Robert Bosley's sermon addresses the reliability of the New Testament, countering common arguments that the text is hopelessly corrupted. He outlines the substantial number of New Testament manuscripts compared to other ancient texts, highlighting that there are approximately 5,856 Greek manuscripts and over 25,000 in total, including translations. The sermon explains that although there are around 400,000 textual variants, the majority are insignificant, such as spelling differences or word order changes, and do not affect the meaning of the text. Bosley emphasizes that no Christian doctrine is at risk due to textual variants. He also discusses the role of early church fathers, who quoted the New Testament extensively, and the widespread, decentralized transmission of the texts across the Roman world, which prevented wholesale corruption. The sermon refutes the idea that figures like Constantine altered the New Testament, showing that the text's transmission was remarkably accurate and reliable.

So, I'm a little bit worried about what I'm going to do. We just had lunch and everything, and this is going to be more akin to a lecture than a sermon, so I'm afraid about halfway through I'm going to look out and everyone's going to be like this. Samuel, however, was kind enough to lend me their nice green laser pointer, so if you do that, I might shine this in your mouth and make your eyes glow and hopefully wake you up that way. So we've been going through this series about strongholds and challenges to our faith and this kind of fits in along with that. Today one of the most common arguments you will hear against our faith is that our Bible is hopelessly corrupted.

That there's no way you can ever actually build your life off of what Scripture says. And so I hope to be able to provide in this little amount of time, begin to provide a way for you to defend your faith and particularly defend the reliability of the New Testament. Now I am going to be focusing on the New Testament. I am not nearly as well read on the history and transmission of the Old Testament. Also, being a much larger book with much more information, it would take much more time than we have today.

But the majority of the attacks against the scriptures themselves are attacks against the New Testament. And it is not uncommon, especially if you are going to go off to college for you younger guys. I can say it now I'm 30. I can say you younger guys. And so if you're going to go off to college or even in the workplace, you will hear these arguments.

So the attacks against the New Testament that we have today, their claims abound of corruption of the New Testament documents. There will be claims that there was an intentional effort to change the books, either by adding or deleting doctrines, either by scribes with a vendetta or church or governmental authorities, and ultimately that the New Testament has been corrupted so much that we have no hope whatsoever of actually knowing what was originally written, therefore you you can't trust what it says. And so what I want to do is answer these attacks and give you the information that is necessary to show why these attacks are ultimately baseless. To do that we're going to look at a few things that may initially make you uncomfortable. It's not my goal to make you uncomfortable.

I want to give you answers to be able to defend your trust in the Scripture. So just hang on with me and we'll get through it and come out better and more enlightened on the other side, hopefully. So before we begin looking at this, we have to look at some basic information. So how many manuscripts do we have of the New Testament? Now what is a manuscript?

A manuscript is any handwritten copy of, in this case, the New Testament that would have been written between the the composition of the New Testament and about the 16th or in some cases the 17th century. Now the printing press was invented in the mid 1400s, But the printing press took some time to catch on. They were big, they were cumbersome, they were expensive to make, and so people didn't just immediately stop handwriting their New Testaments in the mid-1400s. We have manuscripts that are catalogued and collated that go all the way to the 1700s because handwritten New Testaments were still fairly common. So how many of these manuscripts do we have in the original language?

The New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek, and in Greek we have about 5, 856 Greek New Testament manuscripts. And I say about with such a seemingly precise number, because the number is constantly changing. Generally it's trending up because we're finding more manuscripts very regularly. Sometimes it does go down and this is because sometimes they will find that what they originally thought were two manuscripts are actually one manuscript. It had broken apart and it had been cataloged as two different things and we realized, oh, that's actually one manuscript.

So, occasionally that number will go down. In reality, the ones that we actually physically have is about 200 less. We've got about 5600. About 200 have been lost to war, fire, whatever, or they simply haven't been seen in decades. But we know the information that was contained on them so they're still counted.

Okay? And these these manuscripts range from small fragments of just a few verses to complete Bibles. Because completed Bibles became much more common the further along you go in church history, the average manuscript is about 450 pages long. This totals over two and a half million pages of handwritten text written over a period of about 1, 500 years. That is a huge amount of information, a huge amount of handwritten copies of the New Testament.

If we include other languages, we have over 25, 000 manuscripts of the New Testament. The New Testament was very early, copied into other languages. By the end of the second century, it was at least in Latin, if not in other languages such as Coptic and Georgian or Armenian, various other languages, very early on because the gospel needs to be heard by everyone and they need it in their own language. You can't expect people to come and learn Greek to hear the gospel. They need it in their own language, and the early church recognized this, and from the very beginning there was this missionary impulse that led them to translating the Bible into all the languages that were in the first century.

So over 25, 000, 10, 000 of those alone are in Latin. And then in addition to these actual manuscripts of the New Testament, we have about 2, 500 lectionaries. Now, what is a lectionary? A lectionary is basically, think of like Sunday school material, it's a lesson book. You would have these arranged readings that would be read on a Lord's Day that would contain a passage of Scripture, but the lectionary didn't contain the whole New Testament.

So you would have bits and pieces of the New Testament in these lectionaries and they would be read on on Sunday. So we have about 2, 500 of these that contain readings from the New Testament. And in addition to this information, we also have quotations from the early church fathers. And the early church pastors, preachers, bishops, they wrote, commented on the New Testament, they defended the faith quite extravagantly. They would write a lot, as Dame Wallace likes to say, the early Church Fathers did not have the spiritual gift of brevity, and so they wrote a lot, and they quoted the Bible a lot.

And so it's estimated that from the early Church Fathers, we have a million quotations from the New Testament alone, not including Old Testament, simply early church fathers quoting the New Testament about a million quotations. Considering the fact there's only about 8, 000 verses in the New Testament, that means it's almost certain that every verse is covered in the quotations of the early Church Fathers. So if every manuscript we have vanished, we could basically rebuild the New Testament simply from the quotes of the early Church Fathers. How does this compare to other books from around the same time as the New Testament? Well, it's not even close.

We've got the New Testament here with about 5, 800 manuscripts. The next closest is Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey, we have about 2, 000 manuscripts in the original language in Greek from Homer. It's the next closest. You see it's not really even close.

And then after Homer, more realistic, more common for writers of that era. We've got poor Plato over here. It's kind of hard to see, but he has 10 manuscripts. And that's more common for writers of that time. Most writers of antiquity, we have between one and 10 manuscripts of their writing.

So the fact that we have almost 6, 000 manuscripts of the New Testament puts the New Testament in a class completely by itself. There's nothing even comes close. But wait, there's more information. When considering the reliability of the transmission of a document, we have to consider not only the number of copies we have, but also how early those copies were. That number of 5, 800 would not be nearly as impressive if they were all a thousand years after Paul and the Apostles and the prophets wrote.

But with the New Testament, we have the manuscripts starting to appear within 50 years of when the New Testament was actually written from the second century. And about 125 of those manuscripts in Greek that we have are from within the first 300 years of the composition of the New Testament. Again, this puts the New Testament in a category completely by itself. Nothing else comes even close. Again, oh sorry, this is our earliest fragment.

This is p52. This contains five verses from John 18. Excuse me. It is generally accepted to be the earliest manuscript that we have of the New Testament. It's dated to between AD 100 and 150, so most of the time you'll see it written.

It's from around AD 125. Now if you know when most scholars believe John was written, John probably wrote his gospel in around AD or so. It's generally believed to be the last gospel written. So this is within 50 years of when John actually wrote his gospel. We have this fragment.

And what's really interesting about this fragment, it was found, I believe it was 1934 is when it was found. If you went to any seminary in Europe, and if you went to most seminaries in the United States the year that this was found, you would have been told by your New Testament professors, John's gospel could not have been written before the end of the second century because the Christology is just too high and we know Jesus wasn't really like that. The view of John is just Jesus is just too great. There's no way that that document is early. It has to be a later development.

And then they found this and they sent it to four of the leading, what are called papyrologists, people who date manuscripts and study these things. They all agreed within the first quarter of the second century. One of them actually said maybe even the end of the first century, possibly as early as 90 is when this dates to. And so this simple fragment by itself sent about two tons of German literature straight to the flames. It completely overturned all their theories.

So you can kind of get an idea of the writing there. This is Koine Greek. It's in all capital letters. Get a better idea of what this would have looked like if you had the full page. The iPad would catch up.

There we go. That's about what that would have looked like. Obviously my printed text is a lot nicer than the handwriting, but that's what manuscripts would have looked like when they were written in the first century. This is what's called Lectio Continua, something like that. The way the manuscripts were written in the early centuries was all capital letters, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.

So you can see that this would be a little bit difficult, especially for a non-native speaker, and this is probably the source of many of the variations that we have that we'll look at in a minute. But you can see there are a few things right here. Aston Cosmon into the world. Hina Martu, this is Jesus speaking to Pilate. I've come into the world to be a witness.

Pilate's name is up there somewhere. This is the conversation between Jesus and Pilate. Now P52 dates to within 50 years of the New Testament. We have other manuscripts from the second century. How does this compare with other books?

Again, looking at Homer and Plato as examples, it's again not even close. You've got within 50 years, the manuscripts of the New Testament begin. Homer, you're waiting 500 years before your earliest manuscript of Homer. And that's early for other documents of the time. And again, poor Plato.

From the time Plato actually wrote to our earliest manuscript is 1, 300 years. Most authors from antiquity you're waiting between five and nine hundred years before you get any manuscript of what they wrote in their original language. So the fact that we have manuscripts from the New Testament begin within half a century is amazing. There's nothing else even remotely close. Now how many variants are there?

Now this is an interesting part of the discussion when we start talking about textual variants. What exactly is a textual variant? Now a textual variant is any difference between the manuscripts. Any difference, period. It can be information added or deleted.

That's what most people think of when they hear variant, but that's not all. That's not even the majority. Spelling differences, word order changes, these are all variants. Remember we have about 5800 Greek manuscripts and 20 plus thousand early translations. So I want to ask you, how many variants do you think we have?

About 25, 000. Anyone else? If you know, don't actually say. I want guesses. Come on, one or two more.

I'll start shining this on people, I promise. Josh? A hundred? We'd have more than a hundred just from Philemon. Mike?

No clue? About 400, 000. There are about 400, 000 variants in the manuscript tradition. Put graphically, maybe, there we are, that's what this looks like. There are about 138, 000 words in the New Testament, in the Greek New Testament.

It depends on which textual basis you look at. The TR is a little bit longer than the modern text, but they're both right around 138, 139, 000 words. The number of variants is 400, 000. So variants, number of words, that doesn't look very good for us, does it? And this is the information you'll hear.

And people will present this information and tell you, see, you've got all these variants, how can you possibly believe that you actually have what Paul wrote or what John wrote? That's craziness. The problem is that's not the whole story. And if we didn't stop there, that would be, it would seem really bad for us, but there's much more information, very important information. So how do unbelieving critics spend this information?

With 400, 000 variants and about 138, 000 words in the New Testament, that means there's three variants per word. Just about, about 2.8. Almost three variants per word. So that must mean then that every time you read a word in your New Testament, two other words could have taken its place. And that's often how this information is presented.

So that if every word you read could have been two other words, you have no way of knowing what the New Testament actually originally said. And therefore, it's been rewritten and it's been transmitted like the telephone game. You guys familiar with the telephone game? You have a row of kids sitting down, you whisper something in the first kid's ear and they whisper it to someone else and on and on and on until the last person says what they heard and it's completely changed from what went into the first kid's ear. People still play that game?

I remember playing it. I was usually the one that intentionally changed it. So, that was fun. And then usually Constantine is thrown in there somewhere because why not? Constantine gets blamed for everything and somewhere he had something to do with it I'm sure.

Problem is this is almost all of this is completely false. In reality the overwhelming majority of textual variants are meaningless. That's a bold statement. The overwhelming majority of 400, 000 variants are meaningless, but it is the truth. Most variants make no difference whatsoever.

Most variants can't even be translated. In other words, unless you read Greek, you can't even understand the difference in some of these variants. Many are spelling differences and word order changes. The single most common textual variant is what's called the movable new. If you know the Greek alphabet, you know that new is the equivalent to the English N.

And in Greek there is a process where you will add the letter nu to the end of a word if the next word begins with a vowel. And there are rules that follow this, and it's a weird little rule of grammar, but we have the same thing in English, right? We say an apple, not a apple. Greek has similar processes and this movable new is how you would kind of soften that transition between the vowel at the end of one word and the beginning of the vowel of another word. And so these movable news, this movable in, the scribes just sometimes didn't get it.

Like first year Greek students today sometimes just don't get it. So it will appear in places it doesn't need to appear in some manuscripts and it would be dropped out of other manuscripts. It doesn't change meaning at all. Just like a apple means the same thing as an apple. One just sounds better in English, right?

It doesn't change meaning whatsoever and this is the most common variant. It doesn't make any difference. It just made it sound a little nicer to the ears of the first century speakers. Word order changes. Greek is a very flexible language with its word order.

English is not. We are very strict when it's subject, verb, object. You get out of order, you sound like Yoda, and no one knows what you're talking about. But in Greek, you can have the word order basically, I mean, there are some rules for it, but basically it's extremely flexible. You can do, you can twist sentences to say the same thing in multiple different ways.

My Greek professor here at Southeastern, Dr. Black, he has a website where he goes into Greek issues and whatnot. One of his articles is called The Permutations of Jesus Loves John in Greek. And so he wanted to see how many ways he could write the simple phrase, Jesus loves John. Is it coming up?

There it is. Okay, it's not on here. There it is. And so he wanted to see how many ways he could write, Jesus loves John. That's kind of small, but you guys hopefully can see.

Iesus agapa ioannem. And he just goes on and word order changes. You have Jesus loves John. Jesus John loves. And if we were to translate it strictly in English, but that's, it would be translated the same way, no matter what the word order is.

You see, about halfway down, he adds in what's the Omicron there, that's the article. It's literally, it would be, the Jesus loves John. In Greek, you could add the article in front of names. So you'd have the Jesus, the John, the Mary, the Paul, whatever. We don't translate it into English because that's not how English works, but that's how Greek worked.

You could have the article in front of names. And so there's those 16 ways he came up with writing Jesus Loves John with just adding the article and changing word order. And then he came up with a few more, and a few more, and a few more. And he actually stopped himself, I don't even have them all up here, he stopped himself at 96. And yes, he stopped himself.

He could have kept going. Dan Wallace, in one of his books on sexual criticism, he actually argues that You could take, he uses the example of Jesus loves Paul, but he says you could write that in over 500 ways in Greek. But all 500 would be translated exactly the same. Same thing with Jesus loves John. So you've got Word order changes, you've got the addition of the article.

Here you've got the verb changes. It's phile instead of agapof. It's a synonym. They both mean love. Word order changes, the article.

And then over here you've got Spelling changes now beginning to take place. You see Ioannina in these two places, on the right and on the left, they look a little different. There's a missing what looks like a V. That's the new, that's the Greek N. Spelling differences make up a huge amount of textual variations.

But it doesn't change the meaning. Just like we have multiple ways to spell many names in English. Same thing in Greek. Remember, they didn't have standardized dictionaries. They didn't have standardized spelling.

That's a relatively modern idea that you have a correct way to spell everything. That's not traditionally always been the case. A great example. Now, that's not an excuse for you little ones. We have dictionaries now.

So don't take what Mr. Robert said and twist his words. A good example of this, John Wycliffe. We should all know who John Wycliffe is. We owe a great debt to John Wycliffe.

First person to translate the Bible in the English language. Now, he used Latin. That's fine. He did a good job. John Wycliffe.

13th century? Mike? Yes? No? Okay.

14th century. I knew there was a 13 in there somewhere. He spelled his own last name 12 different ways. Because spelling wasn't standardized. Standardized spelling is a relatively new idea.

John Wycliffe spelled his own name 12 different ways. Now it's not because he forgot or he was just clueless, it's just because the concept that there's one way to spell this wasn't something that he worked with. And same thing with the writers of the New Testament. They spelled Jerusalem multiple ways. They usually got Jesus right, but John would be spelled multiple ways.

Paul would be spelled multiple ways. There were different ways of spelling. It doesn't change meaning though. That's a huge amount of variations. Overwhelming majority of variants are meaningless.

Most can't be translated. Spelling differences, word order changes make up the bulk of it. Ultimately 99% of textual variants make no difference to the meaning of the text. 99%. Dan Wallace again actually takes this further and he says about 99.75%.

So you're looking at less than about a quarter of 1% actually make a difference to the text. I'm just going to go with a nice round. Even number 99% make no difference to the text at all. And so that means those 400, 000 variants really boil down to 4, 000 meaningful variants, meaningful in that they actually change meaning in the text or they'll change the translation. This is now less than 3% of the New Testament text.

So that graph, well I thought I had it, nope, okay that's in its second, sorry. So 400, 000 variance, the bulk of that 99% don't mean anything. You've got about 4, 000 meaningful variants, but we're not even done yet. These 4, 000, this 1% still needs to be understood properly. About half of these variants are not viable.

Now what does it mean that a variant is viable? Viability in a variant is a variant That could be the original reading. So out of this about 1%, about 4, 000 variants, half of these cannot be the original reading. Well, how do we know that? Well, for instance, in 1 Thessalonians 2.7, there's a variant there.

Paul writing to the Thessalonians, most translations read that we were gentle among you. That's what the majority of translations say. Some manuscripts, and therefore a handful of translations, follow a different text and say we were as children among you. Now the difference is very minute. The difference is between aganathamen apioi and, sorry, aganathamen napioi.

Do you hear the difference? It's the difference between napioi and apioi. Now remember, you're writing in all capital letters, all jammed together with no punctuation. It's very easy to see how that reduplicated N, the N at the end of the verb and the N at the beginning of the noun, could be missed. Now most likely that variant came in because you would have a scriptorium where you have the person reading from the exemplar, the copy of the text that they're all copying from.

He's reading out the text and the scribes, they hear one thing. Some of them hear one thing and some of them hear the other because it sounds so similar, an apioid or apioid. So one says gentle, one says as children. There's another variant that comes in and no translation follows it for very good reason because it's impossible to be the original. It appears in one manuscript, I want to say in the 14th century, where it says, Hippoi, we were horses among you.

Aside from being nonsense, there's no way that could be what Paul wrote because it appears over a thousand years after the New Testament was written. So that's what I'm talking about, a viability of a variant. That variant is counted. It's one of those 400, 000 variants. It's one of the 4, 000 meaningful variants because it changes the text, but it's not viable.

It can't be the original reading. And so in reality, we're talking less than 2, 000 meaningful and viable variants, and again, per Dan Wallace's view of this, we're talking between 500 and a thousand meaningful and viable variants in the New Testament. So that graph looks very different now. You've got almost 140, 000 words and you've got less than 2, 000 meaningful variants. That information changes the picture a lot.

As an example here, I've got the first 10 verses of Ephesians. And that's what's in bold. That was originally supposed to be red, I don't know what happened there. But these are just examples of where there's a variant between the two most dissimilar printed texts. So the base text I've got here is the critical text which is what would be followed by the ESV or New American Standard.

The variant in parentheses is what would be in the TR or the Byzantine text which is more or less what the New King James follows. If you actually know Greek, you know these are meaningless variations. So I just wanted to show you this to show you this idea that there's three variants per word and therefore it could literally be just about anything. It's just nonsense. The overwhelming majority of this text is identical and even the variants mean basically nothing.

I was originally actually going to use the first ten verses of John and there's only actually one meaningful variant in the entire text, so I thought Ephesians might be a little bit more interesting. There's like four. Now when we talk about variants, not all variants are equal. There are some major variants. Now most of these meaningful viable variants are a single letter or a single word.

There are about two dozen variants that are from several words up to an entire verse. John 5-4, when we went through John 5, that's one of those, where it talks about the angel coming down and stirring the water. That's a complete, that's a single verse variant. So that's one of these about two dozen. Now there are two variants that are in first place, so to speak.

They are both 12 verses. They are the longest variants by far. They both are 12 verses, and this is what's called the long ending of Mark and the per capae adultery, or the story of the woman caught in adultery. That would be Mark 16, 9 through 20, and John 7, 53 through 8, 11. These are the two largest textual variants in the entire New Testament.

These are the only two variants that are multiverse like this. Everything else is less than two verses. In addition to this, there's another major variant which would be the most theologically significant variant. It's called the Kama Yohannam in 1st John 5-7. This is the text, if you know, if you've grown up King James, which I grew up with King James, that in 1 John 5, 7 there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one as a textual variant.

So these are the big ones, And we don't have time to go into all the details. We can talk about this later, or maybe another Sunday, something, I don't know. We can talk about, we're not going to spend much time on it now, but these are the big variants. And I want to tell you about this now, because I don't want you to hear this for the first time from your enemies. Because a lot of this information in most Christians, the first time they hear any of this about textual variance is from their unbelieving college professors or their unbelieving co-workers.

And I don't want that to happen to you. I want you to hear this from your friends, not your enemies, someone who believes in the preservation of scripture and the infallibility of scripture. So you do need to know that these are textual variants. And we can talk about whether or not they're original or not, but they are variants because they are not in the earliest manuscripts in the Greek language. These variants are present in what's called the TR, the Textus Receptus, the base text of the King James and the New King James translations.

So this is why it would be in your New King James if you have a New King James today. They are not found or they're set apart in the text of your modern translations like the ESV, the NIV, New American Standard. They'll either be relegated to a footnote or they'll have like double brackets or asterisks around them and usually a note that says these are not found in the oldest text. And that's why they're textual variants. They aren't found in the original, in the oldest text.

They made their way into the TR because Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus, the one who compiled what became the TR, he used about six or seven manuscripts, the oldest of which was from the 10th century. And by the 10th century, these are solidly within the text tradition. I'm not going to make a definitive statement and say they are or aren't in the original text. We can talk about that later, but I do want you to be aware these are the major variants. So I want you to consider there these 2, 000 meaningful viable variants are in the context of over 2 million pages, 2.5 million pages of handwritten text written over 1, 500 years.

That reflects an amazingly accurate transmission of the text. With that many pages, that much time, there should be millions of variants. There should be tens of thousands of meaningful variants, but there simply aren't. It's amazingly accurate in its transmission. And even these half, these variants that are meaningful, they're not that meaningful.

For instance, in John 4.1, There's a variant there where it's the TR in King James follows one variant that says, when the Lord knew. If you have an ESV or something like that following the modern critical text, it will say, when Jesus knew. That's a meaningful variant. It changes the translation. It doesn't change the meaning though, when Jesus knew or when the Lord knew.

It's the same thing. There's no variant that says when Mary knew or something like that. It just doesn't it's not there So even most of these meaningful variants aren't that meaningful another example of a meaningful variant. That's not that meaningful What is the number of the beast and as Dan Wallace likes to say 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast. He lives a few doors down.

But that's a meaningful variant. It changes the meaning. Depending on your eschatology, it might tweak some nuance of something. But It's not that meaningful. You can still be a reformed Baptist and believe that the number of the beast is 616.

Now dispensationalists might have an issue, but that's the dispensationalists. So even though a lot of these 2, 000 meaningful viable variants aren't that meaningful. And the handful of places where we quote unquote don't know the original reading are either or both rather, very few, and either option is orthodox. And when I say we don't know, that textual critics can't definitively say yes, this is the original reading. There's good arguments on either side.

As an example of that, I want you to look at this. This is manuscript 022-0, and this is a manuscript of the end of Romans 4, the beginning of Romans 5. If you went to the Bible Museum, you saw this actual manuscript. This manuscript is on the fourth floor of the Bible Museum in Washington, DC. If you saw me, at one point, I think it was me and Brandon, the intern Brandon, we're like over this thing and I'm pretty sure I was drooling on the case because it was awesome to see this thing.

But this is one of our earliest fragments from the book of Romans. It dates to the third century. So it's written somewhere around the 200s. Now in Romans 5.1 there is a variant. Most translations say, therefore since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

There is a variant there. Some manuscripts say, let us have peace with God. Since we've been justified by faith, let us have peace with God. This manuscript is interesting because, well, the difference between we have peace and let us have is a single letter. The difference between an omicron and an omega, what it looks like in English, is a difference between an O and a W.

A single letter in a word, and that word in this manuscript is, where's the button on this thing, right there. And you see what is right in the middle of that word? There's a hole, right over that letter. We can, come on, catch up, There we go. Most scholars do agree this says we have.

You can kind of see a little bit of black right there and around. So it looks like it's an O. That's the omega. It looks like a W. An omega is just, it looks like an O.

So most scholars think this says, we have peace with God. The Omega echo meant would be, let us have. But if this said, let us have peace with God, If that's the original reading, that's still Orthodox, right? Let's think about this. Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God.

That is true because we are justified, we are at peace with God objectively. The war between us and God has ended. But if Paul wrote, let us have peace with God, that would still be Orthodox. Having been justified by faith, let us continue to pursue that peace that is already ours in Christ. Let us not mar that relationship that we have with God as ours by being his children.

Either option is orthodox. And this is an amazing thing. It's not just this variant. All the variants where we're not sure either option is Orthodox. It doesn't change your theology.

And so we can look at these variants and say no Christian doctrine is at risk due to textual variance. I can take a King James version of the Bible and I can take an NIV or an ESV, two different Greek texts, now maybe not the NIV because translation issues, but ESV. We'll say ESV. It's more equivalent in translation style to the King James. I can take that, or even just take the Greek text of both.

And if I am consistent, if I apply the same rules of hermeneutics, the same standards of exegesis to both, I will have the same doctrine because textual variants don't change the doctrine. The teaching found in the New Testament does not change depending on these meaningful, viable textual variants. Now your proof texts might change. For instance, if you believe the Kamei Yohannam is not original, you're probably not going to cite it as a proof text for the Trinity. If it's not original, you don't want to refer to that.

So your proof text might change, but will you still be a Trinitarian? Absolutely, without question. Your theology doesn't change depending on the textual variance. And I am quickly, quickly running out of time. Probably already ran out of time for some of you.

But all this information together makes the New Testament the most widely attested document in history, the earliest attested document in history, and the most purely transmitted document in all of antiquity. Nothing else comes even close. It almost makes you think that there's another reason for people rejecting the reliability of the New Testament. Maybe a spiritual reason. Maybe.

Really quickly, I want to look at this. Again, I mentioned the telephone game earlier. That is often seen as the way the New Testament has come down to us, this line of you whisper in one ear and it gets corrupted and there are people like me who intentionally change it and it comes out totally discombobulated on the other end. So the theory is this is how the New Testament is transmitted. And people will often not say it directly, but they will present this theory that basically boils down to the telephone game.

Bart Ehrman, if you're familiar with him, in his book, Misquoting Jesus, this is basically his argument. Bart Ehrman knows better. His scholarly work, he's much more careful, but in his popular level work, like Misquoting Jesus, he basically presents a telephone game transmission. He knows better. Anyway, the problem is this ignores a lot of problems.

If you just think about it, just put some critical thought into this idea, this falls apart completely. Number one, it ignores the major differences in the way that the information is transmitted. A written text is much less liable to corruption because you still have the text. You can still double check your work. If someone's given you a document and you're wanting to make copies, you can still go back to what they originally handed you.

If I simply tell you a message and you're going to write it down and transmit it to other people, you have to have heard it correctly the first time, you have to remember it, and if you want to go back to me to see if you heard it right the first time. I have to remember what exactly I said, and hopefully tell you the same thing again correctly. So a written document is much less liable to corruption because a written document continues to exist after transmission, whereas spoken word, it ceases. There's nothing objective to go back to to double check your work. Also, the telephone game presents a single line of transmission.

It's just from one person to the next person to the next person to the next person. Whereas in reality, the New Testament had multiple overlapping lines of transmission. The New Testament was written by multiple authors at multiple times in multiple places to multiple different other places. It was a complete network all over the Roman world of texts going one way and another and getting to a church and then being copied multiple times and being sent out to other churches. You had Christians traveling the road, they come to another fellowship and they hear a new document they haven't heard before and they copy it and take it back to their church.

And so this idea it's a single line of transmission is just, it's just historically simply false. It was a complete web of transmission lines that overlapped each other. On the other hand, we have the presentation of what would be called a strict ecclesiastical control model of transmission. This is the idea that, well, the Church controlled the transmission of the New Testament, And the Church changed the New Testament documents to reflect the doctrines that they liked. The doctrines that became Orthodox were the ones that were left in the New Testament, everything else was deleted.

There are entire books about how reincarnation was originally in the Bible. There's no evidence for it because people just like to make things up, but that's the argument. The church deleted it. The problem is this simply ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of manuscripts are incredibly similar to one another. There's no evidence of these wholesale deletions or additions of doctrines.

We can go back to our earliest manuscripts and see, this is what we have today. Yeah, there are a few variations, but this is the same doctrine. It's not like John was originally writing about some guy named Bob. It's the same book. It's the same information.

This also assumes the existence of an ecclesiastical structure that simply didn't exist. To say the church had control over all these documents assumes that there is a some sort of a power structure in place that has the ability to make that sort of changes and to have that sort of control. The fact is there was no pope for the first several hundred years. There was no ecclesiastical authority until you get to at least the fifth century, sixth century, to make these kinds of changes. And we have manuscripts that predate the invention of any sort of ecclesiastical model that could have that kind of power.

So we know, just based off the evidence, these changes never took place. In reality, this idea actually reflects the transmission of the Quran, not the New Testament. The New Testament, it was written, exploded across the Roman world, and was never controlled, never compiled, and had a wholesale revision by the papacy or whatever. But that's exactly what you have in Islam. After Muhammad died, the Quran was originally transmitted orally And then there was one battle where many of these men who had the Quran memorized were killed.

And the caliph said, well this is this is bad. We're in danger of completely losing the Quran. So he had it written down. And that continued on for a couple generations until you get to I think it's the fourth caliph Uthman. He hears that there are variants in the Quran so that one part of the Arabic Empire is reciting one text that isn't in another text at the other end of the Empire and There's conflict brewing because of these variants that have crept into the Quran.

And so what did Uthman do? Uthman gathered all the texts that they could find. He sent out messengers and they gathered all the copies of the Quran they could find. And he made a definitive, authoritative edition of the Quran. And then he burned everything else.

And so that created a very stable text and so there are very few textual variants from the Quran of Uthman's day to the Quran today The problem is you have to trust Uthman got it right. That's not really good for them because there's a significant gap of time between Muhammad and Uthman. There could have been major changes. No such thing ever existed for the New Testament. No body, no pope, no emperor had the power to do what Uthman did.

There was no Christian Uthman. And So how has God preserved his work? The New Testament was actually transmitted by a number of diverse lines of transmission. There was never any central authority in place that could remove books or doctrines from the early canon. And this multifocality, this fact that the New Testament came from multiple places and spread all over the Roman world is in fact what made that kind of corruption impossible because there was nobody in existence that could have the power and the reach to gather all these manuscripts together.

So what was the early church doing for the first couple hundred years until 313? Well they're mainly trying to avoid being fed to lions. When you're doing that there's no power structure in play that has the ability to gather the manuscripts and destroy them and make an authoritative text. This explosion of the text is what made those kinds of corruptions impossible. But it's also what made textual variation inevitable and why we have to do textual criticism and why Christians have always recognized we have to do textual criticism.

They were talking about textual criticism as early as the fourth century. Origin wrote an entire, was it an entire book? I don't know. Origin even wrote about textual criticism. Textual criticism is not something new.

And so the sheer number of the surviving manuscripts that we have in the differing lines of transmission actually gives us greater confidence that the original reading, what the Apostles, what the prophets, what the evangelists actually wrote, still exists in the tradition of the text? Nothing's been lost because there was never any point in time where anyone had the power to make wholesale corruption to all the texts So God has Preserved his word not through a strict transmission process but by causing his word to immediately explode all over the Roman Empire, all across the known worlds that no one could have ever gathered it all up and made changes. And then Constantine, because he's thrown in there, I'll just go through this real quick. Often Constantine is the scapegoat for just about everything that's wrong in Christianity in the first 400 years, 300 years. It's often claimed that Constantine inserted doctrines.

A fan favorite is that Constantine invented the deity of Jesus and enforced that on the Council of Nicea in 325. Simply didn't happen. We have early church fathers writing long before Constantine. We have manuscripts. I almost showed this.

Again, if you went to the Bible Museum, you saw a facsimile of, I think it's p66, which is one of our other early copies of John. It has the end of Luke, it has the beginning of John, first verse exactly what's in our Bibles today. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That thing dates to the second century, 150 years before Nicene Council ever existed. So the idea that Constantine enforced these doctrines is simply without any basis.

And neither did he pick the books that were in the New Testament. Come on. I broke your iPad, Jaylen. Sorry. Oh, there it is.

Still not here. Anyway, so the fact is Constantine had absolutely nothing to do with changing the New Testament text, either the manuscripts or actually making the canon. Constantine did give two contributions to the transmission of the text. First, when he legalized Christianity in 313, he did not make it the state religion, he legalized it. That ended state-sponsored persecution.

And up to this point, the Romans had been not only killing Christians, but also burning Bibles. And so, after Christianity becomes legal, there's no more state persecution. And so, this is why in the history of the manuscripts we have an explosion of manuscripts in the fourth century because they're no longer being burned by the Romans. And then also he gave money for the production of 50 Bibles for the city of Constantinople. Eusebius recounts that Constantine wanted to try and make up for what the Romans had destroyed, gave money to have 50 Bibles produced professionally for the first time in history, professionally produced Bibles for the churches of Constantinople.

It's often argued that two of those may still exist, maybe even three. Codex Sinaticus and Codex Vaticanus, These are possibly some of the Bibles that were part of this 50 that Constantine ordered to be made. So in conclusion, yes there are textual variants. Some of them are significant. Yes, we have to do work to determine the original reading.

However, no doctrine is at risk due to any meaningful, viable variant. God has preserved His Word by making it impossible for wholesale changes to have ever taken place in the scriptures. What we have now is what they wrote then. And so we can trust the New Testament as the most well-attested document, the earliest attested document, and the most purely preserved document of all antiquity. God has done an amazing thing.

He's preserved his word. He's allowed variants to come in, but he's even preserved it in the variants to protect us from having false teaching coming in. If you want to do some reading on your own, these are just a handful of the books I've read on this that are very helpful. The first three are much more at a popular level. They're a little bit easier to read.

Particularly the first one is, It's only like 100 pages, maybe even 80 pages. It's just an introduction to these things. King James only controversy. Obviously, he's dealing mainly with refuting King James onlyism, but he does talk about a lot of these things. And then the New Testament textual criticism, Concise Guide by David Allen Black.

All three of these take a little bit of a different perspective. So I think it would be good to, if you want to read, maybe try and read all three of them or even more. These two are much more technical. You would benefit most if you wanted to try and read those, having a little bit of background on the subject, as well as knowing some Greek. They're a little bit more difficult.

That one in particular gets really boring after the first chapter. But it's a good book. And I think that's it. Wow, I've talked for a long time. If you have any questions, I would be more than happy to answer them.

I don't think we'll probably do it right now because, like I said, I've been up here for a while already and I'm sorry for taking so long. This is an incredibly important topic. I think it's something we need to know because the opponents of the gospel have the same information. They will not hesitate to use it against you. You have to know it.

You have to get there first and explain to them why, no, this is how we can trust Scripture, not why it's something that we shouldn't, not an evidence for why we shouldn't trust it. So, thank you.