Interview with a New Testament Scholar - Dan Wallace - IdeaLogical

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(00:00):
Disclaimer For all ideological interviews, this podcast is a
space for thoughtful conversation.
Hosting a guest implies neither their endorsement nor rejection
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We encourage listeners to approach each conversation with
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(00:21):
prior assumptions or biases. You can see the face of Jesus
more clearly than if you were one of his disciples when you
read the Greek New Testament. Now that the Quran is being
examined by scholars, deeply examined, that myth is just.
It's just blown apart and you really can see him more clearly

(00:42):
than just with your English translation.
Every Greco Roman piece of literature needs textual
criticism to be done. The New Testament is no
exception to this. Welcome to another edition of
Ideological. I'm your host, Zach Lee, and

(01:04):
today I have a very special guest.
I've got Doctor Dan Wallace. He is the senior research
professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological
Seminary and also the executive director.
Also, I'm retired, so. Oh Retired senior research
professor, New Testament emeritus.
Emeritus and the executive director of the Center for the
Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

(01:24):
We'll explain both those in a second.
Doctor Wallace, thanks for beingon the show.
Thank you. Appreciate it, Zach.
And please call me Dan, I'll. Tell you, Dan, they have to call
you Doctor Wallace. They're not.
They're not at our level. You know they don't.
They don't. I'm retired.
Call me Dan. I never did care for the title
anyway. But Congrats on the retirement
too. That's great.
No, you don't congratulate somebody for quitting.

(01:45):
You're still writing and stuff though.
Yeah. And I'm still working full time
for the center. Yeah, that's great.
OK, well, Doctor Wallace is a orDan, you call him Doctor
Wallace. I'll call him Dan.
He is one of the leading expertsin the world when it comes to
New Testament textual criticism.We'll explain what that is here
in just a second. But before we jump in, would you
mind telling us a little bit about yourself, your education,

(02:07):
your background, and then your work, both the Dallas Seminary
and for the the Center for the Study of New Testament
Manuscripts? Yeah, I I grew up in a Christian
home in Southern California and I'm a fourth generation
Californian. The surf sucks in Texas and so I
always wear my rain Spooner Hawaiian shirts to remind me of

(02:28):
home and to irritate everybody else.
I. Love it.
I, I, I trust Christ when I was 4, but it was just kind of part
of my life. But it wasn't.
He was not the center of my lifewhen I was 16 years old.
Actually, just three days ago, 50-7 years and three days ago, I

(02:49):
made a radical commitment to Christ and I dedicated myself to
not just him, but to full time Christian vocational ministry.
I come from a family of engineers and inventors and my
sons, my four sons, they all picked up those skills and it it

(03:14):
moved from me to my wife. I don't know how that happened.
She has all the mechanical skills and things and I, I can
barely screw in a light bulb. But I have other interests.
So it was obviously something the Lord was doing.
Not a thing that I'm naturally inclined towards.
In fact, I'm not really very good at languages.
It's been a real hard toil, but so that gives you a little bit

(03:38):
of a background. I decided I was going to go to
Christian college, went to BiolaUniversity and I majored in
Bible and minored in Greek. I got four years of Greek there.
So at Biola I my first year, which was my sophomore year of
of college, I went to a junior college.
The first year I had to commute from home 70 mile round trip

(04:00):
from Newport Beach to La Mirada,CA in LA traffic and I had to
leave at precisely 616 in the morning to beat the traffic
before it would back up at the exit.
So I had school on four days a week, Thursdays.
The only class I had was Greek. 50 minute classes, 70 mile round

(04:21):
trip for a 50 minute class. I typically blew it off and my
grades reflected that. Now by all it even to this day,
if you want to major in Bible you have to get at least two
years of Greek and you cannot get AD in any one of those
semesters. My first semester the professor

(04:43):
said, son, you deserve AD, but I'm going to be gracious to you
and give you AC. Second semester, same thing, but
he said you got to buckle down and get this.
Well, I didn't pay much attention to that.
The next year, my junior year, Iwas on campus, different
professor, and he had his reviewGreek over the first five weeks.

(05:08):
We got an exam at the end of each week.
I got an F on the first exam, I get an F on the second exam, I
got an F on the third exam, but I got a high F on the 4th exam.
F plus is what we're going for. That's right.
And I got AD on the last exam and I thought, man, I'm I'm
really getting this time. I was rather delusional.

(05:29):
So he called me into his office.He said, young man, I think you
need to drop out of Greek. It's just not sticking.
And that was my wake up call. I asked him to give me one more
week. So I went down to my dorm room,
got on my knees, and I said, Lord Jesus, I've been dragging
your name through the mud. If I were at UCLA, where most of

(05:50):
my classmates went from high school, then me doing a mediocre
job in Greek would reflect on you.
And I can't have that. It doesn't matter if I'm at a
Christian School, Who I am in relationship to Christ is what
matters. And so I ended up getting an A
both semesters, highest grade inthe class.

(06:13):
And it, it everything turned around.
But my first year of Greek, the forms, the morphology, all this
I still didn't have down real well.
So I had to learn it really a second time when I came to
seminary and we took a year off.I was, I, I got married right
out of college and I pastored for a a year and a half.

(06:35):
Assistant pastor didn't know enough, decided I needed to get
more education and so I chose Dallas Seminary and we got there
early in the summer. Wasn't accepted in the program
yet, but I was working 40 hours a week and studying for the
Greek exam 40 hours a week. The entrance exam, if you pass

(06:56):
it, then you can get out of first year Greek.
And I said I just don't want to go through first year again.
So that was the second time I had to learn Greek and, and I
really got it down there. And after my THM they hired me.
I taught for a couple years, then taught at Grace Seminary a
couple years and then worked formy dad for a couple years.

(07:16):
Everything was in a two year cycle for a while.
Came back, worked for Pro Ministries for a couple years in
in Dallas and then got into the doctoral program.
And in 1997, after I had been a professor for quite some time, I
got encephalitis. From the great Kefalay, meaning
head because the brain swells. Did I do it?
Did I get it? Right.

(07:37):
That's exactly right. Yes.
Yeah. Everybody thinks I I have a
swollen head. Yes.
So it wiped out my memory. I was in a wheelchair for almost
a year. I was sleeping 22 hours a day.
And I forgot my wife's name. I forgot my own name, I forgot

(07:59):
most of my languages. I had I it was 1997.
I've been studying Greek since 1971 and been teaching it for 12
years by this point and I had the equivalent of about a one
year student after 26 years of studying Greek.

(08:21):
So I had to get back into the Greek and what happened was they
were giving me an IV drip of gancyclovir.
That's what they give to AIDS patients who are close to death,
$1000. Not because I had that, because
they just, they were throwing everything at me to see if it
would stick. And they said we're going to

(08:43):
test you for syphilis. I said, well, I'm not paying for
that because I could tell you right now I don't have that, you
know, so but mad cow disease, the CDC got involved.
They never did figure out what it was.
I got 4 spinal taps, which are not at all fun to go through.
And I was in and out of hospitals for five years,

(09:04):
missing all sorts of holidays. It never did really leave my
system, but I had to relearn Greek.
Now I just published my Greek grammar.
My it's an intermediate advancedgrammar that took me 17 years of
work to get that done and I got it done in 96.

(09:25):
It's 850 page grammar. By 97 I had forgotten most of it
after the encephalitis. And so I'm teaching second year
Greek that next fall, trying to stay ahead of the the students
barely knowing what I'm talking about.
And as I'm looking at the grammar going, what is this guy

(09:47):
trying to say? And other, other times I look
at, oh, that's a brilliant .0. No, no, that's bragging.
You know, it was, it was almost like an out of body experience,
you know, so out of mind experience, I guess.
So that was the third time I hadto learn Greek.
From yourself. From myself, yeah, that's right.
So I taught myself Greek from the textbook that I had written.

(10:08):
That's a weird, weird thing. But but so Greek has been for me
from the very beginning, as mucha spiritual duty as an academic
exercise. And I, I take it very seriously
when I get into the Greek New Testament because, as Erasmus
said, the man who published the first Greek New Testament in

(10:29):
1516, he said you can see the face of Jesus more clearly than
if you were one of his discipleswhen you read the Greek New
Testament. Bit of hyperbole, but really
powerful and and you really can see him more clearly than just
with your English translation. So I fell in love with the Greek

(10:50):
New Testament again. So anyway, that's that's.
That's a great story background.That's fantastic.
OK, talk to us. So, so there's several things I
want to ask you and we can, we can go as long as you want to
go. But talk to us a little about
before we get into textual criticism per SE, talk to us a
little bit about books in the 1st century.
How were they made? What were they made of?
Love? How did scribes write 2000 years

(11:11):
ago? Because most people don't like
most people when they even when they read the word book in like
Revelation, which is more like ascroll, they still think of a
codex like rippable pages and stuff.
So tell us a little bit about ancient writing.
OK, 1st century books were almost always written on rolls
or scrolls. So it would be a rounded, you

(11:34):
know what a scroll is? You know, it's like a roll of
toilet paper, but a little bit better quality made out of
papyrus. And they would take these long
papyrus shoots and strip them down.
And they had glue that would naturally adhere to itself, so
they'd cut them into strips and they would lay them out

(11:57):
diagonally with each other. So you got one strip going this
way, the other this way, and they.
Make like a mesh pattern. Kind of thing, yeah, except it
was completely covered twice over, you know, so you, it's
double thick and you would then pound it out with a hammer and
it would naturally adhere. Soak it in water.
Sometimes they took them for seven days, sometimes for 14.

(12:17):
It did brought out different colors for the papyrus.
Fascinating thing. And the average size papyrus
roll would be maybe 15 to 20 feet.
The average or or the longest usable papyrus roll would be 35
feet. Gosh, that's crazy.

(12:37):
The problem is that our gospels are so big you could not even
put two of them in a papyrus roll.
Luke's would be 28 feet, so would Matthew, and Axe is about
28 feet. So they could add, you know,
maybe Philemon or Titus or something like that.
But that was a very interesting thing.
And this is a little detail thatI I know you weren't asking, but

(13:00):
but once the codex form is invented, now all of a sudden
the church could put a couple ofbooks, more than a couple books,
couple of gospels, ultimately the whole Bible between 2
covers. And that created a problem.
What order should these books bein?
We just assume almost like the the books of the Bible fell out

(13:22):
of heaven into his Ottovan warehouse, you know, and we're,
we're that's where they came from.
But Gilded Edge is already. On there, it's all there.
Yeah, the red letter editions. So what you have with these
papyrus roles then is there's limitations in its size.
There's limitations in being able to find your place in the
text. And so the codex form was
invented in probably the middle of the 1st century.

(13:45):
We have no examples from the 1stcentury, but we think it was
invented at that time. And it would have been used, as
far as we can tell from the records for tiny notebooks, you
know, little journals, 5 by 7 inch kind of journals that
somebody would would take, but not for anything important.
But starting in the 2nd century,we start to see them.

(14:08):
And what's fascinating is all ofour New Testament manuscripts,
every single one except for fourthat are written on the backside
of a papyrus roll. So it was reused where the front
side was for some other text. So all of the books except for
those four, which they were justreusing whatever they had, are

(14:29):
written out of codex. What's interesting is in the 1st
5 centuries of the Christian era, over 90% of all Christian
books were written on a codex. In that same period, less than
15% of all non Christian books were written on a codex.

(14:52):
So for the 1st and perhaps the only time in the history of the
church, we were actually ahead of the technological curve.
Most of the time we're a museum piece, you know?
So that's, that's a fascinating piece right there.
Why did Christians change to thecodex?
It's still being debated, but there was a man named Chapter

(15:12):
Roberts. He had just gotten his
doctorate, and he was working atManchester University with some
papyri that had been excavated earlier.
And he was going through a box of them that his for his
predecessor had left for him to look at.
And very early on in that box, he found this fragment about the

(15:33):
size of a credit card. This is 1934.
And he looked at it and the textwas in, in a, a professional
hand and he looked at the backside and there was writing
on the back. So here you have a literary
document written on both sides of the papyrus.

(15:54):
Well, that didn't happen with the scrolls.
And it just so he, he, he figured out the text.
It was John 18, verses 31 through 33 on the front and
verses 3738 on the back, which meant this came from a codex.
Now he sent photographs to the three leading papyrologists of

(16:14):
the time, and all of them agreedwith his dating that it was
between 100 and 150, and in fact, the best example he had
came from AD 94. It was a dated manuscript.
He's found more parallels with that than anything else.
This is the Rylands fragment. Is this the?
Is this the Don Rylands Papyrus 457, And it's also known as P52?

(16:38):
This manuscript has become extraordinarily important
because it showed that the Christians used the codex early
on, very early. And it also showed that John's
Gospel was not as late as a lot of scholars thought.
There was a school coming out ofTibingen, Germany, from the mid

(17:02):
1800s that had argued they'd taken the Hegelian dialectic,
and that's a thesis, antithesis,synthesis.
As a philosopher, you know all that.
And Professor Hagel had been FC Bauer's professor at Tibigan
University in the early 1800s. And Bauer argued that the Gospel

(17:22):
of John, for a variety of reasons, could not have been
written any earlier than AD 160 and more likely 170.
That held sway that that was in 1844.
He wrote that that held sway forthe next 90 years for much of
European scholarship, which basically meant John's gospel

(17:43):
was worthless historically. What's really ironic is if it's
just a side note, it's so funny to me and so inconsistent.
The five gospels, the Jesus Seminar, they, they talked about
the Gospel of Thomas and it's, they, they colored the words of
Jesus either red, pink, Gray, orblack.
And I worked with Robert Funk, the head of the Jesus Seminar.

(18:05):
I've got the beads, some of the beads that they actually use for
this. And if it was red, that means
yes, Jesus said this. If it's pink, the thought at
least went back to Jesus. Gray, we're not sure it's Jesus,
but probably not Black means no way is this Jesus.
It was made-up later. They have more red and pink in
the Gospel of Thomas than they do in the Gospel of John or even

(18:29):
the Gospels of Matthew or Mark, I believe.
And what's the reason? Well, because Thomas is so
early. Wait a minute, wait a minute.
It's much later than any of our gospels.
It's just such an incredible bias.
It's, it's just truly bizarre. I, I would date Thomas somewhere
between 1:20 and 1:40. Some want to date it earlier,

(18:51):
but that's generally the range of where most scholars would put
it. So John's Gospel chapter Roberts
discovery now sent 2 tons of German scholarship to the flames
when this little fragment of a papyrus and it showed that
John's Gospel is early now, at least earlier than they had

(19:11):
thought. Then you have in the 1940's the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls that showed that the the
the dumb diametrical light dark,that kind of a thing that they
thought was due to Platonic philosophy actually is very
Jewish because the Dead Sea Scrolls use very similar

(19:32):
terminology and viewpoints. So John's Gospel is a thoroughly
Jewish book that was written in the 1st century.
That's impressive and all because of a scrap of papyrus.
That chapter Roberts discovered later he co-authored the book
The Birth of the Codex and he was the scholar on when the

(19:52):
codex would have been formed. OK so that's codex scrolls
though all of our books of the New Testament were written on a
scroll. I'm convinced of that
revelation. The last book when it says the
sometimes it's translated books sometimes scroll about the seven
sealed book if you have a codex and it's.

(20:13):
Got 7 seals, You say? You take this.
This is Misquoting Jesus by BartEhrman.
We'll get to this a little bit later, but you get through the
first section and maybe there's a seal at the end for this page,
but you can get right to the next.
You could, in fact, you could goto the last page and find out
who done it. You know, it's codex with a
scroll. If it's laid out like this, as

(20:36):
all scrolls were, you're going to have a line of wax that seals
it and you can't get to the nextsection until you get through
that section. And so Book of Revelation was
written on a scroll. Now, I think there's other
evidence for the scroll in the 1st century.
I mean, if it's the last book and it's just called a book.

(20:59):
Yeah, big loss. It's it's yeah, I think it's I
think the evidence for it being scrolls is high.
I agree with. That it's it's.
It's almost overwhelming. Yeah, yeah.
And I don't know anybody who thinks it wasn't written on a
scroll. But now you take the Gospel of
Mark, for example, and you've got these extra 12 verses after
verse 8 that some people think is authentic.
And it's printed in most of our Bibles, though sometimes in

(21:21):
italics or smaller font or in brackets, something like that.
But verses 9 through 20, those 12 verses.
But the Gospel of Mark, some would say it it it has an
incomplete ending. We don't know what the ending
was, but it was certainly something after verse 8.
But not those 12 verses. The reason, one of the reasons

(21:41):
they argue for that is that the codex form would lose pages on
the beginning and the end. Interesting.
But what if it was written on a scroll, which all the evidence
points to? That's the safest part of the
manuscript, because it's like blockbuster videos.

(22:02):
If I can bring us back a few. Days I missed Blockbuster.
It was great. Yeah, it was great.
I miss it. Yeah, and you did.
If you didn't rewind that tape, you pay a buck.
That's right in the ancient world of denarius for not
rewinding the scroll. You know that's.
Right. So that's the most protected.
Part last. Whatever the ending was after
verse 8, if there was another ending, it would not have fallen
out. It's the most protected part of
the manuscript. And you got Hebrews.

(22:25):
We don't know who wrote Hebrews.Why is that?
Well, I've looked at thousands of papyrus documents, and when I
look at the papyrus letters, what I've noticed is they are of
two types. You have the address or and the
addressee on the inside, like inall of Paul's letters in the
Catholic epistles. And you have it at times on the

(22:46):
outside, outside, typically affixed by a label that may well
come off. We have the address store and
the address seat. You know, it's like the outside
of our envelope, same kind of idea.
And they'd be carrying this for hundreds of miles.
And that label might fall off. Or sometimes it's just written
on the papyrus and wears off because of just that's the
outside, you know, and consequently, that part would be

(23:11):
lost to us. So I've seen a number of papyri
where it was written on the outside and we can see black
dots, but no words. Interesting.
And so I think if we had that original manuscript when it was
pinned, not when it arrived, we'd know who wrote it.
Obviously the Courier knew who wrote it and who it was going
to. But so you got this fascinating

(23:33):
evidence, just the form of the book and how it intersects with
thinking about the New Testament.
Yeah. And talk to me about vellum.
Is it? Also, some of the manuscripts
are on animal skins and hides instead of just papyrus.
So yeah, well, let me, let me. I'll finish up on this.
I'm OCD. No.
So I got to finish a thought before.
We'll be here for six hours. Same.
OK. OK, so here's some papyrus from

(23:53):
Egypt and I test this kind of stuff sometimes by by doing this
to make sure it's not banana skin because that's fake
papyrus. This is this is real.
So you could see the the papyruslines, the strips, you are going
this way and on this side they're going this way.

(24:15):
So this would be how you you only write along the lines on
the inside of a papyrus roll. But all of our New Testament
papyri, it's written on both sides because they're written on
a codex. So you can see how it was, was
laid out and they would use lampblack carbon ink that would,

(24:38):
they would mix with gum Arabic so it would adhere to the, the
the text. But it was, this is very porous
material. And so they had to have some
good ink that would would settleinto it, but it's also inert.
And so what's fascinating is a number of our papyri, the inner

(24:58):
pages in particular, are easier to read than parchment
manuscripts written hundreds of years later.
Because parchment with this is this is rabbit parchment that I
got from Pergamum where parchment came from.
The word Pergamum in several languages means parchment.
And I got it at a little shop where there's a lady who

(25:21):
continues to make it the old way.
And so they stretch it out on a aluminum, they scrape it with a
Crescent shaped knife and do allsorts of things that they have
to. It's a long and involved
process. But parchment really took over
papyrus in the 4th century as the medium of books.

(25:43):
And my understanding, I haven't validated this yet.
I need to do a little more research, but my understanding
from one of these codex makers, parchment makers, is that in
Alexandria, which was the largest library in the world at
the time, Pergamum was getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

(26:04):
Alexandria, I understand, had about 800,000 volumes.
So they wanted to have every book of the Western world, you
know, and Pergamum had a growingnumber, but it was about
200,000. And so because they buy this
papyrus that was so cheap, they could keep making books.
Alexandria didn't like that competition, so they would no

(26:25):
longer sell it. Interesting.
Outside of Egypt, it's fascinating, yeah.
Maybe Pergamum burned down the library in Alexandria's
vengeance. I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding. So pergamum, then they started
to make their own books out of parchment.
And our greatest majestical manuscripts, capital letter
manuscripts from the 4th and 5thcentury.
We have four of them that were originally complete Bibles, each

(26:49):
one between 2 covers. It's it's astounding to think.
Cynicus and Alexandrinus. And you have you have Vaticanus
and Cynoticus both from about 3:50.
And then you have Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus
from the late 4th early 5th century.
So right around 39410, if we could be that precise.

(27:12):
I don't know that we can, but right around there.
But they were originally complete Bibles, and Codex
Cynicus still has a complete NewTestament.
It's the oldest complete New Testament by half a Millennium.
Just amazing. Speaking of huge, heavy books,
we know that Dan is a scholar because he injured his arm
carrying just huge Tums, just massive, massive volumes.

(27:35):
So if you see that little pad there, that's that's for that.
OK, I want to ask you this. Talk to us a little bit about
what is textual criticism? How does that work with the New
Testament? Because we we don't have any of
the original copies that are called autographs of the New
Testament. Can we?
We still know what they did say.They didn't say.

(27:57):
How skeptical should we be? Give me your thoughts on and for
people that might not know what textual criticism is
specifically. Textual criticism is the science
of determining the original wording of a document whose
original is either lost or destroyed or inaccessible.

(28:17):
But we have copies. We have to do it with all
ancient texts, and we even have to do it with modern things like
the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln wrote that on the back
of an envelope, but even there you got to say we don't have
that envelope anymore. We have 5 copies that are done

(28:38):
by his assistants and they disagree with each other.
We have hundreds of newspapers that tried to quote him
accurately. And what we do know is in the
Gettysburg Address he he did notmention God in a certain clause
in the original writing but he did when he gave the message.
Interesting. So he added that.

(28:59):
But you know what you have behind Lincoln in the memorial,
they've got to figure out which one to go with or a combination.
It's it's still, there's a lot of work that needs to be done,
but they're not wildly differentthat we have a lot of sources
and they're early and they're close to it.
With the ancient world, every Greco Roman piece of literature

(29:20):
needs textual criticism to be done.
The New Testament is no exception to this.
We don't have the originals. They were lost or obliterated, I
think destroyed not intentionally, but they were
destroyed from copies after copies after copies that simply
wore them out on fragile papyrus.

(29:43):
And you can well imagine, here'ssomebody who's coming from
Corinth and he's got a a scribe as one of his servants, and he's
making a trip to Rome. He says, I understand the
Apostle Paul wrote a letter to you guys.
Well, he wrote a couple to us and I could bring a couple
copies. I could have my scribe make a
couple copies and bring them to you.

(30:04):
If he could then make a copy of your letter that Paul wrote to
you. This kind of thing must have
happened over and over and over again.
And it's not like copying Plato's Republic or some, you
know, the Gallic wars or something like this.
This is the life and blood of the church.
And so when someone found out that they have a, another church

(30:26):
has a letter from Paul, they wanted to get a copy.
And Paul even said that to the Colossians.
He said, have the letter from Laodicea.
You guys get it copied and give your letter to him.
I think that was actually Ephesians, because our earliest
manuscript for the letter to theEphesians don't say in Ephesus.

(30:47):
And there's some other reasons that suggests that whatever was
to go there was actually meant to be written by the 1st
readers. And Ephesus is the main port
into Asia Minor. And if you go counterclockwise
from Ephesus, the next stop for Paul's churches would be
Laodicea and the next would be Colossae.

(31:09):
And so as as it's getting copied, I think you know, as the
Courier says, OK, you guys copy it put anaphesso or in Ephesians
or in Ephesus there and then Laodicea, they do the same
thing. And and that's why Marcion
speaks of the letter is the letter letter to the Laodiceans.
Interesting. So that's the copy he knew of.

(31:30):
But so we know that these these were spread copied.
And even Peter in second Peter says that Paul, just as the
letters that Paul wrote or just what Paul wrote in his letters,
he wrote Scripture too. So there was must have been by
Peter's time just a few years later, a collection of at least
some of Paul's letters, which issignificant.

(31:51):
They would have been copied overand over again.
And finally, after a while, you're going to get some scribes
who are semi professional at being scribes.
And here's here's a significant point to consider.
Chapter Roberts, this man I've already mentioned about who
discovered P52 in 1977. He gave the Schweich lectures at

(32:14):
Oxford University on early Egyptian documents, I think.
I think that was the title of it, What Roberts did, he was a
papyrologist his whole life longcareer.
What he did is he found that when it came to the style of
hand that these documents were written in, there would be a

(32:36):
literary hand, a professional hand.
And P52, by the way, is written by a professional hand, a very
literary hand. And there would be those that
are written by people that they're just doing it because
they want to make a copy and they're literate enough to
write. That would be codec 61, which is

(32:57):
the manuscript that has the, theTrinitarian formula in first
John 57 that was written in 1520.
We even know the name of the scribe and he was not a scribe.
It was just an atrocious. I've seen the, you know, the
seen the book, it's, it's awful.But between these two extremes,

(33:18):
you've got scribes who are trained as accountants
especially, they write documents.
It's a documentary hand. They're writing ledgers.
And when you're doing numbers, you better be accurate.
Now, what's significant here is that Roberts discovered only one
manuscript apart from the New Testament, one piece of

(33:42):
literature that was written in adocumentary hand with, with the
number. And the the the way to tell is,
are the numbers written out as words or are they abbreviated
like Arabic numbers but Greek used Greek letters and then a
line above to mention what to indicate what the letter was.
He only found one document of a literary source that was written

(34:04):
that way, but several New Testament manuscripts.
The earlier we go, the more we have that are like that.
So what does that tell us? It tells us that the scribe was
not trained as a scribe to writeliterature.
So it might not be particularly pretty, but that scribe, he or
she would have been trained as an accountant.

(34:27):
Those are not the kinds of people that are going to be
inventing things and changing the text and adding stories and
this kind of thing. They're going to be as accurate
as they can be. We even know by examination of
some of these manuscripts how much a scribe would write at a
time. There's one that's a it's a
professional hand Codex Bayesi, or Codex D It's late 4th, early

(34:49):
5th century. It's got the gospels, an
accident. It's a bizarre manuscript,
really unusual, but it has a very early ancestry and this
scribe would write as much as 9 words at a time.
And then you have P-75 on the other extreme, where the scribe,

(35:11):
it's an early papyrus, 3rd century, has Luke and and John
in it. And he wrote one to two letters
at a time. The kinds of mistakes he made or
she made, you can tell are of that sort, the kinds that you
know. So it's not going to be the big
changes. And the more a scribe
understands what they're writing, they become more

(35:33):
dangerous in a sense, because then they'll do what Bayesai
does. You know, is is just maybe
change the wording is total rewrites.
It's just, it's in a league by itself.
But somebody who doesn't really pay attention that just wants a
faithful copy. And sometimes you have scribes
who didn't even know Greek very well or at all, and they would

(35:54):
write this out, right. But you can.
Those are going to be the more accurate scribes now they're
going to make the kinds of mistakes that are always
unintentional. Those are the easiest to detect.
But so we have this, this, this group of manuscripts, every
single copy we have is imperfectfrom the very earliest times to
the latest manuscripts because they're all copied by hand by

(36:17):
some human either on his own or in a scriptorium or even at a,
at a, at a monastery or someplace like that.
And because they're handwritten documents, they're going to have
mistakes in them. Most of these mistakes will be
the kind that are easy to detect, where you're writing the

(36:38):
same word twice that should havebeen written once, or skipping a
word or phrase or a line. Yeah, just look at your text
messages. It's like that.
There's little misspellings, transpositions, no emojis.
Well, there are emojis. There really are.
There's all sorts of characters in the margins.
Oh that's great. I love.
It really, really bizarre. So, but so these handwritten

(37:00):
manuscripts, there was no control over all from the very
beginning to say you have to copy it this way.
You got these independent writers that are having it
copied for themselves or their church or something like that.
And as as the church grew, now you're going to get copies that

(37:20):
are perhaps made three or four at a time.
But one of the things we've discovered is that virtually no
copies were made by somebody reading the text from a podium
or someplace to a group of scribes.
So there used to be, and it's still taught in a lot of the

(37:41):
textbooks, there's errors of sight and errors of hearing.
Well, if by errors of hearing somebody thinks that somebody's
reading to several scribes. Or something.
Yeah. We have virtually no evidence
for that action. Fascinating.
Yeah, but the error of hearing would be the scribe reading,
seeing the text, saying it out loud, remembering it.

(38:06):
And when he says it, between thetime he says it remembers it and
writes it, there's that that might be an, an error of
hearing, but not other, other ways, most likely.
So you've got this kind of a thing.
And actually, because the text was so widely diffused early on,
it shows that you can't control it.

(38:27):
But you grab these manuscripts and you start looking at
manuscripts to the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th century, and you
compare those and you can get very, very close to what the
original wording said. Now, it's not just the Greek
manuscripts that we're looking at.
Early on, as early as perhaps the late 2nd century, the New
Testament started to get translated into Latin.

(38:48):
We actually have more manuscripts in Latin than we do
in Greek. We have somewhere between 8 and
10,000 Latin manuscripts of the New Testament because Latin
became the lungo franca of of Europe after Constantine moved
the capital to a Constantinople,Byzantium, now Istanbul in
three. Well, it was in the three 20s.

(39:12):
I think it's winning. But anyways, early 4th century
and the Latin just grew and you know, got the rest of Western
Europe. Coptic, which was the big
language in Egypt. We have tons of Coptic
manuscripts starting in the 3rd century and later Syriac, same
kind of thing. Between these three versions, we

(39:33):
probably have 12 to 15,000 copies perhaps.
And I I kind of copy as a handwritten document written
before the time of the printing press or before that language
was put on a printing press. So the average size manuscript
is actually over 400 pages or early papyri.

(39:54):
They're they're small scraps. Some of them, some of them are
actually pretty large. P46, which has nine out of
Paul's 13 letters, actually has.86 leaves of an original 104
interesting and and most leaves are 80 to 90% complete.
Just some of the stuff at the bottom is not discovered right

(40:17):
around 1930. It's in Dublin and Michigan now
and it's very easy to read. The ink is very clear.
So that's. Let me summarize what you're
saying real quick, just as a philosopher, so if I get it
wrong, let me know. So so essentially what we're
doing is we're taking thousands of manuscripts.
So if we have almost 6000 Greek 10,000 Latin, I think I've heard

(40:39):
you one time say 1,000,000 quotes in the Church fathers
from the. Well over 1,000,000.
Quotes. So then what we're doing is
we're looking and if, if every manuscript has the words in a
certain order, but one doesn't, you know, the scribe just
transpose those words. So it's not people sometimes
make a huge deal of how many variants there are, how many
manuscripts there are, but most of them are pretty innocuous.

(41:00):
And so things like earlier manuscripts would be better than
later ones that are shorter versus ones where people in
their devotion try to make it longer.
And and those kind of things would things that are.
Yeah. So things where an error is left
in there would also be somewhat authentic, right.
So anyway, is that a fair like summary That's.
Fair. Yeah, it's a little little
different from that. You don't have that many people

(41:21):
that are adding things. They'll add comments in the
margin if they want to add stuff.
Got it. Although you do have some of
these scribes that did add some more material here and there,
especially for the Book of Acts.This Codex Bayesai has almost 9%
more material in Acts than our best manuscripts do, so added a
lot. Yeah.

(41:43):
It's really, really bizarre. So you've got these manuscripts
that for the most part, there's no control in the copy, not like
the Quran, where there was profound control and there would
be penalties if you made mistakes.
And the popular myth among Muslims is that there are no
mistakes in any Quran manuscripts.
Now that the Quran is being examined by scholars, deeply

(42:05):
examined, that myth is just, it's just blown apart.
I've seen Quran manuscripts witherasures, several erasures on a
single page so that it can say the same thing.
And I won't get in the Quran. But that's a really fascinating
field. Yeah.
The fact that it has textual criticism at all for the Quran,
which is supposed to be. Yeah, I hear you.

(42:26):
Yeah. And, and part of the reason the
the Quran actually was fairly carefully copied is because of a
reaction to the Bible, reaction to the New Testament, where the
the copies would be disparate enough.
And they wanted to say this is the true word of God.
And the proof is that we don't have copies going all over.

(42:47):
But how extreme is the difference?
Well, we can count this in in byaddition of of words and
letters. The Textus Receptus, the Greek
text that the King James was based on, done in 1516, and the
one that the King James really was based on this.
Is Erasmus's text. Yeah.
It's Erasmus done in 1522. And then there are others after
that, Stefanus and Theodore Beza, who did additions that the

(43:11):
King James translators used. But you compare that to what we
would consider by critical examination what we believe the
original New Testament to say. The growth over 1400 years is
2%, two percent growth. You have two passages that are
12 versus long that are in dispute.

(43:33):
Most scholars would say they're not original.
Just the long ending of Mark andthen the lady caught in the act
of adultery, is that. Yeah, OK.
Right. Yeah.
My favorite story that's not in the Bible is because that's
that's. What I've said, yeah.
You're taking away all my Thunder here.
I know well, I'm just I got to contribute something.
I'm not a New Testament scholar,so I got to.
Well, you can correct me on philosophy because I'm not a
philosopher. OK, so then in the next largest

(43:55):
we've got 15 or so that are one or two verses.
Then everything else is part of a verse.
The most common kind of texture variant we have is spelling
differences. About 70% of our textual
variants are spelling differences.
Now, there's been some research done on how many textual

(44:17):
variants do we actually have? And, and Peter Gurry, a former
intern of mine, he was on the staff at CS and TM.
Peter wrote an article where he actually looked at places where
scholars have dove deep into allthe manuscripts of say, John 18
or the Book of Revelation or something like that.
We haven't done it with a lot, but he's taking those samples

(44:39):
and figured out approximately how many variants we actually
have. So the most accurate estimate
done by Peter Gurry published New Testament Studies a few
years ago is that there's 500,000 textual variants.
Now for him, a textual variant is something that is more than
just spelling and nonsense. The problem is that that's the

(45:00):
great majority of these differences.
About 2/3 of all of the of the differences, we could call them
variants, readings discrepancieswere are spelling or nonsense.
When you actually look at the kinds of differences or variants
we have, they can fall into one of four groups.
This is a different way to look at them, those that are

(45:23):
meaningful or viable, and those are the two categories.
How many variants do we have that are both meaningful and
viable? And by viable, I mean it has a
legitimate possibility of going back to the original wording.
Meaningful. It changes the meaning to some
degree, not to great degree necessarily, in fact hardly ever

(45:46):
and never to doctrine doesn't change any doctrines, but
meaningful, we understand that viable.
So is it meaningful and viable? That's one category.
Is it meaningful but not viable?That's category 2.
Is it viable but not meaningful category 3?
And is it neither meaningful norviable Category 4, That's the

(46:08):
largest category we have neithermeaningful nor viable.
And we're dealing, Gee, I don't know what, what it is.
It's, it's 80 percent, 85. I don't know what it is.
It's, it's a very high percentage.
Then, then, then you have the meaningful but not viable and
viable but not meaningful. The viable but not meaningful.
That's a large category as well.Meaningful but not viable.

(46:30):
It's it's meaningful because it does change the meaning of the
text. But let's see, it's found in a
single 14th century manuscript. And my favorite one along these
lines is First Thessalonians 27,where we do have a meaningful
and viable textual problem that Paul says we became gentle among

(46:50):
you or we became little childrenamong you.
When he says we became whatever we became, Apioi is the word
gentle. Napioi is the word little
children. The word before is agonathemon.
He's dictating this probably to Silas or to some other scribe.

(47:11):
And I think that person may haveheard it wrong, and then Paul
would have corrected the letter before it was sent out because
agonathemon Napioi or agonathemon napioi, it's hard to
tell. Yeah, and and a lot of ancient
writing they would do all caps with no spaces or punctuation.
So words running together is huge.
That's why a lot of them are reading it sometimes out loud,

(47:33):
because it's harder to separate words without our modern
spacing. Right.
Yeah, right. But even this, this is where the
only air of hearing would come in from the apostle dictating to
the scribe. And and so it's a single letter
difference and it's it's very significant textual poem.
One later scribe said we became hippoy horses, we became horses.

(47:54):
Among you, yeah. Must be AUSC fan, I guess I'm
not. I'm not sure.
But anyway, that's a silly variant, but it does change the
meaning, you know, significantly.
So, OK, the smallest category ofall those four by far is those
that are both meaningful and viable, and that constitutes

(48:15):
less than 110th of 1% of all textual differences.
And those are the really the only ones that matter when
people are like testing their faith against.
Exactly. Well, in fact, it's far more
than the only ones that matter because most of them still just
don't affect very much. Like here's a, here's a a
significant problem that fits this category.

(48:35):
John 41 when Jesus knew that thePharisee said to her that we he
was making and making baptizing more disciples than John.
Then verse two goes on. Or is it when the Lord knew that
the Pharisees had heard? When Jesus knew or when the Lord
knew? Significant textual variant.
Hard to decide. Probably Jesus is original, but

(48:56):
there's no manuscripts that say when Peter knew, when Mary knew,
when John knew. It's Jesus of the Lord.
It changes the translation and that by definition is going to
be a significant meaningful variant.
You know, but a lot of these have to do with whether the word
but or and is in the text, you know, things like them.

(49:17):
OK, now you've got this lack of control of copying that spread
throughout the Mediterranean world.
And that actually gives us a good sense of what the original
is when we can compare that. However, we don't have a whole
lot of manuscripts from the 2nd and 3rd century.
We do have, as we already mentioned, manuscripts in other
languages, ancient manuscripts, and we have quotations of the

(49:40):
New Testament by the church fathers starting in the late 1st
century with Clement. In the 2nd century we have a
whole lot more, and by the time we get to origin third history
3rd century died the middle of it.
He's written full commentaries and Eusebius got his library in
the 4th century and Emperor Constantine asked Eusebius to

(50:05):
make 50 Bibles for the capital city because Constantine was the
first Christian emperor who wanted Bibles for the new
capital. So Eusebius had a workshop with
origins manuscripts there and with scribes, and he produced
these 50 Bibles for Constantine.What?
What? Here's a little sign.
I'm sorry. I did.
I do rap. I.
Love side listen history academia that's that's this

(50:28):
podcast so whatever you want yeah go.
For it so it it fascinating little thing, Constantine told
you CBS. I want them to be in threes and
fours. What does that mean?
There's at least a dozen different interpretations, but
one of them that I think is mostintriguing, and it may well be
right, is I want them to be in three and four columns.

(50:53):
The reason that may be right is because these are Bibles for the
churches in the capital city, which would mean they'd be, they
need to be large enough that youcould read them in columns.
You get a big Bible and it's just one line across.
You'll lose your place. If we look at our manuscripts

(51:13):
that are lectionaries, they're not continuous text manuscripts,
but they are manuscripts that have daily readings or weekly
readings from various portions. But like you have Gospels
manuscripts, you'll have everything in the Gospels, but
just not in normal order. They're almost always in two
columns because that's what's read publicly.
They don't want to make mistakes.

(51:34):
Do you know how many three column manuscripts we have?
How many? One interesting codex Vaticanus,
4th century. Do you know how many four column
manuscripts we have? Is it the other three?
I don't know one, just one, OK. Sinaiticus yeah, our two major
majuscules, perhaps the two mostimportant manuscripts of the New

(51:56):
Testament. And I think that Canis is the
most important manuscript. Sinaiticus close.
But it it's, you know, some would say, well, maybe those
were two of the original Bibles that Eusebius sent to
Constantine. JK Elliott said, a great British
texture critic who died recently, he said, I think that

(52:20):
a canis may have been sent to Constantinople, but not
Cynoticus. Cynoticus was a reject.
It was poorly copied. It's a very, very important
manuscript. The scribe makes so many
mistakes. Scribes make a lot of mistakes.
So, and one of them, one of my favorites is in First
Thessalonians 2, wherein in the fourth column over the scribe is

(52:43):
writing out First Thessalonians 213 and it ends with two through
of God, the churches of God, I think is what it says or that
that's in the middle of it. Then he continues on to verse
14, but he misses his place and he he writes out he he continues

(53:07):
on all the way through verse 14.That also ends with two through
but then he repeats it going back to verse 13.
Accidentally 11 lines are copiedbefore he realized his mistake.
And you see little marks in the margin saying don't read this.
That was a bozo thing. I just co-authored a paper that

(53:29):
was is published in a in a a book for Holger Struttwolf.
Who is the the Institute for NewTestament Textual Research?
He's the director there in Munster, Germany.
They're the ones who publish ourstandard Greek New Testaments.
Long time friend in this articlewas about what's called a
ditography, where a scribe writes twice what he should have

(53:51):
written once. It's called disturbing
ditographies. And one of the things I noticed
in this particular ditography isthat not only did the scribe
rewrite those 11 lines, but madethree changes the second time
around. So what scholars have done is
they've simply said the second time, you know, the photography,

(54:14):
that's a mistake. We get rid of that.
We read the first time. What if the second time you
copied it more accurately? You know, that's fascinating
things to wrestle with. OK, so you've got those kinds of
issues. You've got church fathers that
start quoting from the New Testament over and over and over
again. And it was in the 1930s that
over 1,000,000 quotations of theNew Testament were found in just

(54:36):
the Latin Fathers from the firstfew centuries.
I don't know how many millions of quotations we have by the
Church Fathers that go all the way up to the 13th century, but
we have a lot. You could virtually reproduce
the entire New Testament many times over just from the
readings of the Church Fathers. So if you wipe out all the
manuscripts, all the early translations, we'd still have

(54:57):
the New Testament. That was fascinating.
So OK, so how does how does thisrelate?
So we talked about how many manuscripts we have.
We talked about how early they are to put that in perspective,
because I have to deal with textual criticism on the
philosophy side reading, you know, doing some work on sexist
Empiricus right now and his skepticism.
And even there you got to figureout which manuscript and how old
all that. So tell me a little bit about
how this compares to other ancient authors, because I think

(55:19):
people think, all right, there'shundreds of years to thousands
of years. There's all these manuscripts in
the New Testament. How does that compare to other
historical documents that we have from the ancient world to
the ancient Greek world? OK, So I should mention this is
the final point I think about these these mistakes.
So I said less than 110th of 1% of all textual differences are

(55:39):
actually meaningful and viable. None of them affected doctrine.
That's if you didn't know better.
You think there was providentialcare going on in the copying
these manuscripts, You know, butit's not that all of the
manuscripts were carelessly copied.
That's that's not true. We have some that seem to be
very carelessly copied, some that were intentionally just

(56:03):
kind of a rewriting like the Bayesian text, which is a
daggod. It's got Greek on one side and
Latin on the other. And what's interesting is a
number of our manuscripts that are dyglots, Greek and Latin,
are from the Western tradition or Western textual stream, if we

(56:24):
could call it that, of of witnesses.
And they're the ones that tend to go more paraphrastic and
maybe add material. Why is that?
I think it's because it was a missionary text.
It's getting the gospel out to people as fast as possible.
So they have the Greek for thosewho read Greek, they have the

(56:46):
Latin for those who read Latin. Some it's just the Latin
manuscripts and number of Latin manuscripts really agree with
Bayesai. And they're not nearly as
concerned to get the exact wording right.
That's not their their issue. And this brings us to a central
point that is a, a philosophicalnature.
The core of Christianity, our our core belief, our foundation

(57:08):
is not the Bible, it's Jesus Christ himself and therefore the
gospel. Getting the gospel out is more
important than making accurate copies.
I'm not in any way trying to reduce the importance of making
accurate copies, but I am sayingthat the early Christians, we're
so concerned to get the gospel out that at times in these other

(57:30):
languages, they weren't as accurate.
Sometimes even in Greek they weren't as accurate.
They're spreading the gospel. Now with Islam, the goal is to
have an accurate text because asimportant as Muhammad is, he's
not God. For Christians, if Jesus Christ
is not God, if he was not raisedfrom the dead, our faith is
destroyed. In the in the New Testament, the

(57:52):
Bible is just a myth book. It's just stories.
But that's not the case. So because of the centrality of
Christ, the Bible stands in second place, not first place.
But that's important to keep that in mind.
Now, it's not. Again, as I said, it's not
always copies that were made wildly or carelessly.

(58:13):
In fact, that's not even most ofthem.
There was a group of manuscriptsthat follows a very ancient
stream of tradition known as theAlexandrian manuscripts and they
are for the most part very careful manuscripts from a very
accurate stream that goes back very early.

(58:34):
Even Bart Ehrman and Bruce Metzger in the 4th edition of
Metzger's text of the New Testament that he co-authored
with Bart makes that exact point.
Gordon Fee and other great New Testament texture critics says
it's a very good stream of tradition goes back very ancient
and he says almost to the originals themselves.

(58:55):
Why is that? Why would the Alexander
manuscripts be so accurate? It's because in Alexandria were
which had the largest library inthe world.
That's where bookmaking was at its apex of its craft.
And there were rules on how to copy books that were that, that,
that a scholar came up with in second or third century BC.

(59:20):
I'm, I'm a little, I, I don't, Idon't recall exactly, But long
before the New Testament, let's just say this, there was a
scholar who came up with this after the classical period was
over, but before the New Testament came out, before AD
quite some time before the New Testament.
And the rules had to do with making careful copies.

(59:42):
All of the evidence points to the scribes who were copying
Christian documents in Alexandria.
We're following the same rules. Now you say some scholars will
say, well, these classical texts, now we can get that to
that question that the 1st century after the writing, this
is a statement that's often made, which really I don't know

(01:00:02):
what the evidence is, but it's. Typically one scholar quoting
another scholar quoting another scholar.
Another scholar in Evangelical told me that he contacted these
scholars who were still alive and none of them said that, but
that the 1st century of copying is where it's the wildest.
OK, let's say that was true for the texts of classical

(01:00:26):
literature. The New Testament is not written
during the classical era, and it's written after the rules for
careful copying came about afterthe classical manuscript started
to get copied by at least a century or more.
So we don't have those same kinds of problems.
And you could even test this by looking at Matthew and Luke and

(01:00:48):
their use of Mark. Matthew has 600 of Mark's 660
verses in his Gospel in one way or another.
Sometimes they're identical, other times they're modified,
but the modifications go in the direction of what Matthew's
doing with his motifs. And he's not a scribe.
He's an apostle who I think he wanted to put his Apostolic

(01:01:11):
imprimatur on Mark's Gospel because it was known.
And Matthew wants to say, yeah, this is this is authentic.
But I'm also putting Jesus's sermons in the context.
So Matthew's Gospels is anchoredby 5 great sermons that were
probably distributed individually as pamphlets before

(01:01:35):
he wrote his Gospel. And we have some evidence to
suggest that. So he would have used Mark's
Gospel. And so where he's making the
changes, it's for his particularmotifs.
But when, when you have Matthew and Luke and Mark agreed, good
grief, you, you know what Mark said.
And consequently they don't change that much for Mark.

(01:01:56):
They're going to leave things out.
We'll modify a few things, but they're not scribes.
These are men who are using their sources.
And Luke says he used sources. So evangelist gospel writers are
not the same as scribes. Scribes had a different duty and
a different task. And we've already seen those who
write documentary hands from Alexandria.

(01:02:17):
Those who copied literature fromAlexandria did so under some
guidelines that were very strict.
We even know of some manuscriptsthat come about in the 10th
century that were the most famous to these is Kodak 1739,
found now on Mount Athos at one of the monasteries on this

(01:02:40):
northeastern peninsula of Greece. 22 monasteries there.
They've got over 1000 Greek New Testament manuscripts at Mount
Athos. Interesting.
And Kodak 1739 is a manuscript that has it's from the 10th
century, has copies of Paul's letters, and in the margins it

(01:03:05):
quotes systematically church fathers comments on what Paul
has to say right up until the time of Basil the Great into the
4th century, and then it stops. Why is that?
We know about the scribe. His name was Ephraim.
We know that he was trained to be a lawyer, that we have five
of his manuscripts, one more that's biblical, 3 of their

(01:03:27):
classical texts. And he's in Constantinople when
he where we have the greatest production of manuscripts of the
late Byzantine era. But he dedicated his life to
finding the oldest, most accurate copies to copy from.
And we know this from some of the things that he's written.

(01:03:47):
1739 was almost surely copied from a manuscript that in itself
would be early 5th century. So it goes back five centuries,
Boom, just by that, and scholarsregard it as equal to one of the
great majestical manuscripts of the 4th or 5th century.
That's fascinating. So here you can have a late

(01:04:08):
manuscript that has a very ancient pedigree by intention,
so that it just lots of things. But when you, when you boil all
this down, there's another way to to look at this and how
textual critics go about their work.
If I had say, if I'm lecturing about the text of the New

(01:04:29):
Testament and I've done experiments like this called the
Gospel according to Snoopy, I'llexplain that in a minute because
I think it's, it's really, really important to think about.
But let's say I had 100 people and I say, OK, I want your
everybody to write out exactly what I'm saying.
And I read this text and I read it slowly, reverential pace, and

(01:04:53):
maybe it I read for 5 minutes. Then I asked them all to pass in
what they wrote. Without names, I wouldn't know
these people anyway. Yeah, and I think I'm going to
do this the next time I give this kind of a lecture.
They pass it in and then I can reconstruct without looking at
my original. Or a textual critic could

(01:05:14):
reconstruct without looking at the original, exactly what the
original said, because all thesemanuscripts are contemporaneous.
But you'll be able to tell whichones are more accurate than
others. You'll be able to tell the kinds
of mistakes the scribe makes. This one, that's very accurate,
but it skipped a whole line. This one is not too accurate,

(01:05:34):
but it has all the data. You can make those comparisons
and the ones that are slower copyists and they skip a line,
they don't all skip the same line.
You know, it's just you could dothis.
It's not that difficult. Now what I've done with the
Gospel according to Snoopy is it's a, it's really a fun
project, but it just beats the stuffing out of me.
It's a nine hour project. I do on a Friday night and all

(01:05:58):
day Saturday with with people. I have to have between 50 and 60
people is really the ideal size.65 would be the Max Friday
night. I give them an introduction to
how textual critics do their work.
Take about an hour and a half onthat.
One of these people has come to one of these.
I've done this over 70 * 1 of these people who came had taken

(01:06:23):
Greek from me at Dallas Seminary, where in the required
course we spend three weeks on textual criticism.
Now, I also taught a course on textual criticism.
He had not taken that, but he took this Gospel according to
Snoopy and it was spent an hour and a half.
I, I, I just give them the rudiments of that textual
criticism is about. Then I take 22 people who

(01:06:48):
volunteer to be scribes and I take them into a different room.
The rest of the people are goingto be textual critics, and what
they have in front of them is information of what scribe
copied from what scribe, and they are to reconstruct the
genealogical relationship. And sometimes a scribe copies

(01:07:10):
from more than one text and theyget the scribal instructions.
You're to make a very accurate text, but you might, but you're
not real good at spelling. And I'll ask somebody who can do
something accurately, but you'rea poor speller.
So I get the actual scribe to dothis.
The, the textual groups are the Schroeder, Lucy and Linus and

(01:07:35):
Lucy. Lucy is the one who's like Bezai
and she doesn't care for the I, I, I copy, I have them copy an
ancient text that's not from theBible, but it sounds Christian
almost, but it is far removed from the Christian faith.
It's, it's a Gnostic text. They don't know where it is.

(01:07:56):
It's just 50 words and I and Lucy is told, OK, you're going
to change the wording to some degree to soften some of the
chauvinism I get. I don't know if the chauvinist
is still a word but but don't change it radically.
Now she has 2. So you got Lucy one and Lucy 2A
and Lucy 2B. Those are copies.

(01:08:18):
So 2 tells you it's a second generation and Lucy one is
actually copying from Snoopy theoriginal.
And I got the Schroeder group. Got 2 Schroeder groups,
Schroeder 2A and Schroeder 2B and they go down their different
streams. Then I got a line script that
comes on later and gathers together an early Schroeder

(01:08:39):
manuscript and one of the Lucy manuscripts that he has access
to. There's only one that's left.
So and then they then that scribe is trying to put them
together but elevate Christ, make it a high Christology.
That's the Byzantine text. Interesting.
And we get usually about 75 to 150 differences.

(01:09:07):
Just in that. Just in these scribes, because
I'm, I'm kind of forcing errors,you know, you don't hear so well
your ink is running, you know, something like that.
So you say, well, don't we know more information than what
scholars know? Well, we can tell quite a bit
about a scribe by looking at a number of features.

(01:09:27):
Like I said, P-75 we know that scribe was careful, probably for
personal use, one or two lettersat a time.
We know Bayes, I was not may have been a mission.
And we know a lot of things by looking at the hand and getting
into the details that way. So the texture critics work out
the genealogy, and then they're supposed to try to come up with
principles based on what they see from these manuscripts.

(01:09:49):
Well, I think the Schroeder stream is going to probably be
the most accurate. I got to watch out a little bit
for the Lucy stream. But she could have original
stuff that Schroeder misses. And even Linus can have stuff
because it's copying from a Schroeder manuscript that's no
longer extant and from a Lucy manuscript that's no longer

(01:10:10):
extant. So even by itself, it might have
the original. We take this through 6
generations of copies, and the next day all the scribes are now
dead scribes. They're ghosts, and they're
supposed to. They can participate, but they
have to be in a different textual strain than what they
started at. And it takes us hours for them

(01:10:33):
to 1st trigger. Try to figure out what the
archetypal reading said. What did Schroeder 1A say?
What did Schroeder 1B say? What did Lucy one say?
What did Linus say? And it it it'll, it'll probably
take 4 hours wow to get through all that, maybe more.

(01:10:54):
And then as a group, and all I'mdoing is I'm asking them
questions. I'm not directing them.
In fact, at times I'm trying to deceive them.
Let's see what what about this you guys are arguing for that?
What about this? And by the time they've worked
through this as texture critics,they understand what it's all
about. And the student who took Greek

(01:11:17):
from me said I knew more in those two days than I ever did
in three weeks studying texture critics.
Now, here's the results from this 70 times I've done it.
I think there have only been twoinstances where we've had more
than two differences from the original out of 70 times, and

(01:11:41):
both were by PhD students who are overthinking it.
Many times we've had perfect, it's gotten perfect.
And the rest of times it's one, sometimes 2 differences.
All of the differences are minor.
It's like the life versus life or something like that, you
know? So really minor differences.

(01:12:02):
So what I do is I put up what all the groups now they're
debating with each other what they think the original said
from the reconstructed archetypes.
And someone will say, yeah, but the shredder stream is more
accurate than the Lucy. Even though we've constructed
Lucy, you can see there's a motive to get it to be changed.
And the shred and they they go back and forth and almost never

(01:12:26):
is it a single stream that has the original only.
So it's reconstructed by comparing all the data.
We know the ages of the manuscripts, the generations of
copies. We know what the, the, the, the,
what the, the motifs of a particular scribe, whether
accidental, intentional, and what the intention would be.

(01:12:47):
And I put this up and then I put, OK, what are the variants
you have in your group? And you'll see, you know what,
for every word, there's a variant or more that might be 3
or 4 variants for a word right from the beginning.
And so then I asked and I and I said, and So what we do, we
underline the the first word that they think is what the

(01:13:09):
original is all three groups getting together.
And it's a solid underline. If they're all sure.
Yeah, that's what the original said, dotted.
If they're not so sure and, you know, wider gaps between the
dots, if they're really just guessing, then I asked the
question, how many of you think we nailed it?
And they see all these variants down there.
One or two hands go up. The rest, I don't even know how

(01:13:30):
close we are. Yeah.
And then I read the original. I put the original Snoopy up and
they start clapping and I say, what are you clapping for?
You guys do the work. Yeah, look at this.
That's cool. What a great way to teach it.
I did it one time in Las Vegas at a, at a church.
I'll, I'll, I'll be, I'll be done with this.
But our New Testament text is inso much better shape than what I

(01:13:51):
force on these people in nine hours.
And they learn the principles, you know, and they, they, they,
they, they don't hear all the internal evidence, external
evidence, know how to deal with it.
Well, that's what we're dealing with.
So I did this one time in Las Vegas at a church that the
pastor who invited me to to do this said while we're leaving
the King James. We started to use the NRSV or

(01:14:13):
some modern translation that wasnot true.
They were still deeply embedded in the King James Bible and he
just was hoping I would come to help them get away from that.
There were people the first night couple and walked out said
everything you're saying is wrong.
I don't agree with anything he said.
I said really like the deity of Christ.
You don't agree with me on that.And then they got it perfect and

(01:14:38):
one person before we got to the end.
If this is how textual criticismis done, I don't want to have
any part to do with it. I'm going to stick with my King
James Bible. That's Linus.
That's the Linus test, really. It's fascinating.
So, but, but we have, we have some good manuscripts, we have a
trifecta of evidence from the fathers, the versions, the

(01:14:59):
manuscripts, and we have strong internal ways to think through
what the original would have said.
Let me finish with this. For virtually all of classical
literature, you have to, I thinkfor all of it, you have to have
conjectures in a number of places.
Sometimes, like with Livy, we are missing most of his books
entirely. And Tacitus and some of these

(01:15:21):
Roman historians and, and, and Caesar.
And you know, you've, you've gotto Plato and you've got the
philosophers, we've got the historians, you got Passanias,
the geography, you got Strabo, who's also in that line,
historian, geographer. And there's gaps, huge gaps.
Classical scholars say we wish we had the embarrassment of

(01:15:45):
riches that New Testament peoplehave.
We have the official number is 5700 Greek, New Testament
manuscripts between 8 and 10,000Latin, Syria, Syriac, Coptic,
and then Old Church Slavonic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, just a
a bunch of other languages that we have.

(01:16:06):
We've got somewhere between 20 and 25,000 manuscripts all
together of the New Testament invarious languages.
So you stack up those New Testament manuscripts, it's more
than 4 Empire State Building stacked on top of each other.
It's more than a Mile High. You take the average classical
author and we've got maybe 15 manuscripts, and that's a

(01:16:27):
generous estimate. Now that's the average, about
four feet high. Well, OK, but those New
Testament manuscripts come centuries later.
Really we have some that come decades later.
We have a complete New Testamentwithin 300 years, and we have

(01:16:48):
large sections of the New Testament before that.
So by the time we are in the 4thand 5th century, we can
reconstruct it several differentways.
But we we've discovered these early papyri.
The 20th century was the the theperiod of papyrus discoveries,
and as important as they are because they go back very early,
not a single place in our Greek New Testament has been changed

(01:17:12):
on the basis of what the papyri and the papyri alone have.
The papyri have been supporters of what we already thought was
original, or at least was the alternate to the original.
They have not changed the text even once.
That's amazing with all these early discoveries.

(01:17:34):
And it tells us that those great4th and 5th century manuscripts
have a great tradition that goesback very early that the papyri
don't fix them, they support them.
That's fascinating. And when it comes to
conjectures, there may be two places for the entire New
Testament where we don't have the original wording.

(01:17:54):
When it comes to other ancient authors, as I said, whole books
chapter that just they're in different order just so much
it's it's just chaos. And when you look at the copies
of these other ancient authors, very frequently you'll have two
streams Middle Ages, 1000 years later.
That's the earliest copies. And then you say, here's the six

(01:18:16):
copies over here and here's the seven over here.
We know all these came from thisstream.
We know all these came from thisstream.
This just it's typical over and over and over.
You get that with the classical texts and the average copies.
The the the time from writing until the earliest copies.
For the average classical author, it's between 500 and

(01:18:37):
1000 years. And for some of these classical
authors, we're waiting 1800 years before we get a single
substantial copy, more than a few lines of a papyrus.
If that were the case with the New Testament, it would be like
saying the first substantial copy of the New Testament we
have is when the Wright brothersflew the airplane for the first

(01:19:01):
time. That's crazy.
Yeah, that's wild. These are interesting.
Facts. And by the time we get to the
4th century, we have I think we have as many as 160 manuscripts
in Greek Allah. Well, some scholars will like to
say that they'll, they'll do a abait and switch and let's say

(01:19:23):
they'll they'll talk about percentages and they'll say,
well, the majority of our manuscripts, 85% of our
manuscripts come from the secondMillennium, 11th century and
later. Yeah, OK, but what is that 15%
that come earlier? It's 967 manuscripts, yeah, at
least. And, and the number is growing.

(01:19:43):
So it's over 1000 up to the 10thcentury, 900 years after the new
test was completed, we have 1000manuscripts.
The next century we have another1000.
And so it doesn't matter how youslice it, the New Testament is
in far, far, far better shape than anything from the classical
world, even Homer. And Homer was a required

(01:20:05):
textbook for Greek school boys. Alexander had his copy of the
Iliad, I think everywhere he went.
And Bruce Metzger said we only have 647 copies of the Iliad.
He said that in 1964, his first edition of his.
Text of the New Testament and even in 2005, his 4th edition

(01:20:27):
that Bruce that Bart Ehrman co-authored, he never updated
the the data. We have far more than that.
Probably the greatest Homer scholar, Martin WA British
scholar has. We've documented quite a bit in
the last 60 years. We have a lot of papyri, about
1800 papyri. They're all very fragmentary,
fragmentary and they all come much later.

(01:20:50):
I I don't know that we have anything within the first 3 or 4
or 500 years of when Homer wrote.
I don't know when the earliest are, but they're, that's, we
have about 2000 copies of Homer,all of his writings, of both of
his writings all together. And that's the best of the
ancient world. Yeah.
And it's got a 900 year head start over the New Testament,

(01:21:13):
so. It's wild.
Slice it anywhere you want. Yeah.
So for people that want to learnmore, this is fascinating.
What are some resources that youwould recommend for people that
want to know about the history of the New Testament, how these
things came to be, some, you know, textual criticism kind of
stuff. What would you recommend?
Well, there's a a number of books that would be helpful in a

(01:21:33):
a number of those areas. I would actually recommend
Metzger and Ehrman as a a great source for the history.
It has a lot of material in the manuscripts now.
Metzger was an evangelical and probably the finest textual
critic of the 20th century. He was Bart Ehrman's mentor.

(01:21:54):
I. Think Ehrman was his last
doctoral student, is that correct?
Or at least he had Barton. And Mike Holmes, OK.
Interesting. Fascinating.
And I wanted to study under Metzger.
I met him in 82, which is the first time I met Bart.
He's first year in the doctorateprogram, I believe, and Metzger
said he's not allowed to take any more students.

(01:22:15):
So instead I went, I, I, I decided I'm going to emphasize
grammar. And I went to study at Dallas
Seminary and abused Fanning for to work in grammar.
But textual criticism has also been a passion all these years
as well. OK, so.
So text the New Testament. We'll talk about this in a
little bit, but there's there's three books that I would
recommend that are dealing with this in an apologetic way.

(01:22:40):
I would also mention a Chuck Quarles new book, New Testament
Texture Criticism for the 21st Century.
It just came out 180 pages. It's an introduction that is is
done well. He's a responsible scholar,
solid scholar, evangelical knowsthe stuff well.
I'm writing an introduction and it's it's I've only been working

(01:23:04):
on it since 1979. So it it won't be for the faint
of heart, but OK, so you got those.
Now here's a book that tells a lot about you know, up here I
had ideas reinventing Jesus. And this is a book that Ed
Komashefsky and Jim Sawyer and Ico-authored.

(01:23:26):
How contemporary is skeptics missed the real Jesus and
mislead popular culture. This book, it has been used as a
textbook in classrooms on the gospels.
And we're, we're going to be revising it one of these years,
updating it. But here's what the sections
are. Part 1 is I believe in

(01:23:47):
yesterday. How do we know that the gospel
writers got the story of Jesus right?
Part 2 is politically corrupt, the tainting of ancient New
Testament texts. How do we know that the scribes
got what the gospel writers and the rest of the New Testament
authors wrote? There's five chapters in that

(01:24:07):
section. Part 3, did the early church
muzzle the Canon? How do we know what books belong
in the Canon? Say it's just three chapters,
but really important. 4 is the divinity of Jesus early
tradition or late superstition. We talk about that where it
comes from. And then part 5, stealing
Thunder, did Christianity RIP off mythical gods?

(01:24:28):
And we have some chapters on this.
It's it's a real helpful. Book.
I like the different angles of that.
That's cool. Yeah, real helpful book and it's
got 60 pages of footnotes. So we did our homework.
We are not. One of the problems you have
with apologists is they like to quote other apologists and I'm
not an apologist. It's the only apologetic book
I've ever actually written or co-authored.

(01:24:51):
But I'm I'm pitching it for lay people.
But it's still the best scholarship going.
Now there's two others. When Bart and I had our first
debate in New Orleans. This is 2008.
It's the reliability of the New Testament.
Bart Ehrman and Dan Wallace in dialogue.
This is published by Fortress Press. 2008 New Orleans was the

(01:25:14):
Greer Herd Forum and ours with was the 4th annual Greer Herd
Forum. It's funded by two businessmen,
Greer and Heard, and it's a Friday evening debate or
dialogue, if you will, between two scholars that are noted in
in this particular area. And then Saturday morning and

(01:25:37):
early afternoon, you've got 2 scholars, if you can put it this
way, on the side of one of thesedebaters and then 2:00 on the
other side. The first debate, the first
Greer Herd forum, was between Tom Wright and John Dominic
Crossan on the resurrection. Can't pick a more important

(01:25:58):
subject than that. And those are the guys as far as
these four guys within T ride and then.
Yeah, I mentioned I was seminar Mike Lacrosse up there now.
Yeah. But yeah, those are the guys to
debate it. And I went to that debate.
I went to the third one. And then of course, I went to
the 4th. I didn't want to do this debate.
I I'm not a debater. I've been involved in five
debates in my entire life, threewith Bart Ehrman.

(01:26:19):
I I was at the one at SNU that you did long time ago when I was
an undergrad. Actually, that was right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was October 2011,
that debate that would be a a thing to really help people, I
think because it's a video you can see at CSN tm.org C as in
Center for the Study of New testamentmanuscripts.org/videos,

(01:26:45):
I think is what it's called. And the SMU debate pops up.
It's two hours long. Don't worry, it's not 2 hours of
debate. We, we go back and forth with
each other and then we have Q&A from the floor.
And what's interesting is I, we had a professional film crew do
this. They, we originally had a, a

(01:27:07):
room that held 500 that sold outthe first 48 hours.
And so we got McClellan Auditorium, I think that's the
largest auditorium at SMU, seats1800.
And we sold over 1600 tickets tothat.
It was the largest debate ever on the text of the New
Testament. Before that, the New Orleans

(01:27:29):
debate was the largest with 800 people.
This was nearly twice as many. And in our third debate at North
Carolina Chapel Hill the next February, Bart said there were
even more there. We don't, I don't know what the
numbers are. Wow.
But what's interesting is I had this film through four different
cameras from different places. And, and because CS and TM was
non confessional, I wasn't goingto bring my faith into this.

(01:27:51):
I just brought in the evidence and I told the crew, I want you
to interview people as they exitthe auditorium, what their sense
was about the debate. And I, I've actually never seen
the debate except once I saw therough cut because I don't like
to watch videos of myself, but because when I do, I get really
depressed about all the gums andAWS.

(01:28:13):
Yeah, like that. So I, I, I, I, I chewed out the
guys. I said you were supposed to
interview people that said Bart one.
Yeah. And they said we, we couldn't
find anybody. We saw people that had Muslim on
their T-shirt or Mormon or atheists or something.
We went up to them. They just walk off over and over

(01:28:33):
and over again. One guy said, this is the first
time that I heard the conservative Christian give a
more nuanced thing. And the liberal was all black or
black or white. Yeah.
I think Bart is still a fundamentalist.
He's just on the left side of the theological aisle.
So, so this the reliability of the New Testament Fortress

(01:28:56):
Press, which is broadly Christian, very broadly at least
they publish religious stuff. They, they had my debate, my
opening lecture on his in there and then the lectures from the
others in there. However, they did not put my
whole paper in it. Interesting.

(01:29:17):
They had to cut out most of the footnotes because Bart only had
two and it would look bad if if I did a whole lot more.
It's interesting. So this book, revisiting the
Corruption of the New Testament,I said I will do this under one

(01:29:41):
condition. That is that I can mention
another book that is coming out where I have the entire lecture
with all the footnotes in it. That's the first lecture here.
So this one, which five of my interns co-authored, they did
chapters, I edited it and I did my my the full lecture.
So this is more important than this one.

(01:30:02):
But that one also gives you Bart's lecture and it gives the
lectures from the other. So those are all helpful.
But these, I think these three books and the other two that I
mentioned is going to tell you alot about the text in the New
Testament and different perspectives.
But I, I would encourage Christians and non Christians to
get together and to watch the video of the SMU debate because

(01:30:27):
it's we didn't cut anything out.It's just the debate with Q&A.
One of the people from the audience asked Bart a question,
very memorable because he was mypastor.
And so I remembered a bit. He said, so Doctor Ehrman, what
would it take for you to believethat we have an accurate copy of

(01:30:48):
Mark's Gospel since our earliestcopies were from the 3rd
century, You know, and it's not even complete.
But he, he said, he came up witha very specific answer.
He said it would take, I believehe said something like this. 10
scribes copying out the originalof Mark within two weeks of the

(01:31:10):
original being written and making no more than 0.001%
differences among them. I could reconstruct the original
from those 10 copies. Now, I don't recall, recall
exactly the percentages, but what I did it was I, I thought

(01:31:31):
that's a very, very specific number.
He's, he's actually has a bar sohigh that nothing from the
ancient world could even come close.
Not even these very, very carefully copied Hebrew
manuscripts from the Middle Ages.
They still don't even hit that. So I, I, I counted how
electronically how many letters we have in Mark's Gospel, and

(01:31:53):
that percentage equals less than1/2 of one letter difference
between these 10 scribes. Well, yeah, we'd have an
accurate copy of of Mark. Then Bart and I got on a
discussion board afterwards and I said, Bart, do you realize
that's what you said? He said, well, yeah, if we had
that, we'd really have an accurate copy.
That's not what the question was.
The question was, what would it take?

(01:32:15):
And he said, you're such a literalist.
No, Bart, this is how English works.
What would it take means what's the minimum?
And you know that. OK, so Bart Ehrman is known as
kind of the non Christian leftist New Testament textual
critic and he's written a lot ofworks that have sold a lot of
copies. In Misquoting Jesus, he makes a
pretty strong case that we don'treally know what can be said and

(01:32:38):
that scribes just elaborated on the text and all that.
What were your what are your thoughts on something like that?
Well, the way people read this book when it came out in 2005 is
that trash. The New Testament, we can't
trust it at all. We have no idea what it
originally said. There was a paperback edition
that came out three months laterafter 100,000 copies of the

(01:32:59):
hardback were sold. And when he was on Jon Stewart's
The Daily Show four days later, the book was number one on
Amazon. The paperback edition has this
little Gray section in the back and on page 252 where apparently
the editors are asking him some sessions.
It's got an appendix. And in this section they are

(01:33:23):
assuming certain things about how they read the book.
Hundreds of thousands of kids from Christian homes have
abandoned the church because of this particular book.
And so they say, and I'll just read a couple paragraphs.
Bruce Metzger, your mentor and Texture Criticism, to whom this
book is dedicated, has said thatthere is nothing in these

(01:33:43):
variants of Scripture that challenges any Christian
beliefs. Why do you believe these core
tenets of Christian orthodoxy tobe in jeopardy based on the
scribal errors you discovered inthe biblical manuscripts?
He goes on. And he says if he and I were put
in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on

(01:34:04):
what we think the original text of the New Testament probably
looked like, there would be veryfew points of disagreement,
maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands.
And then he says, so when I saidthere's less than 110th of 1%,
he's reducing that down to 1% ofthat.

(01:34:28):
Yeah. So of the of the few places he
would disagree. And then he goes on and he says
the position I argue for misquoting Jesus does not
actually stand at odds with Professor Metzger's position
that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by
texture variants in the manuscript tradition of the New
Testament. Even the editors thought he was

(01:34:49):
saying something different. And frankly, Bart Ehrman is on
this master teaching group. They have the these things, but
a master teacher does not createChicken Littles.
This book created Chicken Littles.
And when they point blank asked him, he said, well actually I
don't disagree with Metzger about that.
Yep, it's it's as as a philosopher and one who's done a

(01:35:11):
lot of work on presuppositions. That's the thing.
The evidence is the evidence. Y'all are looking at the same
thing, right, Based on presuppositions, worldview,
certain, you know, axioms, whatever, you're going to come
to different conclusions. So it's not just kind of like
the debate. It's not just the evidence.
It is what you're bringing to the evidence.
So what I thought was interesting about the debate is
how so I appreciate it. And so as an academic, I just

(01:35:34):
want to hear the history. I want to see the evidence.
I don't care about people pushing their worldview or
whatever. And so I thought it was
interesting how many people werethere to push atheism or
Christianity or Islam or whatever.
Like they're wearing their, likeyou said, like with the shirts,
atheists of SMU or whatever. And I just thought that's I, it
was interesting how ideological that that actually debate was.

(01:35:58):
It wasn't just the facts and youwere giving a lot more facts
than his was a presupposition, which is if the Bible is this
way, I would expect it to be this and so it's it's different
presuppositions, which is fascinating.
So I want to end by talking about your work for the Center
for the Study of New Testament manuscripts.
What that is all since you're a humble guy, I will plug you

(01:36:21):
know, the center that he is the executive director of if you
want to help support regardless of your worldview.
One of the things I love is because it's just anybody that
cares about history, facts, scholarship.
So we should all agree that we want to preserve ancient works
and manuscripts, period, the end.
So if you want to help support that, regardless of your
worldview, you guys can check out their website.
But tell us a little bit about your work, what you guys do

(01:36:42):
there and that kind of stuff. CSNTM started in 2002, so it's
now 24 years old this year. It was originally intended its
initial goal was to digitize every single Greek New Testament
manuscript in the world, post the images online, and make them

(01:37:03):
free for everyone forever. So it's a nonprofit and we pay
quite a bit of money to have it posted online.
We have them archived in highestresolution TIF images in
different places in the world sothat if we have a, a nuclear

(01:37:24):
Holocaust, at least one of thoseplaces is, is going to survive.
We, we know it's well under, youknow, things like that.
And we got it in, in three different formats, 3 different
locations and multiple copies. Our cameras that we started with
were 4 megapixels, state-of-the-art back in 2002.

(01:37:45):
And I started CSNTM because of two things.
First of all, I knew about manuscripts.
I'd studied manuscripts my wholeacademic life and mostly I can
only see them on microfilms. Very poor quality, black and
white, just you just. And that's what we were stuck

(01:38:06):
with for the vast majority of the manuscripts.
Once digital photography got to be good enough where you could
take an 8 by 10 glossy picture with digital that would be as
good as 35mm, then I thought nowit's time.
I spent a year with my interns working on the name for it.
The husband of one of my internswas a lawyer.

(01:38:28):
He did a pro bono thing to make us a legal non profit 5O1C3
corporation and our camera equipment morphed from 4
megapixels now to 150 megapixels.
The original camera cost us $1000.
Now it's $150,000 camera. And it's not just the

(01:38:49):
megapixels, it's all the bells and whistles that come with it
that make it so that our, our, our, our fundamental principle
is do no harm to the manuscripts.
It's our hypocritical and we actually have $1,000,000
liability policy that we've never had to touch because
nobody gets to handle these manuscripts until we train them.

(01:39:11):
We when we shot all the New Testament manuscripts at the
National Library of Greece in Athens 2015 and 16, we had to
train 44 people and it cost us $800,000 to do the shoot.
That's crazy. We were there all summer long,
both summers and I was there for100 days in 2015.

(01:39:33):
No, nobody could be there longerthan about 3 weeks because it
would be, you start getting on each other's nerves after a
while. So we'd have to rotate and I'd,
I was having a lot of speak engagement.
So I'd be there for three weeks,come back, speak at a school and
then fly back, you know, and be there for another three weeks.
My job was different from everybody else's.
They were photographing the mainstream.
So we have eight people photographing 4 different

(01:39:55):
cameras, two people set up and then a a a supervisor who had to
go over with me all of the images every single night.
To make sure that we didn't haveany, that mist edges were blurry
any place, things like that, thousands of images.
So it was a lot of work for a long, long time.

(01:40:18):
And the to train the people, we had to have them do a four hour
test of shooting and they had toshoot 400 pages in four hours
with no more than 1% error, 44 mistakes.
Wow, so Ehrman wouldn't even accept that then?
That, but that percentage, right?

(01:40:39):
I'm just kidding. Because it takes a whole lot
longer when you go back to reshoot it.
Oh, I bet. Just to get that one page.
But nobody passed the first time.
Very few passed the second time.It took a lot of training.
And they're doing this gratis. We paid them when they're on the
trip, but not to get the training.
Wow. So that's, that's where we've

(01:41:00):
come. We were the first to digitize
manuscripts, New Testament manuscripts, and we have
digitized far more than any other institute in the world.
We've got, I think we have images of about 1000 manuscripts
that we have shot or that we we've been able to use that

(01:41:22):
others have digitized and then another thousand that are
microfilm converted to digital, which still needs to be done
with digital cameras of the realmanuscripts.
Ours is the first stop that scholars go to.
We get people from every continent, thousands, 10s of
thousands of your different people to visit our site and

(01:41:42):
they know they can see the very best images.
It's helped scholars with the latest editions of the Greek New
Testament to read things that before you had microfilm, and
about 1/4 of the microfilms thatwe had were illegible.
Interesting. For 1/4 of the microfilm images
are illegible. And I know that because I want

(01:42:02):
to give all the credit I can to Munster.
This institute in in Germany that has produced our critical
texts, They're the ones who did most of the microfilming, except
the ones that they bought from those institutes where they shot
that that had already been done.But with film, you don't know if
it's a good picture till you getback.
It's developed too much to go back and do this.

(01:42:25):
And so one out of four pictures is illegible.
Still. That was the only reserve we
had. And they're the ones that gave
me the impetus to do better. And the first manuscripts I shot
were manuscripts that they ownedwhen I was on sabbatical.
And that is wild. We have also discovered more New
Testament manuscripts than any other institute in the 21st

(01:42:46):
century, almost 60 manuscripts to date, including a couple that
are pretty early. Yeah.
So that's our initial goal. Our ultimate goal is to use all
the vast resources we have, makethem available to scholars so
that we can recover the autographic wording of the New
Testament as accurately as possible.

(01:43:09):
And that's where we're ultimately going.
We are not an apologetic institute.
We, we are scholars. We serve apologetics, of course,
but we also have a biennial conference where anybody who
works with the text and they're a responsible scholar can give a
lecture. We've had atheists, Mormons,

(01:43:31):
others lecture at the conference.
I've invited Bart every time to give a paper.
And I, I, I go back to what Frank Gabel and an evangelical
scholar from several decades past where he said all truth is
God's truth. And that's how we view the
conference. You're going to present evidence

(01:43:52):
and we'll have great dialogues, disagreements.
Sometimes people have an axe to grind and it comes out.
Others just want to give tons ofevidence on what they're working
on. There was one Mormon's caller
and our last last one who arguedthat in second John the elect
lady is a real person named Electa.

(01:44:16):
And he produced evidence that was overwhelming.
We asked him to put it in our, our book 'cause we do a book
from each conference. And he said, well, actually, I'm
publishing a book on this very topic.
Brilliant, brilliant. So we've had people that
complain that we had a Mormon scholar there, but his malignism
didn't come out. That wasn't at all what he's one

(01:44:38):
of the world's leading papyrologists.
So, so we're, we're doing things, we're having these
conferences and we're having conferences for lay people
called Bibliion about the text and Canon of the New Testament.
We're doing it in churches, we're doing it at schools.
And we've got we, we have different staff that are doing
this bibliion lectureship. It's as many as seven different

(01:45:01):
courses. It'll move up to 11.
When I say courses sessions, I should say yeah.
And it really informs people. So we talked about books to tell
you about the text and history of the Bible.
Take the Bibliion course, if yousign up to our newsletter and
you can see it at csntm.org. Sign up to that and you can find
out when the next Bibliom courses are going to be in where

(01:45:23):
I think we've got some coming upin Dallas.
Again, interesting, but we've done it all over the country.
What are some ways that people can support you know your
institute, specifically with theNew Testament manuscripts that
you would recommend? Well, we really need funding
because it costs about $15.00 totake a single picture and as I
said, $800,000 to do the National Library of Grease

(01:45:45):
shoot. These trips are expensive.
These are unique, individual handwritten manuscripts that are
irreproducible except digitally.And we do a complete archival
copy of this that has everything, covers, blank pages,
everything. We need help financially because
we've got a lot of trips where people have said throughout the

(01:46:09):
world Scholars Institute's libraries have wanted us to
come, but we can't do it withoutthe funding.
And we right now we're trying tofinish up a job at the Bodleian
Library of Oxford University that still needs I think 1/4 of
$1,000,000 to get that job finished.
So really if you, if you supportUS, $25.00 a month you part of

(01:46:29):
the Scribal Fellowship. And twice a year I have a
special meeting where I just do Q&A with a Scribal Fellowship
people online. It gets you get to go to any of
the conferences we have for free.
So that's that's a big, big help.
That's right. And they can write this off,
right? This tax deductible.
Yeah, nonprofit. Break.
We can also take stock, so maybethis is the time for some people

(01:46:52):
to think about. That yeah, for some of my
wealthier listeners, just get your tax write off or share some
company options or something. So we'll, we'll post a link to
the website when this comes out as well.
And so Dan, I just want to say that you've, you've spent,
you've been very gracious. You've spent a lot of time to
share your expertise and your knowledge being kind of the guy
in this field. And so I just wanted to thank

(01:47:13):
you for taking the time to come on and share your wisdom with
us. Oh, thank you very much, Zach.
It's been fun. And thanks for joining us and we
will see on ideological next time.

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Interview with a New Testament Scholar - Dan Wallace

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Interview with a New Testament Scholar - Dan Wallace