Q&A 12: How were the books of the Bible copied & preserved?

Okay, we have this question 12 here that we're taking a look at. How were the books of the Bible copied and preserved? Last week we talked about how certain books were chosen and other books were excluded. This time we're going on to the question of how the books of the Bible were copied and preserved. As you have in the top part of the handout reproduced from last week, there are four questions in this sort of a chain. of how we got certain books and how we got the Bible.

The first one was the inspiration of the original writings of Scripture. Scripture has about 40 authors, writing over about 1500 years time, and the original writings were inspired by God. This is 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17. The next thing is the recognition, which we covered last week, Holy Spirit and what was not. You see, actually, the believers who looked at which books are in the Bible and which books are not, they didn't actually declare what was inspired and what wasn't. They recognized what was inspired. Important distinction. And the third thing that we're looking at today, the copying and preservation of Scripture.

Until about the middle 1400s, There was no printing, right? So anything that was to be preserved was something handwritten, hand copied. And for us, that is quite an undertaking to imagine, but we don't have to deal with it, do we? Now, then the fourth one. We used to do copy and paste. It's beyond me why Paul just didn't send an email.

One of the reasons why this hand copying had to be done was to preserve things from decay. Ultimately decay grabs all the different things that are out there. Unless things are put in stone, And let me tell you, imagine the whole Bible being written in stone. Did you bring your Bible today in the back of your truck? No, I only managed to get the New Testament, right? That would be really rough. So that item there, preservation from decay.

Since almost all the materials in which the scriptures were copied were subject to decay, usually papyrus, or parchment. It was interesting when I was over in Uganda they had fields for miles of papyrus. I had no idea that anybody was still raising that stuff but they had commercial papyrus fields. The papyrus is just a reed that grows in real swampy territory and they would take the reed and then fold it out and then glued together, actually kind of pound together, kind of cross-grained pieces of this reed paper.

Then they would write on that paper. That was how the inexpensive paper was made in those days. The other alternate was parchment, which was animal skins scraped really clean and thin. Those were the two options. The parchment is more expensive. And also it tends to last longer, but it's still something that over time decays.

Pardon? And so does regular paper. It's one of the things you might have noticed if you do an internet search, a lot of the older books are now being put on Google, even some newer books being put on Google and they'll scan the whole book in. And one reason for doing that is because a lot of these older books, they have acid in the paper and it's actually self decaying. some of the historical documents, you know, our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, things like that, as they were originally written, have to be preserved in very special units in order to keep them from being decayed. Yes? This term, reverend and psalter? Yes. Someone should have those? We'll get to that in just a minute. He brought up some terms towards the bottom part of the page. We'll get there.

So anyway, the preservation meant making new copies from the older copies, which were still in good enough condition to copy from. This required continuous copying from the originals and from copies of the originals and from copies of copies of the originals, etc. So it's like, okay, that's done, now start copying again, right? In order to have more and more copies. That's what was required.

There's also preservation from persecutions. Aside from the issue of decay, from these things getting eaten up by worms and insects and things of that sort, mildew, all the things that might damage them. There was also preservation through persecutions.

One of those is through the Roman Empire. A real quick statistic, the Roman Empire had 10, if you've got all the fingers, it's easy to count, 10 persecutions, right? waves of ten persecutions finally ending after 312 AD. And so in those waves of persecutions, one of the things that would happen is they would, the Roman Empire went out and tried to destroy copies of the scriptures. And so here are these Christians carefully copying these things and trying to protect them, and all the while the Roman Empire is trying to stop the copying and trying to destroy the things that are copied. So in one respect, it is practically miraculous that we have copies to deal with at all, because of the fact that the Roman Empire was so The way that they did it is, the rule went like this. A Roman official would come to the front door of a suspected Christian. A Roman soldier would accompany them.

And they would say, we are coming here to collect your scriptures. You can declare them. But whether you declare them or not, we're coming in and we're going to look for all the scriptures we can find and destroy them. If you tell us ahead of time that you have them, there will be no penalty and you won't be harmed. But we will find them. If, on the other hand, you don't tell us you have them and we find them, this officer, Roman soldier here, is going to kill you.

Right now. Okay? So you decide. That's the way it was. Anyone who was suspected of being a Christian, that was the way they did it. So you have that. In addition to that, under the Roman Catholic Church, it was illegal to have copies of the scriptures. Just patently illegal. Yes.

Even before scriptures were recorded in print, what about the, before those days, the verbal inspiration of the scriptures were just recited and handed down that way before they got into print? There is a tradition among especially the Jews of memorizing great portions of scripture and particularly in the Old Testament.

One of the things that is asked is, excuse me, one of the things that was done was of the disciples of Jesus. It was common for the disciples of anyone, of any of the Jewish leaders, any of the rabbis, to spend time drilling on memorizing the scriptures. So one of the questions that people ask, well, how is it that we have these things written by Matthew and Mark and John and Luke, and they're written so much later? Well, one reason is because the disciples would spend time and drilling and drilling and drilling each other on what their rabbi, Jesus in this case, said.

And so you're correct, that was a tradition of memorizing and memorizing and memorizing the scripture. So aside from the hand copying that was taking place, there was also a matter of committing a great deal to memory. The Jews, aside from that, would memorize the Torah. They memorized the law. and great portions of it.

Under the Roman Catholic Church they forbid that the Bible be translated into the common languages of the people. It was just simply expressly forbidden. The church could have copies and the inspired versions were the Latin in their estimation. The people were simply not permitted to have copies. Now it didn't mean that they didn't have them, but it was not legal for them to have them.

So any copies they had were black market, so to speak. The Roman Catholic Church said that the inspired version was in Latin, which is the Vulgate. So they made copies of the Greek. But ultimately it was the Latin that they had and that's what got read and recited. But it was just patently illegal for the people to have copies, especially in Rome language.

It faded. You know, the Roman Empire came apart and so the Latin was something taught among those who were in But that was it. It was a dead language. Was the Vulgate in a different lineage of translations than the others? The Vulgate was the Latin translation made during the end period of the Roman Empire. I believe Jerome.

That's what was copied and carried down in a separate line of copying. So what did they use to copy from the Greek? Well, first they translated from the Greek and the Hebrew. And then they continued to make copies from those original translations. And the other translations? Well, there were earlier Latin translations.

As a matter of fact, some of the earliest copies of the Bible we have were in Latin, right? But the Vulgate was specifically the translation that the Roman Catholic Church used. You still haven't seen basic Gospel messages, any other translations? Yes, except that rather than... What we would say is we study the original languages because in them we have what was originally inspired, right? Yeah? Wasn't that long ago then that the Catholic Church started letting the laity read?

Yeah, in other words, if you look at it, what would happen is, yeah, this is the inspired scripture, it's the Vulgate, but nobody's allowed to have it. And especially not in the common language. Translating the common language is just forbidden. And so it didn't mean people didn't have it, but it was something that was persecuted.

We have here, aside from the Roman Empire, after the Roman Catholic Church, they had the decree of Pope Innocent III. This is 1199. It's about the time they were setting out with the first Crusades. And the Council of Toulouse, and also the Council of Tarragona. The Council of Toulouse 1229, Canon 14 reads like this.

We prohibit also the laity to be permitted to have the books of the Old and New Testament. The clergy could have it, but not the laity, unless anyone from motive of devotion should wish to have the Psalter, or the Breviary, this is the for Divine Offices or the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, that we most strictly forbid them having any translations of these books, other than the Latin bogate, of course, was assumed. Basically, it was just simply not permitted for people to have the scriptures in their own language. Just forbidden.

By the way, I quote here Canon 14. Many of the rest of the canon items prior to and after that had to do with destroying the houses of the people who were found with these scriptures. And more specifications on how you're going to go about destroying the houses. Tearing them to pieces, making sure that they're absolutely burned to ashes. You may not have any copies of the scriptures, and if you do, your house will be dust.

Do we know why they persecuted the scriptures so much? That's a very good question. What they looked upon, because there was such a distinction between clergy and laity, it was looked upon that people cannot be trusted with the scriptures. Pardon? No, I think there's another reason behind it.

And that is that towards the end of the Roman Empire, one of the things that they did is make it capital punishment for parents not to baptize their infants. And so the people who were objecting to baptizing their infants were killed. One of the things that was feeding that was they would say, the Bible doesn't say anything about baptizing our infants. And so it was feeding that problem. So one of the things they did is, well, you can't have any Bibles then, right? Yes?

What era was Lutheranism? And didn't Martin Luther start translating? Yes, and we'll get into that here, but let me answer that briefly. Martin Luther was in the early 1500s, and yes, he translated into German, for example, that was his work. Wycliffe in the 1400s translated from the Latin Vulgate into English, and although he was not killed, He was, in his group, was persecuted. After he died, the Pope ordered that his bones be dug up and burned to powder and then thrown into the Thames River. So although they weren't successful in killing him, he was nonetheless highly disregarded for having done so. Okay, then the next thing we have here is the hand copy.

Until the invention of the printing press, and the printing press did several things. One is, one of the first things off the press, as I understand the first thing off the press, was the Bible in Latin. But subsequent to that, they started printing the Bible in other languages, including Martin Luther's German translation. In addition to that, they also printed out materials on, you know, here, now finally you can have Greek and Hebrew grammars and lexicons and things like that.

So now all of a sudden people could easily get hold of things to begin translating the Bible itself. And so that's when the whole translation issue got completely out of hand from the church. And ultimately Roman Catholic Church was forced to be in a place of having translations and things of that sort just because there was no way to suppress it. They couldn't suppress it any further because everybody could learn how to read the Greek and the Hebrew and make translations and a great many people were doing it. So the printing press finally overwhelmed the Catholic Church's objections to the translations.

So you're right. Ultimately what they did is to come up with their own Bible, Catholic Bible, and to come up with their own printings of it that the Church itself did authorize. Still today, however, they're not allowed to arrive at any interpretations that are in conflict with what the Roman Catholic Church says. When did the Catholic Church allow the laity to have their own private bibles?

What happened is Tyndale, in the early 1400s, And then there were other subsequent translations into English. We hear, for example, the Geneva Bible was one that was very popular before the King James came about. Finally, there were so many translations into English and in print and being printed all over the place that it couldn't be suppressed. And so around the same time that the King James Bible was first produced, the Roman Catholic Church was beginning to produce its own English versions.

They had the Douay and other versions coming out of the Catholic Church itself. So it was interesting, because of the printing press, And because of the ability of people to begin making their own translations, it finally overwhelmed the Catholic Church's anti-Bible policy. And they simply couldn't suppress it anymore. People were getting Bibles left and right, and they were coming off the printing presses, and there was no way for them to sustain that.

It's interesting that there's nothing wrong with the Dewey Bible as far as Translation is the notes in it that they that they're bad. Yeah Some of the Catholic Bibles are you know, I think good translations Yeah, it's frequently notes and footnotes and things of that source that in commentaries that begin to have an issue Okay, now, on page 2, you'll see a series of slides. These are from a PowerPoint set, but we'll just kind of walk our way through it.

At the top there, it says, In the copying of the Old and New Testaments, there are really two different stories to tell. The Old Testament was copied almost entirely by Jews, except for the later copies of the Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. The New Testament was copied by the Christians and increasingly those Christians of Gentile background who also began to copy the Septuagint. So here we have the Old Testament copied by Jews in the original languages of Hebrew and a little bit of Aramaic. and the New Testament copied by Christians who increasingly are Gentile. So you have those two separate traditions going on. Among the Old Testament documents written in Hebrew, except for portions of Daniel and Ezra, has come from the Talmudic and Masoretic textual copying tradition and from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These Old Testament texts number in the tens of thousands. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which took place about five years before I was born, and they continued to find more discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls on into the 50s. you know, here's another cave, here's another cave, or we look closer at this cave and found some more, that kind of thing. So it's almost every year or two they discovered additional Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolls that had been hidden in these caves in Israel and Jordan. And so more and more discoveries were made. Until that time, it was all other texts that had been copied and handed down from which the Old Testament was gathered. Now, we're going to talk more about this copying and how they went about it.

So until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest copies that we had of the Old Testament were from around 980. So that's like about a thousand years earlier is what the Dead Sea Scrolls announced. quite a jump. Now in this slide called copying of the, and I have OT for Old Testament, copying of the Old Testament documents, this is the third slide on page two, the Jewish copying tradition which credits Ezra as its founder was to see copying the Old Testament scriptures as a sacred work and defined by explicit traditions.

Scribes who copied the text were to wash their hands before and after copying. And by the way, what advantage would that have? Washing their hands before and after. One is less likely to smudge, good, and why else? The oil on your hands. Yes, the oil on the hands would be something that would degrade the parchment Yeah, so that's a very important point. It's one of the reasons why those particular copies were able to be preserved in much better condition.

And then praying before each day of copying. It was looked upon as not just a sort of a secular thing to do, it was looked upon as a very holy act. The name of God was left blank to be filled in later with a pure ink by another scribe. Is that interesting? So you come to the name of God and you leave that blank and you leave enough space in there. They count spaces. Leave the space in there so that another scribe would come in with a very pure ink and just do those. To be done very carefully. Yeah, the next, yeah, red letters.

Copying the Old Testament documents on the next slide over, which has kind of a half a slide blank. The scribe would check the middle word of each section with the original and also counting the number of words in each section. They would go through, let's say you're copying the book of Isaiah, okay? Go and count all the words in the book of Isaiah. Count the whole thing, okay? And as you count, you would note what is the middle word in the whole book. So when you make a copy, you also count those and make sure you have the same middle word. This is being really picky. Truth reading. Yes, this is being really picky. Because the concern was taking away from or adding to.

Remember the account. Here is the so-called Ethiopian eunuch. Here's a copy of Isaiah. That was very expensive, hand-copied book of Isaiah. That's the whole thing. It would cost quite a sum just to get the parchment for that. and then to pay for a subscribe. And now, this copy of Isaiah he had was not some casual copy, because remember how they had to go about copying. This is one of those, you paid for guys to sit there and count all the words and make sure the middle word was the right word. So that's one reason why their copying was done very, very well.

Now, here's the bad part. Suppose a copyist You know what they did? Destroy the scroll. You cannot have a bad copy. You just kind of keep it around. If you had a bad copy and there was something wrong with it, you had to wreck it. And let me tell you, if a scribe is going to have to start over like that, he's going to be real careful, right?

Especially if he starts thinking of something like the book of Isaiah, some big long scroll like that. What was that in honor of God? This was in honor of the Scriptures itself, which obviously have the name of God on in numerous places. Here is, if we use the example of the Book of Isaiah, where here's the Dead Sea Scrolls, we've got this massive set. What was very interesting, when the scholars just start discovering these Dead Sea Scrolls, roughly a thousand years earlier than our earliest copy before that date, it was an excellent opportunity to find out how do they do over a thousand years? Do they keep it straight on? And the reality is they did a fantastic job because they square up very, very well. I'm really fascinated because of my background in printing and so forth.

Yes. And I was thinking, because I didn't study any of this part of it. Yeah. To find this, they would have to lay out the whole scroll and find a set in the language. Yeah. So you would go to the center from the right. Yes. Yeah, so here they are counting.

They start at the back basically from our order and then count the number of words and then get the middle word and it had to be the right word in the middle word. And would they go a whole line to the center and then start again and another whole line the center or did they go in columns? Well they went in columns. They went in columns and frequently what you'll find is the scribes often tried to keep the columns, you know what was in each column, the same from one to the next. It made it easier to check your work because this column matches that column matches that column and so you could tell more column by column if you were I don't have a picture of it with me, but.

We have, for example, several Isaiah scrolls, and some in very poor condition, some in very good condition, from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so, I mean, you'll have a big mass like this. That's the whole book. Yeah, I mean, the whole book in one big scroll. So, for example, this Ethiopian eunuch, I mean, he had this thing, and it was just, you know, it was all Yes, oh yeah, definitely. It was quite a work. So you'd have somebody crank the knobs. The frequent thing is they'd have somebody cranking the knobs.

In the synagogues, they would have copies of books, especially they would try to keep the Torah in there, but copies of the books in the synagogues. And so at the synagogue, it would be a matter of turning to the right place. When Jesus was at the synagogue and he started in Isaiah, and he read a verse and a half and he stopped. But that part that he read out of Isaiah, he had to probably crank the scroll a ways just to find the right place. And by the way, they didn't have chapter and verse locations either. Which is why you'll see in the New Testament where they're quoting the Old Testament, they'll say it is written or someplace it says or as Isaiah wrote because they didn't have chapter and verse designations. Chapters were designated around the year 1200 and verses in the middle 1500s.

Now, let's go on to the next one, Old Testament Textual Traditions. The Masoretic Text, the entire Hebrew Old Testament, OT means Old Testament, copied by the Masoretes, that was a group who began copying and had their copying traditions, after the scribal tradition as in Mark 2, verse 6 and 7. Dead Sea Scrolls, one or more copies of the entire Hebrew Old Testament except Esther. In some books we have a great number of copies. The one book out of the entire Old Testament that's not included in the Dead Sea Scrolls that we've discovered is the book of Esther. Doesn't mean they didn't have it, we just simply have not discovered it or found a copy.

The Samaritan Torah. What happened with the Samaritans is because the Jews didn't accept them, but they very much wanted to carry on some kind of a Jewish tradition, is they took the first five books and altered it so that they could have their temple up on the mountain above where Jesus met the woman at the well. Because remember, the woman says, we worship on this mountain, pointed at the mountain right above where Jacob's well is, on Jerusalem. And so theirs is modified to allow worship and sacrifices upon that mountain. Other than that, it's largely exact same as the Hebrew scroll. So the Samaritans had made their own copies with that variation.

The Septuagint, this is the Greek translation, made around the year 200 BC, okay? And most New Testament quotes of the Old Testament are from this Greek translation, the Septuagint. About 80% of the time when John the Baptist and Jesus quote the Old Testament in the Gospels, they do so from this Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. In the book of Ephesians, and in Hebrews, and in the book of Revelation, there is a particular version of this Greek Old Testament that was used around the area of Ephesus. And it specifically has the marks of that particular version of the Greek Old Testament. Now, New Testament documents, as I said here, there are at least 5,309 surviving hand-copied Greek manuscripts that contain all or parts of the New Testament. The number keeps growing. This figure is from about 2002. And they find more handwritten copies just every year. So this number is a minimum and dated. It's actually grown since then.

There are more than 19,000 ancient New Testament manuscript in Latin. About 8,000 in Latin. Syriac, Arminian. It's not Arminian but Arminian. These are all hand copied versions. Some of the best and earliest that we have are the old Latin. This is not the Vulgate that I mentioned before, but actually the old Latin. The oldest copy of the New Testament known to exist are the Syriac and Old Latin verses.

All total more than 24,000. I say more than 24,000. By now the number is close to 25,000. Handwritten copies of the New Testament have survived. And that is in spite of centuries of official persecution. And I'm saying death penalty. Can you imagine that? Death penalty, if you've got this, if you're caught copying, you're just done. For centuries that was the case. In spite of that, this is the most copied document in the whole world by hand.

Copying the New Testament, the bottom of page two. Copies for the New Testament documents did not have a consistent tradition like the copies of the Old Testament. New Testament copying quality therefore was more variable from one to the next than Old Testament copying quality, but there are a great many copies. Let me ask this question. What would be a reason why the copyists of the New Testament would not have this tradition like we talked about with the Jews where you wash your hands and pray and use special ink and all that? Why would that be true of the copies of the New Testament where they don't have that tradition?

Right, in other words, the Jews had the law and the law had this rigidity to it, right? And since the Gentiles weren't under that, they would not. Why else? different people way. They didn't have any consistent standard people. That's right. In other words, you think about it, the Jews here, you've got, okay, we've got the Old Testament, it's written in Hebrew, and you know, we've got our culture and all that, and certainly some variation in the Jewish culture. But then you're talking about, you know, one person copying would be someone who's, I got to get this copied quickly before the police get here, you know, take my scriptures away, and he's not raised in any copying tradition, and somebody else comes up and they're from some other culture, some other background, and then here's something else, we'll refer to it a little bit later, differences in the way we speak. How are you going to copy something that's different?

For example, how do we spell theater? The last two letters? ER. Some parts of the world, more British background, RE, right? If you go to copy something and it has theatre RE, what might you do if you're an American? Change it to ER, right? What if the place name changes in your particular culture? You might update it. So there would be situations that we could understand where they might, oh no, that's not, we don't call it that.

We do this, right? If I say supper, what does that mean? Evening meal, right? How about lunch? It depends on what part of the country you're in, right? In the U.S. Same thing there, they would have different traditions in different areas. And so if I'm copying, I might want to try to adapt it to my area. And so then that copying, if somebody then gets a hold of that and makes their own copy, they're going to reflect that kind of cultural difference, aren't they? So there would be reasons for having that.

The last slide on page two, for both the Old Testament and New Testament texts, the science is called textual criticism. Essentially what they do is they look at texts in terms of, they're able now, for instance, to date. a particular document. What are some of the ways they can date a particular document? Carbon dating. Carbon dating is now available and so that's one opportunity. They may even take samples from different parts of the document. Isotope dating. Yes, that's right. Isotope dating. Largely carbon dating is one of those things. Developed about the same time as the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.

Okay, and what else? How else might they leak? Pardon? Yes, there's another one. The type of ink. What kind of ink was used was also another procedure. And what else? Yes, what kind of paper do we have? Are we using the papyrus? Some places after a while they quit using the papyrus. So you have changes in paper.

With that many living documents and it's copied, you can look backwards to see where is that copy coming from? Exactly. What you end up having by looking at who copied from whom, by using carbon dating, also by lettering styles. Over time they would use different lettering styles and you begin to identify what's what. and what particular time periods they use certain lettering styles. Ever read letters from even the 1800s? Boy, the way they wrote, just real different.

So by observing these different things, we're able to make essentially a genealogical chart. And then that points back to what's the original, right? And so then If you say, do we have any of the originals of any of the documents of the Bible? The answer is no. But with the number of copies, as you pointed out, the ability to make this genealogical chart, we're able to say this one here is closest to the original. And in addition to that, compared to all the other ancient documents that are out there, We have copies closest to the original in time and a great number of copies to give us a greater certainty about what's in the original text than any of the ancient documents from Ancient times.

That's not just more, it's a significant amount more. A massive amount more, yes. In other words, here we're talking about 24,000. Some of the ancient documents, by comparison, are like seven. That's a lot more, right? Some of the ancient documents that we use to try to reconstruct, for example, Roman or Greek history, we might have a thousand year gap. between the earliest document and the actual event. In some cases, it's even more than that. With the Bible, we've got copies of some of the books from within a few decades of when John the Apostle died.

So much, much closer and a great many more hand-copied documents. And that's in spite of centuries of official persecution. Centuries of destroy their houses, destroy the people, destroy the documents. In spite of that, this is a practically miraculous preservation. And I might even be able to delete that word practically.

All right, let's take a look at page three. Give us an idea. There are changes in styles of writing. The style of writing that you see, given as an example, are called uncials. That is that everything would be put in capitals and all about the same size. And you notice where the space is between the words. They aren't. So they did run into issues, and this also made a copying issue, if you start to break words apart separately. In English, if you bunch things together, what's the difference between now here and nowhere? You can't tell, right?

Except in context. Context tells you. The other is local variations in spelling. I mentioned that you have difference between theater and theater. Savior and savior. And dinner, supper, and lunch. Different parts of the country, we have variations. So there are variations that are cultural variations that show up. But as Kate mentioned, one of the things that comes up through this, we're still able to develop a genealogy which points to the original.

The other thing that becomes an issue is also handwritten notes. A number of you make notes in your Bibles, right? I've done this in the past. As a matter of fact, what you see there is a sample, is a note from one of my Bibles where I used some little micro pen to write notes here. You can tell, however, the difference between the handwritten notes and printed portions of the Bible, right?

When you get into a hand-copied document and somebody puts in a note, it can be a little more difficult. And we have an example there. Fortunately, it's kind of separated and off to the side, but if they didn't do that, the next person copying, if they can't tell the difference, might just copy the note. But, that's also a matter of when you set up your genealogy, and say, look, I noticed that everybody from here on copied the note. And so you say, okay, at this point, that note was added. And we can recognize that and distinguish that. Let's look at page four. Then there are the copying errors.

And as you look at some of these, could you tell the difference between I will go to the roof and I will go to the root? in English, right? You'd say, well, especially in context, I will go to the roof, is probably what's looked at there. Blessed are you, and blessed were you, And so that would be an area where you might lose the distinction. And the next one, go to my house or go to house.

Okay, dropping out a word is another possibility. So as people are looking at these different copies, they're looking at, oh, I can tell where he made a mistake, right? And you can also look at what's the correct version from comparing those. I'm going to move down to this Bible versions and text. It's the fourth one on page four.

The King James Version used a majority text tradition, about 16 printings of the Greek text for the New Testament by 1611, made from about a dozen documents, most of those being more recent in origin, that is, not older. The New International Version, using the critical text, that's one where they've worked with a number of additional documents, makes minimal note or variant readings. The New American Standard Bible reflects some discernment between majority, that is what was used for the King James and the critical text.

One of the things that we have noted here, we're not going to have time to address it. There are two places in your Bibles where you will often find notes that say, you know, the best documents don't have this. And one of those is from Mark chapter 16, verses 9 through 20. And so on page 5, we include some of the support. for that portion of Mark, I believe, should be kept as the original text. The notes that you will see, I think, are in error. I would say keep it, don't worry about it, it's scripture. The other passage, and what I've included is a supplement page at the very back part of your handout.

On John 7.53 to 8.11, this is the account of the woman caught in adultery. And I believe that also should be included in scripture and not questioned. I think the questioning of that portion of scripture is a mistake. And those two places are the biggest issues. Why would I say that questioning those are a mistake? Here's why.

Almost all of the New Testament is available in commentaries and in lectionaries apart from the copies of just straight New Testament text. You could, if you didn't have, remember all these copies of the New Testament I told you about, thousands of copies? If you didn't have any of those, you could assemble all but about a half-dozen verses out of the hand-copied commentaries and lectionaries, that is, the lectionaries were the compilations that were used for reading in the churches, reading sections of scripture in the churches. If we had no New Testament text, we could compile all but about a half dozen verses out of all these other writings.

Those other writings include these portions that are in question. I think they called them into question for no good reason. And that you can, with confidence, read those portions of scripture, don't worry about the notes. I think they made a mistake in even including those notes. So, anyway, we've run out of time.

Hopefully this gives you some insight. The Bible that you have is the Bible God intended for you to have. What's in it, and in some translations it's called into question, ought not to be. You can, with immense confidence, read what's in God's Word and know that that's what was there and what God intended to say and what he intended for us to have. these insights into how we got our Bible, into how things were sustained even in the face of decay and persecution and suppression of Bible copying. We're just thankful for your Holy Spirit's preservation, even miraculous preservation, in light of these persecutions and other issues. I just thank you that we have your word and can count upon every word from the mouth of God. We just pray in Jesus' name.