown over time. At first, it's a statement, it's a blanket statement about how

we are not under the judgment of God if we're in Christ Jesus. A beautiful, beautiful statement. And it's the kind of a thing that scribes may well have wanted to tinker with. Wait a minute, that's too good to be true. Let's put a condition here. Do not walk according to the flesh. Now, that whole idea is picked up in verse four. That's not what it says in Romans 8.1. And then, but who do walk according to the spirit, then that's added later too. So you can see by the manuscript evidence, the earliest ones don't have it. The later ones add this. And scribes had a tendency to add, basically, if in doubt, don't leave it out was their attitude. Now, some of the earlier scribes had a different kind of an attitude where they're trying to

sometimes edit it to make it crisper, you know, and there's some redundancies, but the later scribes, that was not their attitude. And so, if I have a—let me give you another illustration. This is a little bit broader. It's not a particular verse, but it's Mark chapter 6, 7, and 8. For 89 verses in a row, Jesus is not mentioned by name or title, only by the pronoun he or as part of a verb. For 89 verses in Mark 6, 7, and 8, it finally gets broken up when he heals the blind man by spitting in his face, and you get a distinction between Jesus and the blind man. So, 89 verses in a row, it's just mentioned by he. Scribes who wrote out copies of the New Testament also wrote out portions of the New Testament, also wrote out portions of the New Testament for Saturday and

Sunday readings. It's called a lectionary. And some churches, denominational churches, Anglicans, and some Presbyterians, and some others are going to read from the lectionary. So this is the passage we read for this Sunday. So these lectionaries, we have over 2,000 of them in Greek, which are portions of the New Testament, a selected reading for the day. Well, you don't want to start a passage that say, he said to them. If you're reading that for the day, who are they? Who are them? Who are he?

And so he said to his disciples. And who is the he? Jesus said to his disciples. Who is the he? Jesus said to his disciples. So what we see is because of the lectionary influence, four times in those 89 verses, the name Jesus or the Lord is added right at the point where the lectionary begins. So you can see that what scribe in his right mind would want to get rid of the name Jesus if it's in the text, you know. He's got one manuscript that doesn't say it, another one that does say it, I'm going to put the name Jesus in there. So that'd be a good example of, um, I mean, you can, you can imagine several differences here among our 1.5 million. You could have, he did this in another manuscript. Jesus did this Christ,

Jesus, Jesus, Christ, whatever, like variations would all mean the exact same thing. In fact, Jesus Christ, whatever, like variations would all mean the exact same thing. In fact, it might have been you that, I mean, years ago, I came across an example that in Greek, there are over like 20 or 25 different ways to say Jesus loves Paul. Yeah, that was my example. Was that you? I actually developed that into John loves Mary because there's different spellings for John and Mary. And there are, using exactly the same verb, agapao, there's well over a thousand different ways to say that. And they only mean Mary loves John.

It's not like, well, there's various English meanings. John loves Mary. That's how I did it. But I could flip that around to Mary loves John. That's how I did it. But I could flip that around and Mary loves John. You'd still have a thousand. And you can, different word orders,

different spellings, add the article before the name or not. It always means John loves Mary. So if you took that on, you know, something like that example to like every verse in the Bible where there's like so many different ways

the Greek could say the exact same thing that accounts for, would you say, the overwhelming majority of these 1.5 million differences? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. They don't affect anything. In fact, I'd say 99, well, here's a way to look at the variants. You can put them into four different categories. Those that are not viable, that is, there's no chance that that wording could go back to the original, but they are meaningful. It would change the meaning, but say it's only found in a 14th century manuscript all by itself. Well, that's not going to convince anybody. Those that are

not meaningful, they don't change the meaning, but they are viable. So you've got a lot of manuscripts that have different spellings that don't change the meaning at all. There wasn't a dictionary standard on how to spell different names. John even spells the verb he opened in Greek. It's a noigo, but it's an aorist tense. So it's first person's, I mean, first eras, third person singular, active indicative. And John spells that three different ways in the space of nine verses. Oh, wow.

So he was a creative speller. That doesn't prove anything. I mean, it's always translated exactly the same. I've never seen a translation that does it differently, but John spelled it differently. So I'll finish on this. So you've got those that are not viable, but John spelled it differently. So I'll finish on this. So you've got those that are not viable, but are meaningful. Those that are not meaningful, but are viable. You can ignore all those. Then you've got those that are meaningful and viable. And you've got those that are neither meaningful nor viable. Only one of those categories is

significant for translation and belief, and that's those variants that are both meaningful and viable. Of the one and a half million variants we have, less than two-tenths of one percent of all these variants are both meaningful and viable. So what you hear the critics talk about is these hundreds of thousands of variants that nobody wants to talk about because it would bore people to death. It's that two-tenths of 1% are viable and meaningful. And when I say meaningful, I mean like John 4, 1, where it says either Jesus knew or the Lord knew. That's a meaningful, viable difference because it translates. But that's...

What does it really affect? It doesn't really affect anything. But there are some that do. So Romans 5, 1, for example, the difference between the two readings is a single letter where Paul says, therefore, since we have been justified, we have peace with God or let us have peace with God. And it's either echomen with the omikron or echomen with the omega. Both words were pronounced exactly the same in the first century. Omega, both words were pronounced exactly the same in the first century. And so scholars debate that back and forth, and the manuscripts are split all over the place. How do we solve something like that? Well, that has to be resolved internally by looking at the flow of the argument in Paul's letter. And most scholars, the vast majority of scholars are saying, Paul wrote, we have peace rather than let us have peace. But both of those would be true in different contexts.

Right. That doesn't change. It still doesn't. Those are different meanings and that context might play a different role. But at the end of the day, both are biblically true. We should be exhorted to have peace. And we do factually have peace through Jesus' shed blood. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. There you go. So you've got those. I'll tell you one of my favorites is Revelation 13.18. Back in the second century, Irenaeus was writing about the number of the beast. That's Revelation 13.18. The number of the beast is the number of a man, and his number is 666. 18. The number of the beast is the number of a man whose number is 666. Well, Irenaeus, writing in the second half of the second century, was complaining about what he called corrupt manuscripts

that had 616 as the number of the beast. And he said, but older manuscripts have 666. Well, those are the ones he knew about. But so at least we know in the second century, both readings were there. And we didn't know of any other witnesses until the 1840s when a scholar working at the National Library of Paris looked at these manuscripts. So this scholar looks at a particular manuscript, which is a palimpsest. That means the text was all scraped off and rewritten centuries later. The undertext happens to be one of the most important biblical manuscripts we have. And it took him two years to work through Codex C, or Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, which is an early 5th century codex that originally had the whole Bible. When he came to Revelation 13, 18, he noticed that this manuscript has the number of

the beast as 616 instead of 666. Besides Irenaeus' testimony, that was the only manuscript we knew about, but that manuscript has become the second most accurate manuscript we have of the apocalypse of the book of Revelation. And there's frequent times where by itself it has the original wording. So now that gives us some pause. In 1998, when I said 17 more papyri were discovered at Oxford University and published, There was a manuscript that spread out over nine chapters in Revelation. It was 26 different pieces, like the size of postage stamps, and that was published. I had a chance to look both at Ephraimus Rescriptus in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and then I looked at this particular papyrus at Oxford University under both a magnifying glass and a microscope.

And I can confirm that it says the number of the beast is 616. What's interesting is it has a letter right before that, that if it's a word, it means or. And the rest of what comes before that is torn off. means or, and the rest of what comes before that is torn off. Did this manuscript say 666 or 616? And it's an early third century manuscript. And we're talking about some evidence that's really significant. And you asked me if I think the number of the beast is 666 or 616. It kind of depends on what side of the bed I get up in the morning. I mean, I go back and forth on these issues. Yeah.

I can see why scribes would want to have 666. There's a lot of reasons for that. And Irenaeus kind of takes a spiritualizing view of it. What were the reasons? The six represents humanity or something? Well, yeah. It's a gematria. What were the reasons? The six represents humanity or something? It's a gematria. A gematria is the number equivalent of a name. And the name for Jesus, Iesus in Greek, has a gematria of 888.

We think of seven as the number of completeness or perfection. And I think the early church understood this gematria of Jesus to mean beyond perfection. Or the eighth day of the week. If the first day is Sunday and the seventh day is Saturday, the eighth day would be Sunday again, the resurrection. And they talk about all things have become new and how, you know, Hebrews seems to pick up some of these themes and some other things to say that with Jesus, all things are new again. And so I think they understood the gematria. If I were God, I would have made his gematria 777. But having an 888 means it's even beyond perfection. Now, 666, on the other hand, is exactly two-thirds.

Point 666 ad infinitum is two-thirds. It never gets to seven. I think that number would probably represent mankind at his best at trying to achieve perfection, and he never gets there. He's never good enough to get into the kingdom you have to start with the son of god christ whose number is beyond perfection only by putting faith in him do we get to know the lord have you written on this are there any recent articles written or i i've posted a blog on it i think okay but not not not all the aspects of it that's really helpful i've only vaguely heard that there are there's manuscript evidence for 616 and i haven't looked into into that you know um and also like with the dead sea scrolls i know there's evidence that that goliath was 6 6 not uh nine feet tall or whatever

which is still a big dude i mean that's like yeah right uh gen carlo Stanton from the Yankees. But wow, that's so. So again, I mean, I could see some potential significance to the number being different. Again, if that number is referring to a certain, according to a certain interpretation of Revelation, it could be referring to Nero or not Nero or something. Right. Isn't that don't the numbers kind of match? Well, 616 fits in with nero much better you have to add a new at the end neron to make it be 666 that's worth 50 points so 616 plus 50 666 uh and so 616 i i keep thinking that 616 if it was part of a Nero-Rita-Vivis myth, that is Nero-resurrection-come-back-to-life myth, as you have in Revelation, that you wound a head and the thing comes back to life. Nero-Rita-Vivis was a real cult in the second half of the first century.

People kept thinking he's going to come back to life. Right. back to life. But would somebody in the second century come up with that, long past the time where the Nero, Rita Viva Smith, was dead? It wasn't common. It wasn't a common belief. So that tells me that the 616 reading may well be exactly what John wrote in Revelation, because afterwards it would have no meaning, and so the number could have been changed to 666. But I'm not sure about that. Here's what I would say. I'd say, I don't know of a single Bible college or seminary or denomination or church that has, for its doctrinal statement, we believe in the deity of Christ, we believe in the virgin birth

of Christ, we believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. And we believe that the number of the beast is 666. It may be important, but it doesn't rise to that importance. Yeah, that's super interesting. What would you say is the most significant kind of textual variant that we do have do you have one that stands out that if you could just snap your fingers and discover the original oh you would love to know what this actually says and means because this is keeps you up a little a little bit at night oh sure yeah that's that's that's the interesting stuff it does keep you up and it's i mean i'd love to find out the original of romans.1, whether it's we have or let us have.

But I will mention the two largest textual problems we have. They are both 12 verses long. And there are some critics who like to speak of them as they're just among several that are lengthy, which is not a good representation of the facts. The next longest passage is two verses, and we have, I think, about 15 places where one or two verses are involved. And everything else after that is part of a verse, often just part of a word. Most variants are just part of a word, just spelling differences or transposition, something like that. But Mark chapter 16, verses 9 through 20, is 12 verses long. And that's where it speaks about Jesus telling his apostles, if you pick up

snakes, you won't get harmed, drink poison, you'll be fine, you know, all this kind of stuff, speaking tongues. And that's found in the great majority of manuscripts. But our earliest manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus that I already mentioned, 4th century, we don't have any other manuscripts earlier than that for this particular passage. Both of them lack that ending. Okay. And I have a strong sense that Mark intended to end his gospel at Mark 16, 8. It says that the angel told the women to meet the disciples in Galilee, and Jesus will meet you there. And they did nothing for they were afraid, period. And I think what Mark is doing is hinting that those who are reading his gospel need to come to grips with whether they really believe in Jesus. How much are you convinced that you believe in him?

Are you enough to pick up the baton and carry it to the next level? What Mark is doing is he's getting readers to step into the sandals, if you will, of the disciples and the women and continue sharing the gospel during the time of persecution in Rome. So it makes perfectly good sense. So the abrupt ending would be more intentional, which would hit. Doesn't Mark have a theme of fear and power? And that wouldn't be unlike something that he would want to do. And you have like, the book of Jonah kind of ends like that, you know, with a question and you're the readers has a bomb thrown in their lap to kind of wrestle with or even lamentations ends like on a sour note, you know, and so that's not uncommon

to do that. That's interesting. There's modern commentators who say, we don't find this in ancient literature, which is just not the case. I mean, Jonah is a great example. But even within Mark, you've got after the transfiguration, Jesus comes down, and he tells the disciples that he speaks to them again about the resurrection from the dead. And the next statement, we're talking about something that is at the end of Mark's gospel. The Lord does rise from the dead. There are no appearances by the Lord to the disciples, but the angel tells the women he has risen. And three times Jesus prophesies this. So right after he explains this in Mark 9, it says the disciples said nothing to him. They didn't understand what he meant by the resurrection of the dead, but they said nothing because they were afraid. And it's exactly the same verb as used in Mark 16.8.

And the verb is an imperfect tense with the suggestion being for they were being afraid is the idea. In other words, there's no conclusion to this. Mark just drops the ball right there. And I think that's a hint of what's going to happen in Mark 16, 8. So you're going more on, would you say you're basing ending Mark there, not necessarily on the external manuscript evidence, but more internal coherency and logic. But you do have those two, I mean, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, we didn't talk to you.

I mean, for people who don't know, we kind of mentioned Passamitt, two of the earliest full manuscripts in the New Testament. Like, it's a huge, hugely important manuscripts, and they don't have the ending of Mark. That's the longer ending of Mark. Well, I'm looking at both the external and internal evidence, because you have Eusebius in the early part of the fourth century and Jerome in the latter part, bothbius canonized the text to this point, but some

manuscripts read this, and then they go on and have verses 9 through 20. So, you've got that kind of a testimony where even manuscripts that do have those verses, the scribe may well not think that it's authentic. So, you've got those things, and what's interesting is Jerome adds a point where Eusebius says he could hardly find any manuscripts with more than verse 8. Jerome says it occurs in almost no Greek manuscripts. Now, Eusebius had behind him Emperor Constantine, and he had Origen's workshop in Philippi, with Origen's library that he had inherited in the 4th century. And what Eusebius has got is all this wealth of the Roman Empire, essentially, to find any

manuscripts he can. When you get to Jerome, now you've got the power of the Vatican behind him, so the eastern and western branches of Christianity, and you get the same kinds of statements in the fourth century. In the late fifth or early sixth century, we have our first commentary on the gospel of Mark by a man named Victor of Antioch. And he says that about, you know, somewhere around half the manuscripts don't have anything past verse eight, and about half of them do. But his commentary is the only commentary on Mark's gospel in the first millennium, and it was wildly popular. So by the time he writes, 100 years, 150 years later, after Jerome wrote, now we're talking about more and more manuscripts having the long ending,

and he says that's the one he favors. So what do we expect? We expect the scribes to follow suit on that. And so you can see that even through the patristic evidence. But then you look at it internally and say, the language is not Marx. It's an abrupt change where Mary is introduced again, even though she was previously introduced. There's so many things that are just bizarre about it. One of my doctoral students did his dissertation on every single word in Mark 16, 9 through 20, every phrase, the syntax, the themes, the theology. He said, and he really did a really objective case where he said, well, here's one that does occur in Mark, and so I'd give this by itself about a 66% probability that's Mark. And then he goes through the whole thing. He says, collectively, it's dramatically against it being by Mark. Although there are some things that

could fit into Mark. And so why else would a scribe put this at the end of Mark's gospel, unless it could fit into Mark's? Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. If it was so different, it wouldn't make sense that it got there in the first place. Right. And we have ancient translations that don't have it or they'll have another ending after verse eight. And so I asked the question, what is more likely that scribes would delete passages that speak about picking up snakes and drinking poison and speaking in tongues? When you have that kind of thing in the book of Acts, you know, a snake bites Paul and he doesn't die, you know, and they speak in tongues and this kind of thing. So it's picking up something that happens in early Christian history, nothing about poison, but the rest of it's there. something that happens in early Christian history, nothing about poison, but the rest of it's there.

And so if a scribe would be likely to get rid of it because of that, why do we have it in the book of Acts then without any variants? Or is it more likely that scribes say there is no resurrection appearance by Jesus at the end of Mark's gospel, and consequently scribes wanted to add something. And so other endings were added to Mark 16, 8. So you get these endings that are real vanilla, but they have Jesus appearing at the end. And then you've got, there's a number of manuscripts that have the shorter vanilla kind of ending. And then they have this robust, really flavorful ending, if you will, Mark 16, 9 through 20. They never reverse the order. It's always this and then this. If Mark 16, 9 through 20 was part of the original gospel, why would that shorter vanilla ending ever have been used?

Nobody ever would have come up with that if you already had verses 9 through 20. I wonder how many Christians have died from poison or snakes based on a passage that might, I shouldn't laugh, that's sad, but it's, yeah, an ending that might not even be in the New Testament. I would imagine John 8 has to be the other 12-verse section. What are your thoughts on that one? So this is the woman caught in adultery, a famous passage. Yeah, it's John 7, 53 through 8, 11. And when I've lectured on textual criticism or the reliability of the text to audiences, I'll ask the question, if you had a preference, you could keep only one of these 12 verse passages in your New Testament, and you had to get rid of the other one. How many would prefer the long ending of

Mark's Gospel? I've gotten two hands to be raised. One was by a former Muslim who had become a Christian. He wanted to have more evidence for the resurrection. And somebody else also with similar background raised their hand. But everybody else, oh, I want the story of the woman caught in adultery. It speaks of God's grace and Jesus' mercy to the woman, and it puts the Pharisees into place, all the rest of this stuff. Bruce Metzger was of the opinion that it was not original, but that it was historically true. And so we would have to make a distinction between what is historical and what is canonical. There's several things, as John says at the end of his gospel, that Jesus did and said that he said it would fill the libraries of the world. We don't have those things.

Maybe this is one of those stories. But it's a passage that was trying to find a place to fit into the Gospels. And one of the things we see with floating passages that don't just get plugged into one place is usually that's because they don't belong there. And so it's found after John 7.52, between 7.52 and 8.12. It's also found at two other locations earlier in John 7. Oh, really? It's found between Luke and John as a freestanding passage. It's found after John as a freestanding passage, and it's found after Luke 21-38. So, how do you explain that? I think that this story in a truncated form actually was part of what Luke edited out of his gospel. And it has more Lucanisms than it does Johannesims.

It looks much more like Luke's vocabulary and grammar than it does like John. Oh, really? Interesting. And so one of my students wrote a paper, a very impressive paper, I think it was published in Novum Testamentum, a major New Testament journal, where he argued that the form of the story of the woman caught in adultery in Luke's hands would have looked like X. And he did all sorts of comparisons to see this. He said, for example, that Jesus wrote something in the sand or the dirt almost surely did happen because there's no explanation as to why he did it. So

why would somebody invent that without explaining why he did it? And there's a lot of manuscripts that give different explanations. He wrote the Ten Commandments, he wrote down the Pharisees, you know, things like that. So it's one of those things that begs for explanation, sin, you know, things like that. So it's one of those things that begs for explanation, and therefore, it's probably authentic. But did the Pharisees peel out from the older to the younger? No, that's probably apocryphal. And was the woman caught in adultery? Well, perhaps not. We don't know what the sin was. I mean, obviously, if she was caught in adultery, there was a man involved. Why wasn't he brought forth too, unless it was a setup by the Pharisees? You know, there's a lot of questions there. But back to the textual issue, if we had to choose on the basis of which passage we want to

have in our Bible, hands down, story of the woman caught in adultery goes in, this picking up snakes business, that's out. When you look at the actual manuscript evidence, though, the issue is reversed. Mark 16, 9 through 20 has far greater evidence on its behalf than the story of the woman caught in adultery does. It's not nearly enough to make it, most scholars think it's original, but it's still more than the pericope adultery. scholars think it's original, but it's still more than the pericope adulteri. And so I'd say what we have to do is instead of bringing emotional baggage to our understanding of the Bible, let the Bible speak to us from the historical basis that we have and all the millions of man hours that have been done in the last five centuries to get back to the original wording.

man hours that have been done in the last five centuries to get back to the original wording. So, so the manuscript evidence for the woman caught adultery, there's, it's not significant. It's what are we looking at? Nearly as significant as what you have in Mark 16, you have, I think only one manuscript before the eighth century that has it codex D and it's in a quite different form from the others, which you have P66, P75, all of A, B, and C did not have it. Now, a couple of them, they're lacking several pages, but we can extrapolate and say, everybody agrees they didn't have the story of the woman caught in adultery.

And, you know, it just goes on. And even later manuscripts, those manuscripts, I believe that have, if I got this right, the ones that have commentary almost always lack it. And those manuscripts that don't have a commentary attached usually have it. But there's been some work done by Tommy Vosserman and some others recently to argue that this was not authentic. It's some really fascinating stuff to think about this passage. And I call it my favorite passage that's not in the Bible. But you did say, you said it felt like Luke, or was that conjecture? So do you think Luke penned? I think Luke had it as part of his special material that ended up on his cutting floor.

And that's why after Luke 21, 38, it would fit best there, but in a much more truncated version. And probably the reason that Luke did not include it was because he's told stories about the grace of God and mercy to women. And this one wasn't quite as interesting. mercy to women and this one yeah just wasn't quite as interesting so so that's we so it does occur in some manuscripts of luke later on but in a truncated version not not in the exact version it's pretty much still the same version but i'm saying that uh that's because by the third century the there were two different versions of this that kind of circulated one was from papius which wasn't exactly the same story and then there was another one that luke had access to okay so it's a it's a complicated

issue and if you're confused by it i'm sure your listeners are too why because so but you would still say something like this probably did happen but the precise details we're not sure exactly what happened but something like this probably happened. Right. I'd say that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Oh, that's disappointing. Yeah. I love that. I'm one of the many who would have raised their hands. You know, what's interesting is I feel like for years in my Christian life, whenever the people refer to that passage, they would always qualify. Now, you know, we're not sure if this is in the original, but I don't hear anybody say that anymore. I see. And I started just, I just quote it and don't even

qualify it. I kind of assumed that like, oh, maybe it's been well established now that it was part of the original, but you kind of burst my bubble. I need to go back and repent. Yeah. Well, you know, some years ago, my pastor was preaching on this passage. He said, it's not in all the manuscripts, but I think it's probably original. And he preached the whole sermon on this. I talked to him afterwards, and I said, you know, the basis for this is so slender. You really shouldn't preach a message on something that most scholars don't think is original. And he said, well, I'm praying that we'll find early manuscripts. You know, that was my attitude for 17 years. I held the same view that he did.

And later, when I really wrestled with these issues about the text and came to a critical decision that we are allowed to use our brains as well as the external data and ask the question, what would scribes be likely to have done? What is the author likely to have done? You end up asking those questions. That's called internal evidence. And we compare that with the external, and that's how texture critics decide what the original is. That must be a scary sight. You're a pastor. You've got Dan Wallace in your congregation.

You preach a sermon afterwards. Dan's got this disgruntled look on his face he's moving towards the front you're like oh crap what did i do it was good sermon too i thought great great sermon wrong text um dan thanks so much for being on i got a bunch of more questions but we're we're butting up against an hour here and i know you got probably a thousand and one things to do. So thank you, man. Thank you so much for your work. Your yeah, this is kind of a me geeking out on this podcast. We don't always go so deep into like textual criticism and stuff,

but this has been fun. Yeah. Thanks for your time. Really appreciate it. Let me conclude with just one thing. Yes. Bart Ehrman in his book, misquoting Jesus talks about both the quantity of variance and the quality of variance. He says he has laid in the book, he talks about how, you know, if you have an angry Jesus in this passage or you don't have an explicit Trinitarian formula here, goes through a number of passages. And he says it does matter. It does affect the meaning of the text. And he says, it does matter.

It does affect the meaning of the text. Well, that's kind of a sleight of hand. Because when his paperback version came out, the book came out in the fall of 2005, I believe. And the paperback version came out a few months later. In the first three months, 100,000 copies of this book were sold. And he was on television shows, Stephen Colbert and John, I forgot his last name, the guy who had Colbert on at first, you know, but anyway, John Stewart, and he's interviewed by newspapers and radio shows and all this. Well, they wanted to keep the sales going, the editors did. And so they had an appendix that they added to the paperback version.

They had an appendix that they added to the paperback version. And on page 252, here these unnamed editors ask the question after they had, I'm sure, read through and edited and know what the book is all about. And they say, why do you disagree with your mentor, Bruce Metzger, about these doctrines that are changed by these variants. When they put the question to him like that, he said, well, I don't disagree with Dr. Metzger. Actually, there's no variants that affect any of these major doctrines. That's not how texture variants work. When they point blank asked him the question, he had to admit, well, no, these doctrines really aren't affected by it.

But in the book, he says they are. Page 252 of the paperback version. You can get that in Christ books, places like that. Wow. Golly. I mean, Bart Ehrman, people might know who he is. Former evangelical, now turned atheist, but still a biblical scholar specializing in the stuff you specialize in.

But you guys have had a few debates right about all these things yeah we have yeah if i can mention a site where they can see one of these yeah so uh if they go to csntm.org that's that's my institute the center for the study of new testament manuscripts cs as in cs lewS. Lewis, NTM as in Antiem of Wizard of Oz fame, csntm.org. And you can find on there the entire video of our second debate at Southern Methodist University before the largest crowd ever to see a debate on the text of the Bible. 1,400 people were there. And we hired a neutral party to video this.

And it's a two-hour presentation of both Bart and I speaking and of us asking questions back and forth, people from the crowd asking questions. And then they did an exit poll. And we asked them, make sure you get a good representation of all sides in the exit poll. There was not a single person that said Bart won the debate. Oh, really? And I was upset about that. I said, guys, I asked you to get a fair representation.

They said, we tried. Here's people that had Muslim or atheists or Mormon on their shirts leaving. And we asked them and they refused to talk to us. They just left. Not one person thought that Ehrman won the debate. Wow. Oh, that's crap. I got to go. I got to go watch that. That's the one to watch. I've seen him debate other people. And he's, you know, when people are good at debating, they don't even need to have the best arguments on their side. They're just, they can be so good rhetorically. And I've seen him do that with some really smart people and he'll just spin things around and say things and twist or whatever. I'm like, oh, that, that's scary. So that's, that's, I want to go watch. I heard, I remember when it happened. I was going to go see see it actually but i couldn't get down there but i'm not good at debating i've been in seven debates in my life and three with bart erman he's been in hundreds of them yeah yeah yeah he was a national championship high school debater oh really that makes that makes perfect sense okay well dan yeah second ending thank you so

much for uh being on the show really appreciate you and yeah so csntm.org to check out that and many other things going on in your world. Thanks for letting me be on your show. Appreciate it. My pleasure. My pleasure. Yeah. Take care. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.