Autograph Testament Made Easy

Autograph testament

[Music] hey everyone welcome to christ culture and coffee i'm your host robbie lashawa and i'm here with my amazing co-host tyler hurley how you doing tyler hey i'm doing great thanks robbie i think you're pretty amazing yourself too so stop it get out of here what are you sucking up for just kidding dude it's good to see you i mean i i don't know here we go but cool we are super excited about this episode today because we're going to get more in depth on textual criticism and manuscript evidence yeah this one is this episode's a little more technical than normal you know what i mean it's kind of uh it's a little bit more uh in-depth and nerdy but i think i think our listeners are going to enjoy it so hey i do want to mention this too if you're watching um so tyler and i again aren't together in person we're doing this over the internet and the reason for it is uh i shared last week how i'd been sick turns out my wife and i had the coronavirus so there it is it actually happened we actually had it and so we've been quarantined uh the nice thing is we're both feeling great uh so we just praise the lord for that but um my quarantine's actually up on friday uh so a few few more days here and i'll be back on the streets uh can't wait to get it back out and yeah with oh man it's been a long time i've been in here so anyway just wanted to let people know that that's what's going on and that's why we're we're filming like this but we still wanted to do the show even though uh i've got issues and i had coveted and uh i'm glad it's over and i've got some antibodies now so that's nice yeah and you've been really a trooper sticking through especially like like just through the past couple weeks with being sick and everything you've still been able to do the podcast so uh props to you robbie well done yeah well thanks well i felt pretty good on the days we've been recording so that's been uh that's great but well let's get into it today so tyler this is christ culture and coffee we love to start with a coffee tip and this coffee tip that you have for us today this is coffee snobbery at its finest i mean this is getting into the details of making good coffee so why don't you tell us what the coffee tip is for today yes so you hit the nail on the head when you're saying this is very coffee snob type because this is something like so precise but but the coffee tip we have for you today is to ensure a great cup of coffee you need to take into account your brew ratio i'll say that again ratio yeah the ratio of your coffee to water that's what we're talking about when we say brew ratio okay i like it to ensure precision you need to buy a countertop scale for your kitchen and you need to weigh the coffee grounds and the water you need to weigh them not just measure them robbie wait wait wait hold on hold on weigh them yes like on a food scale you need to weigh them okay and now in order to do that so the thing is is the reason you do this to weigh them instead of measuring let's say you use tablespoons to measure your coffee right okay well the problem is that's inaccurate because depending on how coarse or fine the grind is you'll have a certain volume of coffee that will change depending on that type of grind oh that's so sweet so yeah so it's not a one tablespoon can differ from another tablespoon depending on the grind or the bean or anything like that of course because of the difference yeah exactly what you said the different kind of beans uh the way you grind it all of that takes into account which we've talked plenty of times on this show however uh this is more about the ratio of the actual grounds you have to water and so by weighing it it's a clearly what we have here through research is most professionals use a ratio of 115 to 117 uh coffee to water volume so one gram of coffee for every 15 to 17 grams of water which is okay eight ounce cup which is 237 grams you need 14 16 grams of coffee okay okay that makes sense so okay so let me make sure i got this straight so yes the ratio to use is one gram of coffee for every 15 to 17 grams of water yes exactly so now i'm doing math in order to make coffee tyler right yes but apparently the experts that are out there the professionals who make coffee out there say that this is the best brew ratio to take into account of how good your coffee tastes well hey i'll i'll give it a shot i need to get one of those scales though so i can start weighing in yeah yeah because if you think about it everything comes into account when you're making your coffee uh like the amount of water you use if you use too much it can become a little more diluted or if you use too little it's not it's too strong you know so you kind of have to have a balance of what you're going for with your makes sense man no it makes sense yeah and to be precise like that so you can have consistency over time yeah that's a good tip i like that it does it does so anyways that's your coffee tip for the day to all you coffee snobs out there so it's very very important i guess by according to these experts that you weigh your grounds and your water i like it man good tip you are very welcome now let's get into the content for today because this i'm super excited about this yeah this is pretty fun stuff so like just to promise it so what we're talking about today because we're in a series on new testament reliability and so what we're going to be talking about today is how do we know what the original new testament said like that is the goal how do we know that what we have in our bibles today is the same thing that the apostle paul wrote and the apostle peter wrote how do we know that we actually even have the new testament and so today we're just going to get super nerdy and we're going to talk about how do experts how do scholars go about ascertaining that's a big word ascertaining what the new testament actually originally said and do we know what it said so here we go i'm excited about this yes yes and so uh the first thought first and foremost we want to start off with the information that's interesting that a lot of people out there don't know we do not have the original autograph meaning the actual tangible handwritten documents of the new testament what are you talking about we don't have like what paul wrote we have it of course but we have copies of copies we don't have the physical piece of parchment or papyru or whatever paul actually wrote on okay for the new testament documents and that goes for all books we only have copies of copies now a lot of people look at that and they think that that's a problem right because you think well of course like why wouldn't you want to have the original what the actual author did because someone could have messed with it right but the thing the fact is we have so many copies so many manuscripts in fact we have and this is an estimated around 50 100 to 5300 greek new testament manuscripts and the greek ones are important because the original autographs the original handwritten parchments were written in greek however you may have caught right there i said 50 100 to 5300 now that's a range of 200 manuscripts yep right that's right yeah so robbie tell us why can't we be more precise why is there such a big gap of how many manuscripts that we talk about here well this is interesting tyler because in a lot of apologetics books that i've read over the years and that you've read you know they're given like the exact number as if we could even know the exact number recent scholarship has come out and talked about how we should probably to be more accurate give a range and not try to be exact because when we try to be exact that number it becomes obsolete there's a few reasons for it um they're discovering new manuscripts all the time and so new manuscripts come out and uh they kind of uh add to the old number but we're also it's also hard to be precise and and i want to give a couple of reasons why so when people are looking at the greek new testament manuscripts there are four different categories of manuscripts there are what are called magiscuoles what are called minuscules what are called papyri and what are called lectionaries okay those are like the four categories of the greek manuscripts and i want to explain to you what each of those are so magic schools are the earliest type of greek writing that are used in the greek manuscripts we have and this type of writing is all capital letters with no spaces in between words and hardly any punctuation at all so this is interesting could you imagine reading a book in english that's all capital letters that there's no spacing between right that's what the magical manuscripts are and um there's a lot of reasons for why they did this one of the reasons was you could save on parchment because you only had a certain length of uh of scroll and so by cramming it all together you could fit a lot in there and this was just a style that they wrote it was a handwriting style capital letters no spaces now minuscules are different handwriting uh they're in small letters and they're more cursive like so it's not capital all smushed together it's different the majority of greek manuscripts that we have are minuscules but the minuscule style didn't really start appearing until the 9th century a.d so that's interesting papyri uh these are manuscripts that are made with papyrus they're written on papyrus so this is actually where we get our word paper from uh is papyri uh what papyrus is is it's a reed plant that grows abundantly in egypt and uh they cut thin strips of papyrus and then they lay strips in two layers they lay it down flat like in a horizontal and then uh vertical layers and they let it dry out and then they beat it down and they press it and they let it dry and they smooth it out and it becomes like a flat sheet of paper almost right it's it's made of reeds but it's similar it's similar to paper it's super strong and it's very very durable in dry climates and so they would take these sheets of papyri after they had had processed them and then they'd glue them together and you could make scrolls out of papyrus so we have a lot of papyri that we found in egypt and other arid um climates that have new testament greek writings on them but the papyri is about the type of material they're written on and then the fourth category are lectionaries and lectionaries are greek manuscripts that are arranged in sections of scripture that are to be read in public worship service so it's almost like an aid that you'd have at church right to read hey today we're all reading this and people would get it out and they would they would read from it so now here's the thing tyler there's these four different types of of greek new manuscripts do you notice a problem with these four categories this is really interesting right the the problem is two of them are based on a writing handwriting style one of them is based on what material it's made out of and then one of them's based on the content and the arrangement of the content so this is a problem for us right there we go you can see these categories kind of overlap each other right exactly man that's a huge point yeah so there's like some papyri uh which is they're made out of papyrus right yes we we didn't talk about what the handwriting style is on some papyri well some of them are magical right so do you count it as papyri or do you count it as magical do you see the problem yeah which one is it that's a that's a very important question when it comes to counting these it is man and even with like lectionaries like some lectionaries are magical some lectionaries are minuscule so do you count it as a lectionary or do you count it as minuscule like yeah that's right so it gets really interesting when you get into the details of how they count these and are we double counting things um another way that sometimes stuff gets double counted is that there's manuscripts that have been disassembled and sold in pieces to different buyers around the world right so it's it's really difficult to know if some manuscripts are actually part of another manuscript right so sometimes a manuscript could get counted twice like if i found like a codex a book of greek new testament writings and i i was like i want to make a lot of money off this so i sell one sheet to you and one sheet to a guy in africa and one cheat two guy in europe you basically could count those as three different manuscripts but they're not they're all one manuscript it's just you don't know so sometimes we count things uh twice because of issues like that and then in addition to that some manuscripts have been lost accidentally um there's like records of a certain manuscript and then the libraries that house them can't find it anymore and so there's like pictures of lost manuscripts it's like i don't know where it went um so that happens um but also sometimes people steal the manuscripts because they have like tremendous religious experience right or because they have like monetary value and so there have been times where people have stolen manuscripts and then resold them and they get counted as a new manuscript which they shouldn't have because we already counted them so to say hey here's the precise exact number of new testament manuscripts we have is really a bad idea because of all these factors but within that it's safe to say we have somewhere between 5 100 to 5 300 greek new testament manuscripts right does that make sense yeah of course it does and that's important to remember uh because what's interesting about this is all these manuscripts are not necessarily equal to each other either like a big point yeah like some of them contain the entire new testament like for example the codex and niticus where it literally documents the entire new testament that we have that uh but then there are other that are just fragments that only have one or two words on them like the john uh ryland papyri or p52 document which is literally like what like just a couple inches long and it's got just a couple words on it yeah i think it's two i think the exact measurements are it's about two inches by three inches so and it has some of the gospel of drawn on the front in the back yep exactly yeah yeah and so it's like but that's still that's still a manuscript little credit card size is a manuscript and then the whole book of the new testament is those are each counted as a manuscript yeah it's counted as just one so it's like you have some that are uh but then then again you have some that are older than others even though they contain less so it provides more credibility so you have to take all these things into account and so it's important we realize that we don't count manuscripts just on their num numerical value but instead weigh the evidence that we find contained in the manuscripts that's a huge point tyler because a lot of again with apologetics a lot of people like act like because we have a certain number it means it's true it doesn't yeah and just for the fact of having a certain number doesn't even mean we can know what it says we have to we have to look at how good the manuscripts are and weigh the evidence that's inside of them right and so i think that that's a huge point bro is all manuscripts are not created equal right some of them are great pieces of evidence and some of them contain a few words that are nice but really how helpful is it you know so that's an important thing to think about when we're trying to figure out what did the original new testament say yes and so what's important noting all of that that we just said uh is to it kind of help you understand textual criticism methods and we're going to get into that a little bit right now so in order to attempt to get to the original text like what the actual autographed handwritten documents had said new testament textual criticism has developed methods of comparing the manuscripts with one another and concluding on what the original said so an example they're taking like we said the p52 like the the little john fragment the little words that they get from that and they see that it's older than uh like then like we said the codex and it gets so they can compare and see okay well we've had those words from john way longer than we've had it here so we can believe that it's more incredible right yeah that's what they do and they kind of even will take like so they'll take all of the you know let's say like john 18 because they've actually done this every single piece of john 18 that we've ever found in greek new testament manuscripts they have compared them all with one another to see where our difference is and how the differences come about and so they're attempting to figure out what was the original that all these copies have been copied from and copied from copies of right that's so important to know and so that's that's kind of what we're trying to get into with all this it's uh there are many many different uh differences within these greek manuscripts and but these differences are called textual variants yeah textual variants are big because when we start to compare all of these bro um there's differences and so they actually keep track of the variance of the differences because we need to find out which one's wrong and which one is right yes exactly and that's important to know because i don't want to be believing in a lie right and that's what the whole goal of this podcast is in general too we're trying to expose the truth uh not just in uh secular the secular world but also in the biblical world and we're trying to apply apologetics to scripture and show uh that their the variants actually understand the truth what was actually written like i said the handwritten autographed documents uh and so with that it is safe to say that there are around 500 000 and again that's half a million five hundred thousand text variants among our new testament greek manuscripts not including spelling differences that's huge right that sounds like a lot yeah it's huge it does and it should some people get intimidated by that or scared because it's like wow like so many variances and we're going to get into those and what they're actually about uh but bart airman and i know we've talked about him quite a bit on this show uh he's a a non-christian atheist kind of agnostic leaning atheist who uh kind of provides some evidence for scripture and he's a new testament scholar and so what he points out is that there are only about 138 020 words in the new testament which are which is insane because that means that there are half a million textual variances to the actual words that are in the new testament meaning we have so much more variance than the actual context of the words yeah that's kind of a problem right there's more variance than there are words in the new testament and he i've heard him say this uh in like debates before and in his books yeah he loves talking about that like it's supposed to scare us or something yeah exactly and well it does to some people when you first look at that at face value and so uh but what's important to note about that is how scholars go about text criticism that's how we need to look at this thing yep so let's dive into that tyler let's talk about okay so we got all these manuscripts we're trying to compare them with one another and we see that there's differences and variation with words and word order and all this stuff how do we go about what are some general rules that textual critical scholars use to determine what the original said yes yes so uh some of those rules that we have one is to determine the reading that would most likely give rise to others and with that it's just understanding uh like through the reading what would most likely make make the most sense right with what they're reading it's like when you're analyzing the text like what does it say right yes yeah there's an one an example of that and we'll talk about this in detail next week but an example of that would be um in first john uh i think it's chapter five i i should know this but i think in first john 5 there's like this textual variant that talks about there's three the father the word and the holy spirit and it's like a trinity uh term it's trinity a trinity formulation well we don't find that in a lot of other manuscripts and it isn't original it got added later but they'll determine why would this get added would it get subtracted or would this type of a thing get added and it makes more sense that it would get added because people are trying to clarify the trinity versus oh i'm going to actually take that out of the bible scribes wouldn't do that right so the most likely reading would be that they added this definition to bolster the doctrine of the trinity which originally wasn't there yeah thank you for explaining that yes that's absolutely like that is exactly what that is uh and so next what they do is uh they take them the more distinctive reading and they usually prefer that over another meaning like when you read something that has more detail or something that is a little bit more distinctive and like specific they'll pick that out of one that's less specific less detailed oriented yeah the general idea with that is that a scribe because the people who are hand copying these care about the new testament that's the only reason they're doing it right yeah and so they're not going to make things um less distinctive right that would be to take away from scripture they wouldn't do yeah so it makes sense that they wouldn't take away from distinctiveness but they would more often try to clarify it and so if it's more distinct that's usually the preferred reading because they would probably simplify it not complicate it yeah that's a good general rule and all these are general rules sometimes some of them don't work when you're comparing things in certain texts and you have to say okay this one doesn't apply here because of this this and this but these are the general rules that they use when determining it yep yeah exactly and that's perfect and then uh and then another factor that they take into consideration is uh which of the readings that they're comparing is shorter and typically they'll typically not in all cases but they will favor the shorter reading because if it's more concise and more to the point uh they want that to be the one that goes through into the the text criticism like just it makes more sense because it's more specific like we said distinct specific and more on top topic in context that's what they're looking for short and simple right yeah and they and the the idea there is that a scribe who believes that the bible is the word of god wouldn't take away god's word but they'd probably be more prone to add it add to it to clarify things yes exactly and so also another one factor that they take into consideration is they also determine which reading is more appropriate in its context so of meaning what they'll look at they'll look at the literary context based on the passages around it they're going to look for grammatical uses and phrases and then they'll also look for spelling errors and historical content yeah yeah so if you think about that one's pretty easy because like if somebody's writing to like if paul's writing to the church and he's writing like and he's using all these plural we we you know uh wording and verbiage and then it all of a sudden switches to like third person or something it's weird in the context yes and they can see oh that's probably a mistake because it could be this and this version says we still but this one changed it to something else and so all of those factors come into it um but that's what's nice about all of this is this is when we're comparing it with all the different manuscripts it's not like we just have one manuscript we compare all of them and we can see oh man a whole bunch of them have this reading these ones have this reading we can think through the time period and see when this this mistake derived like you can see it happening with a lot of them so kind of kind of interesting yeah yes and that's exactly what they do and so with that too they also examine just like you said parallel passages for any differences and they determine why they may appear and that's just kind of that last one is kind of a general oversight of all of text criticism because really that's what they're doing the entire time they're taking these parallel passages ones that are the same they're similar and they're comparing to see what differences are there and they're saying okay should we add or remove things from the biblical text here based off these manuscripts and that's kind of what they're doing that's all that text criticism is it's comparing documents looking for mistakes things that were included that weren't uh and they're just kind of editing it down and trying to clear out any error any human error that may be getting in the way of the actual text and the message that was behind it yep that's right man and some of these uh mistakes that we see happen are unintentional changes to the text we also see intentional changes where scribes add stuff but we also have like a whole list of unintentional changes and we can't talk about every single detail of text criticism on the show but we did want to share uh some of these unintentional changes which are really interesting so a few of them that that happens so often that they have categories for these um are things like mistaken letters so sometimes in the text there's similar looking letters that are sometimes interchanged for other letters especially when you're using the magical manuscripts the capital letters right some of them look similar and you could see how a scribe would accidentally write the wrong one because it looks similar to something else you know for like us like if you if you're writing an a v and a w the capitals they look pretty much the same right it's just in in english it's just one stroke different and so an m and an n one stroke different and so sometimes there's words like that that have been changed because they made a mistake of similar looking letters there's another uh unintentional change category that's called homophony and this is substitution of similar sounding words so this is really interesting and it's difficult to explain on a podcast without diagrams and showing people pictures and all this stuff but in romans 5 1 we we have this happening so paul uses the word echo men which means we have um but he but it also sounds just like this other word echo men that means let us have or we may have and there's only one greek letter different between those two and it's what type of an o in english what type of an o you're using echo men echo men they sound very similar but there's one letter different that means there is a different uh it has a different meaning of what the word is either we have or let us have we may have so this kind of thing happens where and i could see myself doing that you know you read it you say it in your head and then you go to write it and you write what it sounds like versus the exact wording of what it is yeah right and well not only that though but you got to think too something that a lot of scholars were probably dealing with at the time is when you're looking at these manuscripts some of them are a little older a little warm maybe as like one of those letters is not as easy to tell if you're looking at like a o versus an e or like a you or you know what i mean like yeah there's like all those types of things that can happen and it is crazy too because we even see like some some manuscripts describes right in the margins like they write notes or they write theology or they write extra stuff and then like a generation or two later we see those notes work their way into the text um so it's it's really a funny science to do text criticism like this um so that's yeah substitution the similar sounding words another another one is called hypography and this is an omission of a letter or a word and it's usually due to a similar letter or word uh in the context so you see a word that ends the same your eyes kind of skip over it and you don't get the next word that has the same ending and so you omit a letter of a word or a similar letter in a word or context another thing is called the dedography and this one's easy to remember because it's like ditto right like two so when there's a letter or a word that's been written twice rather than once and we actually have an example of this possibly possibly happening in mark chapter 3 verses 14 through 16. and you're gonna you have that right tyler you're gonna read that for us yeah yeah it says and he appointed the 12 so that they could be with him and he could send them out to preach and to have the authority to cast out demons and he appointed the twelve simon to whom he gave the name peter yeah and then it goes on to name the other disciples but do you see how in verse 14 it says and he appointed the 12 and then in verse 16 it says and he appointed the 12. yes i see that this may be a example of geography where the scribe was writing down things and he accidentally wrote the same phrase two times does that make sense i mean i've done that yeah i've done that when reading before you ever do that like you read you're reading it one line and then you try to go down but your eyes do a little like skip and you end up going back and starting over the same line again i've done that before or vice versa and so that yeah that makes total sense like of course that that would happen yep exactly so that's dedography um there's another one that's called uh uh meta metathesis or metis metathesis and it is uh the reversal in order of two letters or words um so that one is uh uh interesting too so when there's there's two of the same letter in a word sometimes they get omitted or they get reversed um and so an example of this is in john 1 42 when it's talking about simon peter and it calls him simon son of john well it says john but some manuscripts uh have omitted one of the ends from the greek word john which makes it into jonah right so that's a difference right so again nothing huge but when you omit two letters next to each other because john has two ends next to it in that verse and then you change it for one it means something different right there's another unintentional mistake called fusion which is where there's incorrect word division that results in two words joined as one um so mark 1040 has an example of this and in um greek the word is al and oys which means but for whom when you separate them al ois right but for whom but if you can join them and you smush them together it's aloys which means for others so it means something different and you can imagine when they were writing in the magicals which you remember are the capital letters all smushed together with no spaces the scribes have to make a judgment call on where the word ends and the new one begins and so that's where we have some issue with with these uh with these words getting smushed together or separated not at the right spot yeah well like you said earlier too robbie when we were talking about the way that the text was written a lot of them because of the limited amount of space they would have on a scroll sometimes is they would there wouldn't be any spaces that would all be written together right yep yeah so that's exactly why you would have that i could completely understand why someone would have an issue of separating some words if there's no space between at all yeah exactly that would happen in english if we did that we we could see it as as a couple of different words so yeah exactly it makes complete sense yep so that is interesting um another thing that uh so that's that's uh fusion that's when there's incorrect word division that results in two words getting smushed together as one and then the opposite of that is fission which is an incorrect word division that results in one word written as two so we see this in romans 7 14 where the word should be oy demen which is we know but if you split it into two words it can be oida men which means on the one hand i know so that makes a difference it should be we know because the context of what paul's talking about and how he's been talking in romans 7 it is we know plus i don't think he uses the on the one hand and then later on on the other hand and so the on the one hand doesn't make sense in that passage so that's that's an interesting one and then there is another one that i wanted to mention last one and it's called homo which in greek it means a like ending so this is when there is an omission of words because there are two words that are the same or two phrases that are the same on both sides of the word or phrase okay so if i said something like um i went to my house and at my house so there's house and house right right so sometimes you're reading that along i went to my house and then you you write house and then you look back up and you see the second house and you just start from that house and you omit the and at my that's in between house and house right yeah that is what this is okay so an example of this is in first john 2 23 it has the phrase has the father in it twice and it should have that in there but sometimes uh there is uh the mistake of omitting the words that are in between the has the father and has the father and so we see that happen in um first john 2 23 where some mistakenly omit that and don't repeat it twice because their eyes kind of skipped over it and they just recorded the second has the father or the tan patera ekoy ek so um it's really interesting so again hyper super nerdy geeky stuff but this is how you do text criticism you get into the nitty-gritty of the passages and you say okay what was the original reading what are the rules what mistakes have been made and how can we come to the original text that is available if we synthesize and we compare and we do the science of text criticism yeah exactly and now the importance of textual variants is is very important to know like the the fact is these should not cause us alarms well but tyler there's 500 000 of them that sounds like a lot right yeah right right well that's the thing like at first that scares you like and that that's fine like seeing that number that like that's okay that that shakes you up but the thing is is it should not cause you alarm the reason why is because the fact that we have so many manuscripts with so many variants also means that we have a lot of data with which to look out to work out the variant readings meaning like we can look through those 500 000 variants with the manuscripts we have now we can compare it and see like we have the right manuscripts like we have the original intended message like the fact that the fact that we can recognize the variance means we can recognize what's not a variant exactly yeah and with the variance we can figure out most probably what the original said like yeah so even with the variance that's exactly right even with them we can do this text criticism thing to come to what the original must have said yeah of course like obviously say you had like a bunch of uh just random letters that you you had sent from your grandma right you made copies of it or something that you kept cherished but like if you notice that there's differences from all of them and you're comparing it like to any letter in english or something you can see differences today that would compare and maybe they'd be wrong but you could compare them together and you could see what the original context said this they did the same thing with greek and they're going through it now like to get us the text that we have today in the new testament so by looking at the variance that looking at the errors or the things that are like different in each of these manuscripts and comparing we can see what the original text said and that's why it's so important that we have all these variants because they tell us what the truth of what we have right now and it also i think it attests to the accuracy over all of the new testament yeah it really does man and the other thing is this a lot of the variants don't matter right like they're so so unimportant easy to recognize like like for instance like here's an example so if you if you were doing text criticism with a recipe that your great great great grandma had passed down right let's say some recipe for like sourdough bread or something and you know it comes from three or four generations back and then your grandma has a handwritten copy of it and your uh your great aunt you know your grandma's sister has a handwritten copy of it and then your great uncle has a handwritten copy of it and one of them got smudged because they accidentally spilled some water on it when they were doing some dishes and then your parents have copies of it and your aunts and uncles will have copies of it and your great-aunts kids have all these copies of it and there's all these copies of the same recipe well the one that has a word smudged out can easily be figured out what that word should have been by looking at the other ones that have that word in them right yes yes exactly and even if some punk kid let's say yourself went and you changed the recipe and instead of it having you know baking soda in it you changed it to yeast just to mess it up or something you know even if you intentionally changed it we could go and compare it with the other ones and we could figure out oh no originally it must have said this because 10 out of the 11 say this and this one has a red marker through it and it's scratched off right we could we could figure it out right right that's what's going on with the new testament and so a lot of the variants are so insignificant they're unimportant that even in new testament greek textual critical studies they don't even bring them up because they're so easy to spot and they're trivial and they don't make any sort of difference for what the original had said because we can spot what it didn't say peter gerry he's at phoenix seminary he's doing a lot of great work in text criticism um he makes this really important um uh percentage uh so i i don't have time to explain it all if you want to read a great book on this kind of stuff it's this book right here myth myths and mistakes in new testament textual criticism which was edited by elijah hickson and peter gury who's at phoenix seminary and they've done some really cool work on talking about how many of the variants are important right and he says through some like kind of groundbreaking calculations that the number of variants that might be meaningful affect the translation and to affect the translation of the bible is somewhere between 0.3 percent to 2.8 percent right so think about that 0.3 to 2.8 percent of the half million variants are even somewhat significant so now all variants aren't created equal right we have to weigh the variance just like we weigh the manuscripts to see how significant they are most of the variants are trivial and don't change anything and don't matter and we know what the wrong ones are but among the 0.3 to 2.8 percent that are somewhat important we even need to look at those ones and see okay these ones are significant in the sense that they're not easy just to throw out as unoriginal but even among these ones that are important which ones actually may affect doctrine or ethical living in the text and which ones really are trivial and don't affect the meaning of the text so even among the small percentage that are significant we even get a smaller percentage that make a difference when it comes to understanding scripture yeah so many do not have affect the meaning of the text at all like that's exactly crazy when you look at that comparison because uh however the thing is we want to dig deeper into these variants because they help us resolve like text criticism issues that do have an effect on meaning on the text and doctrines and christianity but again like that's such a small percentage it's crazy how really the new testament that we have today isn't really that affected by all the variants yeah it's not affected at all not at all it's not affected very much and this is where we want to make a distinction because a lot of times in the past apologists would say the variants don't matter because they're so insignificant what percentage of the matters however there are some variants that matter and we want to look at those and we want it like you said we want to do good text criticism to figure out what does this probably originally say and what bearing does it have on certain doctrines or certain beliefs and so we don't want to just because it's a small percentage throw those out no they're kind of significant so we do want to look at them i want to read a quote from peter gerry this is just a great quote he says it is best to admit that in relatively rare cases variants really do have some bearing on doctrines and ethical practices of the christian faith but none of these doctrines or ethical practices is established from these disputed texts so what he's saying is there are some variants that are significant that change the text in such a way that what it is saying it doesn't mean the same thing however we're not building our doctrine based on one verse and one variant for pretty much any doctrine right like we don't we don't say oh the trinity is based on only one verse no it's not it's a whole bunch of verses right jesus deity isn't based on one verse it's based on a whole bunch that's why it is a doctrine so the variant may change the meaning of the text in some places which we'll look at next week but we don't build doctrine based on one verse or one variant so when it's all said and done and this is what i think is mind-blowing tyler right when we've synthesized all the texts we have and we have done text criticism on it our modern greek new testament after all text criticism is done gives us a 99 accurate reading of what the original autographs said now this does not mean that some variants are not important but it does mean that we can rest assured that we have an accurately transmitted new testament from the time of the apostles up till the modern day and i think that is just amazing yes yes that's so huge like it's very important to note that and that was the whole goal of this topic for today was to um just show you guys that the new testament is reliable because of text criticism and that's when the what this whole series has been through well we kind of see through through text criticism that the new testament is reliable we have enough data to compile what the original handwritten autograph said to 99 accuracy and just it's super cool that we have all of this and let's make sure we're distinct with this yes just because we can know that we have what they wrote doesn't mean what they wrote is true so when you say it's reliable you mean that it's reliably transmitted we have what they wrote it could all be a bunch of fairy tales and lies but you can't say that we don't even have what they wrote some people like to say that right we don't even know what the apostle paul wrote because it's been translated through so many generations and iterations that's right you know what we know what it says and reliably we know what it says now is it true well that's a different thing right so we figure that out we need to make a difference yeah that's something we made make a distinction of too is like like the difference between transmitted and translated like those are different things like which we've described before on the show but when something's transmitted it's directly copied word for word exactly what it's saying from one to another translated is changing from a language entirely and trying to have to figure out a different wording for something yeah a lot of people like on pop like like like a common objection to this is it's been translated from greek into latin into coptic into english into spanish into chinese it's been translated so many times you can't know what it originally said they're mis like what you said is so true they are they're mistaking transmission for translation transmission means it's been passed along through time accurately and it has because we go back to the greek and we do take criticism and we transmit it and then we translate it from the greek into chinese or the greek into english or the greek in spanish so people do mistake that all the time they say it's been translated so many times but what they're really talking about is transmitted and we need to make that distinction and then show them it has been transmitted accurately and it's reliable we have bro 99 accuracy we have what they wrote originally and you can't dispute that that's the crazy thing to me the science is so good it's indisputable that that that's the case 99 accurate reading of what the original authors wrote which it just gives me confidence that man it seems like somebody's behind this giving us this accurate depiction um through the work of text scholarship and obviously through the greek manuscripts that are preserved for us to investigate it seems like god wanted us to be able to know what they originally wrote yeah yeah and that's super great and exciting but uh thank you for joining us today on christ culture and coffee and being a part of the podcast uh make sure you tune in with us next week though because we are going to be looking into some of the most difficult variants in the new testament and see what kind of bearing they have on christianity yeah that's going to be fun man because some of the i don't want to mess people up but we got to be accurate with what's original and what got added that might not be and what are the what are the difficult passages so that's going to be really fun next week yeah we're super excited so make sure you join us for that um also make sure if you aren't already that you go and subscribe to our youtube channel uh we're coming out with new content on there weekly so make sure you come and be a part of that and also we're going to be uh making posts on our social media accounts all the time for those of you who might not know we have a twitter account now so go ahead and follow us chrisculturecoffee and on twitter instagram and we're also on facebook uh so make sure you go and join us on all of our social media platforms and youtube subscribe to stay up to date on everything that we're doing so thank you so much for joining us today on and being a part part of the podcast with us today we will see you next week as we talk about text variants