GYC Conference 2024: Wherever He Goes

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

Tom Shepherd

01 Are the Biblical Manuscripts Reliable?

02 How Many Variants Are There in the Biblical Manuscripts?

03 How Do You Figure Out Which Variant Is What the Apostles Wrote?

04 How Did Books Get into the Bible?

05 Which Bible Translation is Best

You for the opportunity to talk about the Bible and its reliability.

We thank you so much, Lord, the way you've preserved it.

We pray that you'll help us to understand things better as we go through these times together.

All right, So I'm sorry I'm not there with you.

I'd like to be there, but my wife's health is kind of frail, and so we're doing this from home.

And there was a question that was raised, a couple questions, about the Apocrypha.

I went back and looked a little bit up about that.

The story of the Apocrypha is a little more complex than the way I stated it.

Actually, Luther in his Bible included the Apocrypha between the Old Testament and New Testament.

They were kind of taken as what we call deuterocanonical books, or books that were taken as valuable to read but not the source of doctrine, and that became more and more settled in Protestantism over time.

So that's a little more, but you can go read about the Apocrypha and find more about it.

All right, so we're now looking at what variants do our manuscripts have.

There are thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament, thousands of them, right, and no 2 of them are exactly alike.

Okay, so, oops, I gotta click on this so I can make it.

So what we concluded last time was the autographs of the New Testament text probably survived for hundreds of years because of the high quality of the writing material.

If I'd been there with you, I would have passed it around.

This is modern papyrus, but it's made in the same kind of way that they made it.

And then this is parchment, and it's made from animal skin, poor animal, animal skin that is treated especially, and then you can write on it.

So that's what these documents were made from.

Our earliest manuscripts in the New Testament go back to the second and third century.

We talked a little bit about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls come from the like the second third century BC to the first century AD, and our earliest New Testament manuscripts go back to the second and third century AD, which is very very old.

So we can recover the original text of the New Testament from all these manuscripts.

Our test today, now in this lecture, is how many manuscripts do we actually have?

Are there checks on what the manuscripts contain?

And what kinds of variants are there in the text of the New Testament.

All right, so the process of forming the Old Testament, so this is now we're going to take a little bit detour and talk about the Old Testament for a while.

The process of forming the Old Testament canon, the Old Testament books that are our Old Testament today, was different from the way the New Testament was done.

The oldest Hebrew Bible until the mid-20th century came from about 81, 000, the Aleppo Codex.

However, between 1946 and 1956, a group of ancient scrolls was found in the Judean desert near the Dead Sea.

That's why they're called the Dead Sea Scrolls, near a place called Qumran.

I haven't gone up in the caves where they found these.

These scrolls and fragments found with them have been dated between the third century BC and the first century AD.

That's approximately a thousand years older than the next oldest Hebrew Bible.

Portions of all the Old Testament books except the Book of Esther have been found in these caves that were near this settlement, probably in Essenes.

They were a group of Jews, you know, referred to Pharisees and Sadducees, while the Essenes were another sect or, you know, grouping of Jews in that time period.

And they probably were the ones who made these scrolls and they put them up in the caves.

Now the settlement at Qumran was wiped out during the Jewish war, which was some AD 66 to 73.

So probably maybe shortly after Jerusalem fell, they went down, or it may have been before that, and they wiped out the settlement at Qumran, or the people ran away.

What the Romans didn't know was that this group which had copied these scrolls had preserved a number of them and put them up in these caves.

And nobody knew about them for like 1900 years.

And then there were these Bedouin boys were taking care of the sheep and they threw stones up into these caves, you know, little boys having fun.

So they climbed up there and that was the first discovery of these scrolls.

And the story of how they, you know, ended up being preserved and well ended up in museums is a fascinating story.

Well, if you haven't read the book of Esther lately, Esther is the only book in the Old Testament that does not have the name of God.

There's no mention of prayer, there's no mention of God.

Now, some people will say, well, didn't she pray before she went into the king?

She fasted, but there's no mention of prayer.

Of course he was, but he's kind of in the shadows.

So the Essenes didn't like that, and so they didn't include Esther in their book, but all the other books of the Bible, plus other books as well, besides.

So what the scrolls show is that there was careful transmission of the Old Testament text across that 1, 000-year period with remarkable agreement with a standard Masoretic text that became what we have today.

Of course, there are certainly some differences, but some of the scrolls differ more from the Masoretic texts as we have it, and that's something more that Old Testament scholars deal with.

But these scrolls are our oldest witnesses to the Old Testament.

And like I said, there's this remarkable parallel to the Masoretic text which gives us encouragement about our Old Testament.

So this gives us confidence in the text of the Old Testament as found in our Bibles.

Now in contrast to that 1, 000 year gap between manuscripts of the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The New Testament has a wealth of manuscripts over a 1500 year period.

Far and away, the New Testament is the best attested document from the ancient world.

Over on the left it says the document, and then when was it written, the number of manuscripts we have testifying to that, and the earliest manuscript, the date of the earliest manuscript.

So the New Testament, it was written in the first century.

So that would probably include the lectionaries and some things, but not versions.

The earliest 1 of those manuscripts, we saw a picture of it last time, comes from the second century.

So, you know, a little more than, well, for the text that it has, it's like 25 years from that time period.

Tacitus was a Roman historian of the first century AD.

We have 1 copy of some of his, I think like 6 of his animals, 1 copy from the 9th century, nothing in between.

Euripides, 1 of the famous Greek tragedy playwrights of the 5th century BC, We have about 330 copies of his plays, some of them anyways, and the earliest ones come from the 4th century AD.

Villius was a Roman historian and wrote in the first century BC to AD.

And we have 1 copy from the 17th century.

Now look at the amount of time from the time when it was written.

Now this isn't all material from the ancient world, of course, but this gives you some picture.

Our oldest document of his is from the ninth century.

I mean, that's like 800 years between when he wrote it and our earliest copy.

Series

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

02 How Many Variants Are There in the Biblical Manuscripts?

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

The End of Time

04 After the End, What Next?

59m

Prophecies of Hope

14 Death’s Mystery Solved

1h 2m

Can We Trust the Biblical Canon?

03 How Do You Figure Out Which Variant Is What the Apostles Wrote?

52m

Unlocking Prophecy

14- Facing Death Unafraid

1h 1m

Is Death the End?

05 Your Questions Answered

49m

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Sanctuary

19 Our High Priest’s Victory Over Death

52m

The Doctrine of Personal Ministries

Part 4 - Doing the Wrong Job Well

1h 18m

Amazing Discoveries Reveal the Future

Is Your Loved One Really In Heaven?

51m

Unlock Revelation

9. The Mystery of Death

1h 28m

Bible Manuscripts and Translations

05 How Did Books Get into the Bible?

1h 2m

Bible Manuscripts and Translations

03 What Variants Do Our Manuscripts Have? Part 02

1h 2m

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Sanctuary

19 Our Great High Priest’s Victory Over Death

1h

Sound Doctrine