What is textual criticism and in particular, what is New Testament textual criticism in this series? We are going to talk about the definition of textual criticism. We will talk about The goals how we're trying to accomplish the task what it means to examine manuscripts what kinds of manuscripts are out there What languages there in what are the major textual problems of the New Testament? How certain we can be about what the text of the original New Testament really was and we'll talk about a number of scholars There's going to be all sorts of things that should be of value and interest to many people who are interested Simply in the text of the New Testament the definition of textual criticism Historically has also been the goal of textual criticism. It is simply to try to ascertain The wording of the original text of a particular document when that original document no longer exists Now that goal has been nuanced in recent years And there's been a second goal that some have wanted to make into the primary goal of textual criticism But let me address those issues when it comes to New Testament textual criticism The primary goal and the basic definition is to try to determine the wording of the original text of the New Testament Because the original text no longer exists If the original text of a document still existed textual criticism would not be necessary If all the copies of a document still exists even though the original doesn't and all those copies are Exactly like each other than textual criticism really would not be possible So with New Testament textual criticism our objective is to try to examine these copies to get back to that original wording In recent years textual criticism has been redefined or at least New Testament textual criticism has been redefined The goal used to be simply to try to recover the wording of the original text But in recent years the definition has become let's find out what different scribes over the centuries have how they've changed the text and What those changes indicate about their socio-economic cultural Situation their religious background their politics these kind of thing now that should not be the primary goal of textual criticism But it has a very important role in the process of understanding the transmission of the text And it also is a goal that should tell us if I can find out what influence described to change the wording to X from Y Then that tells me that X is not the original reading, but it came from Y now in terms of the definition that Most textual critics follow of trying to determine the wording of the original text there has also been in recent years A new wrestling with how we define the term original and there have been some issues that we need to think about one of these issues is Is an original text the text that an author Initially wrote but may have then fine-tuned it later on Which one of those counts as the original text? That's a great question when Shakespeare did his plays at the globe in London for example He would fine-tune them he would tweak them the wording would change from play to play when Mozart was doing his Concerts in his operas in Vienna then he would also be taking it through various changes The fact is that if scholars were to find duplicate copies or more than one handwritten copy of Shakespeare's plays or Mozart's operas which one would be considered the original it's it's a it's a difficult question It's a tough question So one scholar raised these illustrations and said the New Testament seems to be the sort of a document that is not capable of being able to define what the original text is another scholar pointed out that We need to have different ideas of what an original text is and what he ultimately landed on I think is the best definition although. I'm not so sure he felt it was the best definition Was the what's called what did Germans call the Ausgang's text? That means it's the text that exited from the author as it was dispatched to the readers and This is also sometimes known as the autographic text or the autographs I think that's the best definition of an original text when it comes to the New Testament documents And so the issue here is this when an author writes something and then sends it to readers Who are on a different location as soon as it leaves that author's hands now? we're dealing with that document which is finalized as far as he's concerned and Consequently, that's what we would call the original text or more Exactly the autographic or Ausgang's texts. We'll use those terms interchangeably in this introduction to textual criticism However, and that's the text that we are talking about when we say original It's what leaves the author's hands when it's dispatched to the readers in some of the region textual criticism is Necessary for the New Testament documents Just as it is necessary for virtually every scrap of ancient Greco-Roman literature for two reasons first of all We don't have the autographic or the original text anymore and secondly No two manuscripts agree completely The reason no two manuscripts agree completely is because all these manuscripts by definition were written by hand There was no movable type printing press until the year 1454 when Johann Gutenberg in the city of Mainz, Germany Actually invented the the machine that could do this and it was one of the greatest invention One of the greatest inventions of the last millennium It happened a year after the church invaded Byzantium on May 29th 1453 which will become a significant point for us as we think through some of the issues of Transmission of the New Testament as well. So within a a two-year period 1953-1954 two very significant events took place that affect New Testament textual criticism But as I was saying up until that time, we didn't have manuscripts printed on a printing press They were all handwritten and because they were all handwritten every single one of them has mistakes in it Now most of the changes that these manuscripts have are very very trivial spelling differences for example are among the most common and Largely because there was no standardized spelling of so many words in the ancient world as a matter of fact what's fascinating is in Within the space of eight verses in one chapter in the Gospel of John The author spells the exact same word. It's a for those of you who know Greek It's a third-person singular Arist active indicative of a noigo the word means I open he spells it three different ways You know within the space of eight verses now That's remarkable that we could have that kind of variety of spelling, but there weren't dictionaries It said there's a right way to spell. There's a wrong way to spell in these words When it comes to the New Testament manuscripts, not only are no two manuscripts exactly alike But as you look at the earlier documents Two of the closest manuscripts of the ancient world when we're talking about first millennium Even talking about the first half million the first 500 years ad now We're talking about manuscripts that differ Even those that are as close to each other as we can find between six and ten times per chapter Well, there's about 250 chapters for the whole New Testament So if those manuscripts were complete New Testaments, we're talking about a couple thousand differences For those documents for the spread of the New Testament Because we don't have the autographs anymore Because the manuscripts differ from each other and because they differ at times quite a bit at other times It's still minimally six to ten times per chapter of the early and important witnesses We have to practice the discipline of textual criticism to try to get back to the original Ultimately the objective as we examine all these manuscripts and think about the data is to try to sift through and find out What kinds of variants or textual changes were created either accidentally or created intentionally as a change to some other form of the text than what the authors originally wrote and We'll wrestle with those issues as we get into this discipline a little bit more When we come to the text of the New Testament and trying to determine what the autographs are actually about One of the great problems we have is the amount of material that we have to look at Now I'm going to compare this material to what other ancient Greco-Roman literature looks like in terms of their material remains of these various authors and that's why I've Entitled this lesson an embarrassment of riches So if we take for example three Roman historians from the first century approximately AD On whom we're basing most of our understanding of what ancient Rome was like We've got Livy, Suetonius and Tacitus Now Livy we are waiting 300 years before we see any copies of his writings and we don't see the full array of what he wrote about Roman history Most of it simply lost forever without any knowledge of where it went to We have a grand total of about 30 copies of Livy in existence today That we can examine to try to see what he had to say another ancient Roman historian was known as Tacitus and We are waiting for 800 years before we see any copies of Tacitus's works and The grand total that we have are three three copies of Tacitus And yet he's one of the great Roman historians to give us the information that we need on The history of Rome in and around the first century AD as well as before that time a Third author Suetonius we have quite a bit of material from Suetonius We have over 200 manuscripts from Suetonius, but again like Tacitus We are waiting 800 years before we get any copies of his writings Now if we were to compare this to the New Testament documents You would see that we have an embarrassment of riches and it truly is an embarrassment for New Testament scholars Which creates kind of an existential crisis of how do we approach this material? What can we safely disregard at least to some extent as we examine the more important materials? Here's the data we have for our New Testament manuscripts at the present time close to 5,800 copies of these manuscripts in Greek alone Now if you were to wipe out all the Greek manuscripts This is what the text of the New Testament was originally written in Greek if you were to wipe out all of those We could still reproduce the text of the New Testament many many times over from the witnesses that we have in Latin which were as early as the second century and the Latin text we have over 10,000 copies of Latin manuscripts of the New Testament in existence today We could reproduce the text in Latin and Coptic Coptic is an ancient Egyptian language. It's essentially Egyptian hieroglyphics that are put into Greek letters and The Coptic text starts as early as the third century. We have hundreds of Coptic manuscripts today In fact, we have probably at least 1500 Coptic manuscripts if not quite a few more that have not yet been cataloged All around the world. There's many many Coptic New Testament manuscripts that are simply not yet cataloged and therefore not known to New Testament scholars Besides Coptic. We also have Syriac another very very important ancient copy of the New Testament And we have hundreds of copies of Syriac then the New Testament was translated into many other languages It was translated into Georgian into gothic into Arabic It was translated into old Church Slavonic into Anglo-Saxon and Armenian We have so many copies of the New Testament in all these versions that there are surely between 15,000 and 20,000 copies of the New Testament not in Greek written on hand written manuscripts So it's it's an embarrassment of riches Then you add to that the over 5,000 copies of the New Testament in Greek and we've got Over 20,000 copies well over 20,000 copies most likely of the New Testament in various languages Before the time of the printing press Now I should mention Something that is true both for the New Testament and for these other ancient authors and that is this a Copy of one of these ancient documents does not mean that it's a complete copy We have our earliest manuscripts for the New Testament as well as the earliest manuscripts for Livy and for Seutonius and Tacitus are going to be those that are fragmentary texts the earlier you go the less likely it is that you're going to Have a complete copy in fact the oldest complete New Testament manuscript that we have in existence Which happens to be in Greek and it happens to be an exceedingly important manuscript is codex Sinaiticus which is housed now at the British Library in London It's written in about the middle of the fourth century somewhere around 8350 give or take 25 years And it's a complete New Testament. That's our oldest complete New Testament However, we also have a number of manuscripts that although fragmentary have quite a bit of text up to that point Now I've mentioned the number of copies we have for the New Testament and that gives us an embarrassment of riches But I haven't talked to you about the dates as you recall with Livy Seutonius and Tacitus We're dealing with the earliest manuscripts coming 300 years And those are only of Livy and then Seutonius and Tacitus were waiting 800 years before we get copies These are fairly representative for ancient Greco-Roman authors The best among them is going to be Homer and of course Homer has an 800 year head start over First-century authors. So he's got quite a few more copies than these other authors do but not more copies than the New Testament Homer's in a league by itself But I'll just summarize this and say that we have approximately 1,000% as many copies of the New Testament in its various languages as we do copies of Homer It's a remarkable difference and he is in second place in terms of literary remains among all Greco-Roman literature Huge disparity now in terms of the date of these New Testament manuscripts The earliest come from the second century from within 100 years of the completion of the New Testament Scholars have pointed to a fragment of John's Gospel known as P. 52 or Papyrus number 52 that is housed at Manchester University in the John Rylans Library today Manchester University in Central England had a scholar who was resting with the data in the the library back in 1934 and he was a bonafide paparologist. His name was Colin H. Roberts He found this fragment in the John Rylans Library. He said this looks like it's From the New Testament. I mean he was a paparologist. So he's dealing with other kinds of texts and Looking for a New Testament manuscript among the papyri is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack About one-tenth of 1% of all published papyri are actually New Testament manuscripts. So it's it's pretty hard to find them But he discovered this quite by accident and said I think this is from the New Testament Sure enough it was on one side of this papyrus leaf was John chapter 18 Versus 31 through 33 and on the other side was John 18 verses 37 38 And so a year later Roberts published this papyrus p. 52 it got published in 1935 but he had circulated photographs of it to the three leading Papyriologists of Europe at the time and each one independently wrote back to him and said we believe that this manuscript should be dated No later than a than ad 150 and as early as ad 100 a Fourth one wrote back and said I think that this manuscript is probably Written in the last decade of the first century. So in the 90s as Remarkable discovery and it really changed an awful lot of ways in how biblical scholars have looked at When John's gospel was written one way I even said well the ink of John's gospel must have been barely dry when p. 52 was copied from it And so the idea was that John's gospel was very very late middle of the second century something like that Well since that time a number of other manuscripts have been discovered This is one that has just what half a dozen verses and it's only the size of the palm of my hand, but Other manuscripts have also been discovered that are apparently from the second century Scholars have debated in more recent years what the date of p. 52 is we're not exactly sure because it doesn't say this was written at this time And so we've got to make comparisons of this manuscript with other manuscripts whose dates are known and they're known because they're Non-literary papyri where someone says dear so-and-so and he writes it in the year of The reign of Augustus his 14th year or something like that so we can pinpoint the date in time when we do that kind of thing But there are other manuscripts from the second century as well Papyrus number 66, which is at the Bodmer Museum in Cologne, Switzerland on the shores of Lake Geneva is a remarkable manuscript that has Most of John's gospel in it. It doesn't have the entirety of John anymore. The outside leaves have fallen off and From chapters 14 on it's it's fairly fragmentary But p 66 is a manuscript that was dated Somewhere between ad 150 and ad 200 and yet it's got most of John's gospel really a remarkable text We also have several other manuscripts p 4 p 64 p 67 We've got others that are possibly second century what's known as p 75 Which is a document that has both Luke and John in it the vast majority of those verses p 46 is the earliest document. We have of Paul's letters It's housed now at the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin Ireland And at least most of it is the rest of it is housed at the University of Michigan This manuscript is dated at about ad 200 so right on the cusp between the second century and the third century And it has today most of Paul's letters in it We know that it had Far more material than it has now although we still have the majority of what it has today The reason is because the scribe actually wrote out what the page number was And so we can see some of the later pages and figure out exactly how much this text would have had in it These are some of our early manuscripts all together We have manuscripts from the second century or possibly the second or third century that number as many as 10 or 12 Manuscripts that are dated to about that time period Now in terms of how much material of the New Testament they have the remarkable thing is That approximately 43 of all the verses of the New Testament Not the entirety of each verse, but 43 of parts of those verses And in most instances the majority of those verses are found in these manuscripts that are dated to the second century Or to the second slash third century. That's an amazing amount of material Very early on for the New Testament Then you get into the third century and we have quite a few more manuscripts in the fourth century Basically when by the time we get to within 300 years of the completion of the New Testament We have well over 100 manuscripts in greek alone not counting the the other Languages the other ancient versions that have the text of the New Testament including our first complete Greek New Testament manuscript that has every book of the New Testament The entire New Testament is duplicated many times over in these manuscripts That we have through the first 300 years after the completion of the New Testament There's nothing in the ancient world that comes close to that in terms of the completion of material and the date of the material We just don't have any parallels at all that even stand a chance against the materials we have for the New Testament So what scholars have to deal with is this embarrassment of riches of massive amounts of material And on the other hand they have to deal with the early texts and yet those early manuscripts very frequently Differ from each other they typically differ from each other more than the later manuscripts do that were almost cranked out Not by a printing press, but very very carefully produced But on it's on a standard text that was changed significantly from the early text So we've been talking about this embarrassment of riches How much do we have of the average ancient Greek author Greek or latin author? How much do we have of his literary remains? The average author has fewer than and I'm giving a very liberal estimate here Fewer than 20 copies of his literary remains still in existence And most of these Greco-Roman authors would have Just a handful one two three maybe six or seven copies. That's it So giving a generous estimate of 20 copies if you were to stack those literary remains up How tall would it be? Well on average it would end up being about four feet high if we had 20 copies of their the remains you'd get up to four feet high Now take the New Testament manuscripts in the greek and all the ancient versions. How high would that stack be? That would be closer to About a mile high It's a huge difference between these ancient greco-roman authors and their literary remains and what we have for the new testament Now if you were to wipe out all of the greek manuscripts and all of the ancient versions of the new testament Would we be left without a witness? Not at all We also have the fathers of the church or ancient bishops and presbyters and Elders and deacons who wrote commentaries and homilies on the new testament Beginning in the late first century. We start getting these church fathers who are Making some minor comments on the new testament as it was in a state of of Production it wasn't really yet regarded as the new testament until It became what's called canonized that is when The church recognized certain books and determined that certain books would be considered scripture Which didn't it took some time for that to happen But in the meantime these patristic writers in the late first century second century third century All the way up through typically the 13th centuries how we count them Are quoting from the new testament and alluding to the new testament How much material do we have from the church fathers? In terms of quotations and allusions from the new testament Well, the best estimate is that we have Well over one million quotations of the new testament by the church fathers for this period of time That's a huge amount of resources and the entire new testament is reproduced again many times over in the writings of these church fathers Finally when you think in terms of the amount of material there's another way to quantify this All together among our greek manuscripts only we have approximately Two and a half million pages Of manuscripts of the greek new testament Which the center for the study of new testament manuscripts is dedicated to digitizing as much as we are allowed to and as much as we are able to Those two and a half million pages Average out to about five hundred pages per manuscript So the average greek new testament manuscript is about five hundred pages long This is a significant amount of material. We're not dealing primarily with fragments But with some lengthy materials and very early on we get this When you compare the new testament to the other ancient greco-roman literature The remarkable thing is the average other greco-roman literature the average author from greece or from rome Has no literary remains for at least 300 years While as the new testament has well over 100 copies in greek alone within the first 300 years of the completion of the new testament Textual criticism in terms of how it is practiced is divided into two broad sections One is known as external evidence and the other is internal evidence External evidence has to do with an examination of the data that are out there the hard data The manuscripts the versions in the and the father's writings Internal evidence has to do with what you might call the soft data Which has to do with what an author would likely have written and what would the scribes be likely to have done Although both of those are of virtually equal importance They do come at the the problem of the text in different ways And we need to combine their efforts to see how we view a particular Textual variant in terms of whether it's authentic or not When it comes to external evidence, it has three components One is the date and character of the manuscripts The second is known as genealogical solidarity And the third is known as geographical distribution Date and character has to do with an examination of each individual manuscript in terms of when it was written And in terms of how good of a witness it is To its own group of manuscripts within it within which it exists Now that group of manuscripts sometimes is known as text types others call them Families and there's other scholars that are moving away from this kind of terminology altogether But nevertheless when we look at a manuscript one of the considerations that we have is what is the date of the manuscript And generally speaking we would say that the earlier the manuscript the more likely it is to go back to the original wording of the text So date is an important factor coupled with this is the character of the manuscript Is this manuscript a good representative of the textual family to which it belongs And we can check that out by comparing it with some of these other manuscripts that belong to that textual family Obviously if a manuscript is both early and is considered to be a good witness to that textual family Then we'd say that that is an important manuscript Now some manuscripts don't naturally yield themselves into a particular Family of manuscripts at all, but they are still early and It's hard to pigeonhole them as to where they belong But they are significant manuscripts in their own right because of their date Codex washington iensis in Washington dc is one of these manuscripts a late fourth perhaps early fifth century manuscript as some have dated it Other scholars have dated it much later to the seventh century And a couple of scholars have dated it Significantly earlier than fourth or fifth century But it's a manuscript that doesn't quite naturally fit into any one of these textual families But it because of its most likely early date it has some significance all on its own Now so the date and character is an important thing now one of the considerations We have to look at on this is just because a manuscript is early does not necessarily mean that it's going to be An important witness to the text of the new testament For example a scribe may have been Sloppy in his copying practices He may have been copying say three or four words at a time Instead of a couple of letters at a time We know for example that the scribe of p66 a late second century document Was one who was far more interested in calligraphy In making pretty letters on his manuscript than he was in accurately transmitting the text that was in front of him Meanwhile another scribe the scribe of p75 which is probably an early third century Possibly a late second century manuscript there the scribe looks as if he's making a personal copy The manuscript is not nearly as clean as p66 it looks almost kind of like chicken scratches But this scribe is very careful to write out the exemplar in front of him and consequently he's writing One or two letters at most at a time And so the kinds of mistakes he makes are those that are typically nonsense errors And transpositions where he inverts one letter in the place of the other so instead of spelling cat c at He might have spelled it cta And consequently those are the kinds of mistakes we have So date and character is important, but again an early manuscript where the scribe is not careful Uh and especially if he knows greek well and intentionally changes the text Is not going to be as valuable as a scribe who is careful or who makes the kinds of mistakes that are easily detectable Generally speaking those kinds of mistakes that end up with nonsense readings Are to be preferred to the ones that make sense because it's it's easier to see Oh this scribe meant to write x instead of y when a scribe is intentionally changing the text It's very difficult to tell what uh the main script in front of him actually said Now there are some manuscripts that come further down the line That are every bit as valuable as the early manuscripts And this is where the date of a manuscript does not become nearly as important The classic example is codex 1739 a manuscript that is of medieval age And it's on the peninsula of mount athos in northeastern greece where 22 monasteries are Located no woman has legally set foot on this peninsula for millennium codex 1739 is a document that is extremely significant because here the scribe ifrium was his name was uh a scribe who uh tried to find the earliest possible manuscripts he could to copy from And we have evidence of some of his other writings Codex 1582 is another one that he wrote out and he wrote out some classical text as well He was very careful to find the earliest and the best copies he could And the ancestor that he apparently directly copied from in the 10th century Was a manuscript that comes from the late 4th or early 5th century So there's no intervening copies between what this scribe wrote and what his ancestor says So codex 1739 becomes a manuscript that we would consider to be As important as a late 4th or early 5th century Manuscript of the greek new testament very important But that's the exception that proves the rule normally the earlier the date the more important the manuscript Now when it comes to the character of the manuscripts again, we say that the better a witness is to the textual family that it belongs to This gives it good character. This is important for us to consider One of the things we can determine about these manuscripts Is through a number of processes we can pretty much determine how a scribe copied out his or her text Whether it was word for word letter for letter or large phrase for large phrase and some of them Copied out the text by sense phrases this kind of a thing But the character of the manuscript is based both on the fact that we're dealing with a manuscript That is a good witness to its textual family And the way in which it copied its exemplar Was one in which it did not get too creative and go off in some different directions But may have made nonsense errors or minor changes from what that exemplar's text said In other words, the scribe was a faithful scribe trying to copy what The manuscript in front of it actually was saying The second area of external evidence is known as genealogical solidarity If the best witnesses of a particular text form Agree with each other on the reading or the textual variant Then we would say that there is a pretty decent genealogical solidarity by genealogical What we mean is if you think in terms of a family genealogy Those members that are close to each other that have the same parents the same grandparents And they all have blue eyes and blonde hair We'd say these folks seem to have Pretty strong resemblance because of their ancestry When you're looking at genealogy of manuscripts when you see a strong resemblance because of Their ancestry and especially if you see it in the manuscripts that are otherwise determined To be both early and significant and good witnesses in terms of their character We'd say that now we have genealogical solidarity And the point of the external evidence the point of all these different steps and textual criticism In fact is to try to get back to the earlier reading namely the autographic text We have to do so without material evidence to get there So if i'm looking at say 10 manuscripts from the fourth century if we had that many all reading the same text That belong to the same family And nine of them all say The lord said and one of them says the lord jesus said in a given text Then we would say most likely that those nine got it right from their common ancestor And the tenth one is the renegade who added the word jesus from some other evidence or for some other reason So that's genealogical solidarity where the manuscripts have a strong agreement We can push back the date of their common reading that we don't have material evidence for But obviously the ultimate original date of these readings has to go back to the original new testament And we don't have any first century documents So we have to come up with hypotheses to give us the sense of what that original text really said The third aspect of external evidence is going to be geographical distribution If you think of genealogical solidarity is Within a almost a funnel going through the centuries back to the earliest period of the beginnings of a particular text form That's genealogical solidarity if you think of geographical distribution as going wide In terms of the geographical region, but at the same time you get kind of a cross of Twofold cord that's not easily broken if I have say a bunch of manuscripts and versions and church fathers from the fifth century And we've got one from the eastern part of the empire another from the western part of the empire Another one down in south maybe another one in some other areas You've got these manuscripts from the same period these manuscripts and versions and fathers from the same period And they agree with each other that gives us geographical distribution Now if the reading is the kind of a reading that is not predictable That is not the kind that a scribe could would normally come up with on his own And that two scribes and two different locales would Independently of one another come up with then we would have to say Okay, that tells us that the geographical distribution is important And we can push back the date of their common reading even further than the date of each one of those manuscripts So these are the three areas of external evidence date and character of the manuscripts genealogical solidarity And geographical distribution and scholars look at this kind of material evidence And work through the details of each textual problem on the basis of these three criteria to come up with the best Estimate they've got as to the date of each reading and when it got into the textual stream On the basis of these this external evidence As we mentioned in the last lecture there are two aspects to the nature of doing textual criticism There's the external evidence and there's internal evidence external evidence looks at the material data that we actually have to try to Get back to the wording of the autographic or original text Internal evidence looks at what we think an author would be likely to do and what we think a scribe would be likely to do Now those are the two aspects of internal evidence one is called intrinsic probability What the author is likely to do the other is called transcriptional probability what the scribe is likely to do The problem you've got is that there's a number of people as soon as they hear these differences They say well, that's totally subjective. How do you know what the author would be likely to do? How do you know what the scribe would be likely to do? It is true that it's subjective, but it is not totally subjective Just as the examination of the material evidence the external evidence is not totally objective either The reason it's not is because every single manuscript we have of any material Length has corruptions in it. There is no perfect manuscript Consequently we have to look at these manuscripts as corrupt documents But relatively corrupt some are better than others and we have to look at internal evidence as subjective But relatively subjective some of the criteria are stronger in giving us a very good sense of What the earlier reading or the authentic reading would have been in light of a number of data Now when we look at these two aspects we combine the external and the internal evidence together To come up with a hypothesis in the general Guideline that textual critics to use to determine what the original text said is this Choose the reading or the textual variant Which best explains the rise of the others If you have reading a that can best explain what reading b and reading c have to say That as you can see that I think reading b comes from reading a And I can see how reading c would come from reading a or possibly from reading b Then you have a good sense of what we're dealing with here. Let me give One example I'll be giving several examples through this Lecture series, but here's an example from romans chapter 8 verse 1 We read in certain manuscripts. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in christ jesus Other manuscripts have more material here And they say there is now no condemnation For those who are in christ jesus Who do not walk according to the flesh? And so they add a phrase which looks very much like a qualifier The first statement is there is no condemnation for those who are in christ The second statement is there's no condemnation for those who are in christ Who do not walk according to the flesh? Then another group of manuscripts the majority of our manuscripts, but also the later manuscripts add yet another qualifying phrase But who do walk according to the spirit? When we combine both the external and internal evidence on this particular problem What we discover is that our earliest manuscripts which have solid date and character And they have pretty good genealogical solidarity and helpful geographical distribution They seem to point in the direction that the shortest reading that is there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in christ jesus Goes back to the autographic text When we look at that in combination with the internal evidence and ask the questions What would the author be likely to have written? What would the scribes be likely to have written? Then that combination tells us that most likely that shorter reading is in fact what the apostle paul wrote Now let me explain how the internal evidence plays into this We know throughout church history that qualifications were added on top of what Salvation seemed to be about in uh in paul's teachings and consequently it would be a likely Thank for a scribe to want to add a qualification for paul's unqualified absolute statement There's therefore now no condemnation for those who were in christ jesus Scribes would feel uncomfortable with this and so they added a qualifier that we actually do see later in verse four of roman's chapter eight But it seems to be in a slightly different context And so they added the line for those who walk do not walk according to the flesh But then a later group of scribes said well, that's not enough We need to also add another qualifier make a positive statement But who walk according to the spirit? So then you get the fullest statement which we find in the king james bible Which ironically enough even though it's the earliest translation of the of the new testament into english by a large committee And it beat out the geneva bible which was done in 1560 the 1611 king james bible Was one that was done by a much larger committee and it was actually done in england and it's had a long and Very significant history That is based on later manuscripts no earlier than about the 12th century. So it's based on manuscripts about 500 years younger than itself while modern translations are based on Manuscripts that go in many cases all the way back to the second century. So our modern translations are based on Manuscripts that have a date that precedes the time of the manuscripts behind the king james new testament by a thousand years in many cases And we have approximately 1000 times as many greek manuscripts at our disposal as the king james translators use for doing their new testament Now back to the internal evidence and all this When you ask the question, what is the author likely to have written? How can we determine that? That's called intrinsic probability Well, we can see from places where the text is very stable What an author's style is does he speak this way or does he speak that way? For example in john's gospel We know that john does not like to call jesus lord until after his resurrection in the narratives And consequently when we look at john 4 1 There's a textual problem there when jesus knew that the Pharisees had heard that he was making and baptizing more disciples than john Is what john 4 1 says or other manuscripts when the lord knew that he was making and baptizing more disciples than john And so it's when jesus knew or when the lord knew now frankly in terms of the significance of the meaning There's not a whole lot of of consequence in this particular textual problem But in terms of john's style there does seem to be a very clear and distinct way in which he writes For the times in which he narrates about who jesus is Before his resurrection. He calls him jesus and other terms, but he doesn't typically use lord After the resurrection. That's when he begins to use the word lord far more frequently Here in john 4 1 we have a scribe who changes jesus to lord And then you've got other scribes who fit well, yes, of course That's the appropriate term to to describe him by and here again We see the majority of manuscripts that have the word lord while the early manuscripts Many of them have the word jesus here So we ask the question. What would an author be likely to do style is a factor involved in that Does john usually use this word or this word to describe jesus before his resurrection? So those are very important issues and and some of these Textual problems are very famous problems that scholars have literally logged thousands of hours to try to determine There are whole doctoral dissertations on which a phd is granted That deal with one word in the greek new testament to determine Is this authentic or is this not authentic and they go through all of the evidence of external evidence and and internal evidence to try to determine what that word Really was that the author wrote So intrinsic evidence has to do with what would the author be likely to have written And a part of that has to do with his style Another part of it has to do with the context both the immediate context and the broader context of what he's dealing with And then there's the narrative art and other things that would bring in to bear on On those features as we're examining what an author would have written when you take Into consideration for example The story of the woman caught in adultery, which is john chapter 7 verse 53 through john 8 11 Now we see That the earliest manuscripts in fact most of the manuscripts of the first millennium Do not have this story This is a passage these 12 verses i would say are My favorite passage that's not in the bible I used to be adamant that this text was part of the original text of john's gospel But over the years i've as i've studied this I've recognized with the vast majority of new testament textual critics already have recognized That most likely it was later scribes who add this text to john's gospel It ends up in several different places in john it ends up in three different places in john chapter 7 It ends up at the end of john's gospel or at the end of all four gospels It ends up after luke chapter 21 verse 38 it ends up just as a tack on To all the gospels without being placed any one place by some manuscripts Here's a floating text that goes in a number of different directions But in terms of the intrinsic evidence when you begin to examine this in terms of idioms And vocabulary you don't have nearly the same vocabulary frequency in the story of the woman Caught in adultery as you do in other parts of john in other words Here's a text that as you're reading through this if you were to read through it in your greek text And you come to john 753 through 811 it all of a sudden strikes the average reader that there's something different here This doesn't sound like the john that i've been reading all along And after you get done with back done with 811 then you go on and say oh now this sounds like the author that i've been reading all along This is a text that was trying to get into the canon if you will or trying to get into scripture And in many respects it was successful because when the king james bible was published It had the story of the woman caught in adultery in it and since that date There has been what we might call a tradition of timidity That has kept that in the text even though the vast majority of scholars who have produced bible translations in In the 20th and 21st century would say we don't believe that these 12 verses are part of what john originally wrote That doesn't mean that they're not historically true That's a different question from whether they are literally a part of the fourth gospel But the intrinsic evidence shows us once again The vocabulary the idioms the syntax the style and the context don't seem to match With the rest of john's gospel very well, so it doesn't look like it's authored by the uh the evangelist The second aspect of internal evidence is transcriptional probability And this has to do with what a scribe would be likely to have written Now that sounds subjective right off the bat But again what we're looking at is Predictable variants that we can see that scribes would do if they're unrelated to each other And there's a number of kinds of variants that are very obvious For example, when we look at the synoptic gospels matthew mark and luke These are gospels that are called synoptic because they look at the life of jesus from Pretty much the same perspective for the same eye the same viewpoint almost, which is what synoptic has to do with And john meanwhile is way out there and taking a different look at jesus from a different perspective entirely But the synoptic gospels have a number of parallels 90 percent of mark's gospel is found in matthew's gospel for example, and so obviously matthew has In essence cannibalized what we have in mark and put it into his gospel and then he's tweaked it and changed it for his particular purposes Now there's times where the wording just doesn't match up many times where the wording just doesn't match up between Two of these gospels or three of these gospels When a scribe comes along and sees that what does he do? Well, the natural tendency would be to harmonize these texts So they say exactly the same thing and so the scribal tendency is to Matthew says this mark says this let's make them say the exact same thing We're not talking necessarily about discrepancies in the text here We are talking about differences though and differences that sometimes don't seem to make a whole lot of Difference in the meaning but they have to do with a different perspective of a different emphasis Thanks along those lines And so the scribes have a natural tendency to harmonize two different gospels so that they're saying the same words Consequently, that's what we would call in terms of transcriptional probability unintentional change to the text Although the intentional change is not that the scribe in the fifth or sixth century is coming across this and he sees math You say x and he sees mark say why he's not thinking you know I uh I know that i'm going to be messing with mark's gospel to make it say x just like mathy does And i'm changing it from what the original text said, but i'm going to do this anyway because i want to harmonize That's not what they're thinking. They're generally speaking thinking these two manuscripts or these two gospels say something different here And I already know that the scribe who read out the copy of the gospels that i'm looking at has made numerous mistakes I just bet he made another mistake here And so i'm going to change the wording of mark to conform it to what mathy has to say That's a known scribal tendency to harmonize the gospels And so when we see more than one manuscript doing that And doing it in the same direction if it's a predictable variant, there's not necessarily any Geographical distribution that suggests that these two are linked going back to an earlier ancestor It's just a predictable variant that could have arisen quite independently in two different parts of the empire without having any influence from the other So that's intentional changes and that's just one example of them as harmonizations Scribes also made unintentional changes and these could be due to Bad eyesight where they write down the wrong letters or the wrong words It could be due to the fact that they may not know greek very well And so they're copying out maybe a few letters at a time, but they make a number of Mistakes as they're copying out the text This is the kind of an error that scholars can determine with great facility as to This scribe made this mistake There are two manuscripts from the 9th century for example codex f and codex g of paul's letters That one is housed in dresden in germany and the other one is at trinity college In cambridge england and these two manuscripts agree with each other in spelling Differences from all the rest of the manuscripts out there that at times seem to be bizarre spellings These two manuscripts are both Diaglots that is they have another language in there and in each manuscript. It's latin in one of them. It's interleaved that is you've got Greek on one page and latin on the other the other one. It's interlinear. So you've got Greek on one line and latin on the other, but they have so many commonalities in Not just defective spelling although there was no standard for spelling really But their spelling differences are so Different from any other manuscripts that they surely must be cousins if not sisters of each other and copying the exact same ancestor And so we can look at those kinds of things. Those are not predictable variants Those are accidental changes. These two scribes must be related to each other As as far as we can tell because of the kinds of changes that they have that nobody else agrees with Now other kinds of changes that are Accidental and this is all under the the rubric of transcriptional probability Would be changes due to bad hearing where someone doesn't hear exactly what the lecturer is reading And so he doesn't copy out the words exactly the same bad eyesight where it's not necessarily bad eyesight But it's rather that you see one line and then you see another line that ends with the same words And you actually copy out that second line skipping the first one where you may have skipped an entire line of text This is known as hypography or writing out once what should have been written twice Other times you write out one line and then you see the next line that that Looks similar to it and then you write the first line again And so you're writing the same thing out twice when it should have been written once that's called Detography so we've got these accidental changes as well as intentional changes All of this comprises what's called transcriptional probability So putting this together you've got for internal evidence two aspects intrinsic probability What an author would be likely to have written and transcriptional probability What a scribe would be likely to have written and putting those two together when they say the same thing when they say You know this is most likely what the scribe wrote this most likely is what the author would have written And they agree with each other then we have a pretty high probability On the basis of internal evidence as to what the biblical text originally said Let's put all the external evidence and internal evidence together And think through how we look at a particular texture problem We're going to give it as an example revelation chapter one verse four In revelation one four we see that it says John to the seven churches in Asia Grace to you in peace From the one who is and who was and who is to come Now the wording from the one who is is unusual And in one modern translation the net bible they say from quote he who is They put this in quotes to show that That's what john is doing in the original text and what we've got here is simply this After the preposition from in english as well as in greek You cannot use something like the word he that's not correct grammar. It was not correct grammar in Ancient greek. It's not correct grammar in modern english After from if you're going to refer to the personal pronoun you need to say from him From him who was would be fine, but not from he who was or from the one who was is fine Now what we discover is that Instead of from he They have from him So the majority of manuscripts And the majority of late manuscripts changed the wording to from he to from him That is correct grammatically And you can see why scribes would naturally want to change it to from him If they understand that that's the correct grammar one scholar said that Here in the book of revelation To say from he He said unless this was intentional It would be considered one of the worst grammatical blunders in all of ancient greek literature Indeed it is so bad That it would be the equivalent of someone today Writing to his mother and he says Dear mom Congratulate I me just got a phd in english lit We would consider that to be really atrocious grammar. That's what it looks like here in revelation 1 4 But we've mentioned externally that we have the earlier manuscripts. So we've got date We've got the better manuscripts that have from he and we have the majority of later manuscripts that have from him So we're looking at date and character. We're looking at geographical distribution These manuscripts are distributed in other parts of the empire and it's not just the greek manuscripts, but other witnesses And we're also looking at genealogical solidarity within each text form The better witnesses seem to have from he So externally we'd say from he looks like it's original But from internal evidence now, how do we deal with this? Are we going to say the author just doesn't know greek at all? He could hardly rub two sentences together without making huge mistakes When 32 other times in the book of revelation that same preposition is used and he has the right case after it Instead of the nominative case or from the idea from he and so john who wrote the book of revelation Certainly knew what the case was to be used after that preposition And we also look at the transcriptional evidence where here are these scribes that they would have a natural tendency to Want to replace he to him so it would fit the grammar properly now All of that suggests that the original wording would be from he both the external evidence and the internal evidence suggests from He is the original wording of revelation 1 4 But as you look deeper into this there's another level of of Things that are going on here when we think in terms of the author's style of his narrative art The context these kinds of things what we discover is this In revelation 1 3 He says pay careful attentions to the words of this prophecy and those who pay careful attention to them and keep them will be blessed And then you get into the very next verse and he says from he well These first readers would say wait a minute. John. You told us to pay careful attention to your words You should be doing the same thing But you're not doing the same thing. Why should we pay careful attention to your words? Well, what he's got here is actually a strategy to help them understand his book in our modern translations, we have A reference section that typically goes down the middle of two columns or on the side of its one column of References that This text is similar to and typically is referring back to The book of revelation quotes from the old testament Hundreds of times far more than any other text of the new testament far more than any other book of the new testament The apocalypse the book of revelation quotes from the old testament and yet remarkably Not once is any one of those quotes begun with something like it stands written it is written God says moses says daniel says anything like that All of these quotations or allusions if you will are indirect in the sense that they have no Formal introduction to signal i'm quoting from the old testament text And so as you look at this what's remarkable also is you look into the text and you begin to discover That these quotations from the old testament are very frequently Kept in the original form of what the greek translation of the old testament would have had it in known as the septuagint And when you look at revelation one four, we're looking at a text Which would have been perhaps the most well known verse of the entire old testament to gentile converts in the first century ad They come to faith in jesus christ And they say who is this god that we worship? That's the same question that moses asks god On mount sinai at the burning bush and god says i am who i am Now in the greek in the septuagint. It's ego i me ha on And the ha on here is also the ha on that occurs after the preposition from in revelation one four But here's the point That kind of language Would be like saying Do you believe in we the people? If i were to say that to you what i'd be talking about is do you believe in the constitution because i'm quoting from the preamble of the constitution Now technically it's not grammatically correct. I should say do you believe in us the people But if i were to say do you believe in us the people? Then what i would be having is a text that you would not be as familiar with You you lose the illusion if you change the grammatical form of it in ancient greek There were no quotation marks so for john to write this text in a way that his readers would know what he's Quoting from he has to keep it in the original grammatical form that's found in the greek old Old testament the septuagint so that they can read the text and say aha He's talking about this verse x is 314 And so again as we look at this text closer when you see Apah ha on which we have in revelation one four or from he I think what john is saying is this is from the immutable one the one whose character does not change This is from the almighty god But he doesn't say that explicitly because he's trying to get his readers to dive into the old testament To find out what he's talking about In recent years Scholar on the apocalypse by the name of dr. greg bill has argued that john's Texts where he uses what we would normally call bad grammar Really line up in a remarkable number of places with those very same places where he's quoting from the septuagint And consequently what dr. Beal sees as happening is that john is getting his audience to read those old testament texts It's like every time he uses bad grammar it sends a flag up the pole. It says okay now Search and find out what i'm talking about And you have to ask yourself. Well, why doesn't he just say this is from daniel chapter 9 verse 13 or something In part the reason that john didn't quote Daniel 9 13 and say so is because there were no verse numbers back then But another part of his strategy seems to be that he wants to communicate what he's saying to his readers without those who are Uh In charge of getting this letter from the island of potmos to asia minor, which is today's turkey would be Understanding what's going on if he said for example Domition is a jerk the emperor of rom at the time I don't think that letter could get out to those churches because he was the emperor and john was exile on the island of potmos Consequently, he's got to get his message to them in a way that they will understand But the the romans will not understand and this seems to be the strategy that he has Done to accomplish this The very next verse quotes from the psalms where we've got psalm 89 quoted And it says the faithful witness the true one and the form of the greek is exactly the same as we have in the septuagint of psalm 89 While as it should not be that form in revelation 15 So john starts with the very Famous verse the well-known verse to these gentile converts exodus 314 And then from there he moves into some other texts psalm 89 and all the way through the book of revelation He is quoting from parts of the old testament keeping it in the original form. So his readers will know Aha, he's telling us to go and see what text he's talking about so we can interpret what this book is all about To sum up external and internal evidence Combining these two features to determine what the original wording of a particular variant is A particular place in the text is when you look at the external evidence and you think about the date and character The geographical distribution the genealogical solidarity you come to a conclusion that says on the basis of the material evidence that i've got I think i can come up with a hypothesis that reading a Is the ancestor of reading b that is reading b came from reading a Then you look at the internal evidence and you say on the basis of intrinsic evidence And the basis of transcriptional evidence. I can say that reading b seems to be the ancestor of reading a Now when you have a conflict like that you have to work through the issues and say Well external evidence suggests that reading a was the the first reading Internal suggests that reading b is the first one you work through that conflict always with a question in mind Choose the reading which best explains the rise of the others But in the instance of revelation one four It's pretty easy for us to see how the data line up both the external and the internal evidence are on the same side The external evidence suggests because of the dates of these manuscripts and because of their character because of their genealogical solidarity And their geographical distribution that what revelation one four originally said is from he who is Now when we look at the internal evidence it also lines up with the external and says the same thing It is most likely that the author wrote from he who is in light of what his agenda seems to be of equating unusual grammar with direct quotation from the septuagint And you also look at the transcriptional probability. What is the scribe likely to do the scribe is likely to change this to more normal grammar to good grammar if you will Because he doesn't understand the nature of what the author is trying to accomplish and so Internal evidence and external evidence are used In combination to try to choose the reading which best explains the rise of the other Which as far as the evidence is concerned that tells us this is the wording of the autograph in that place An example of a textual problem That is a little bit more difficult to solve than the problem in revelation one four Is found in matthew chapter 27 verses 16 and 17 Here's a place where the external evidence and the internal evidence do not line up In matthew 27 16 it says At that time they had in custody a notorious prisoner named jesus barabbas In verse 17 So after they had assembled pilot said to them whom do you want me to release for you jesus barabbas Or jesus who is called the christ Now what's interesting here is that the word jesus before barabbas in each verse is only found in a handful of later manuscripts The vast majority of our manuscripts including our earliest manuscripts and our best manuscripts Do not have the name jesus before barabbas In fact, when you look at the external evidence, you'd have to say Date and character of manuscripts tells us that it says whom do you want me to release for you barabbas or jesus who is called the christ And uh, this is why we have a difficulty here the external evidence date and character Geographical distribution genealogical solidarity all go in the direction of saying there is no named jesus before barabbas in either verse 16 or verse 17 However, when it looks when you would look at the internal evidence now we see a different picture There is no reason that we can come up with that ascribe would accidentally Add the name jesus before barabbas in either verse 16 or verse 17 In fact, you go back several verses before you see the name of jesus listed in the text Where you could have a possible what's called deutography writing twice Which should have been written once and it's it's highly unlikely that ascribe could have accidentally added the name jesus before barabbas especially in two verses right in a row and so There's not a good argument to say that the scribes accidentally added the name jesus Is there a reason why ascribe would intentionally add the name jesus before the name of this notorious prisoner barabbas The only reason that i can come up with as to why ascribe would do that is if you were A malicious scribe who wanted to give the same name That jesus christ had to this notorious prisoner, but these same manuscripts Do not show any evidence of malice They are faithful scribes to them for the most part who are trying to copy out the text in front of them But they don't have Evidence they don't show evidence of changing the text for malicious reasons. In fact, they harmonize Matthew mark and luke in many places because the differences in the wording look to them almost like discrepancies and consequently It's difficult to attribute faulty motives to these scribes in that part now when we look at The transcriptional evidence then we'd have to say It's difficult to come up with a valid reason as to why any scribes would intentionally add the name jesus before barabbas But let's ask the other question Would scribes intentionally take away the name jesus before the name barabbas? And now all of a sudden there's all sorts of reasons and the most immediate one That goes all the way back to origin who was a writer in the third century a very influential A church scholar whose writings influenced later generations of scribes fathers and other christian leaders He said that there is no wicked person who has the name jesus in scripture and therefore barabbas doesn't have the first name of jesus It's not a very good argument But it's the argument that he gave it was kind of a genuflected Argument saying only jesus christ is the one we worship We don't want to give this name to anybody else now Old testament joshua had that name. That's the the name in in in greek is yesus or we transliterated as jesus But no evil person had this name now the reality is that There are plenty of reasons why scribes would not want to have the name jesus before barabbas because barabbas was a bad guy And they don't want to see this comparison with jesus christ However, as you look at this text what's fascinating is you get into verse 17 And it says Whom should I release to you jesus? Barabbas or jesus the one called christ Why would pilot have to add the words the one called christ unless he's making an explicit contrast With another jesus who has a different surname if you will in other words. He's saying If jesus were not part of barabbas in pilot's statement in verse 17 He would say whom should I release to you barabbas or jesus the christ But he wouldn't have to say jesus the one called christ. He might even say jesus christ But he would not have to say jesus the one called christ That is additional information to distinguish this jesus from different jesus So externally we're dealing with not the best manuscripts that have this but it is Possible that they could well go back to the original all by themselves And most scholars would say yes, they most likely do although we sure wish we had some better evidence for this And internally the evidence is extremely compelling that matthew wrote originally jesus in both matthew 27 16 and matthew 27 17 Well, let me sum up then The external evidence seems to argue that there is no jesus with the name barabbas in either verse 16 or verse 17 But the internal evidence argues the name jesus barabbas is found in both 16 and 17 And as we begin to examine these data the question that we must always ask that is foremost in our minds Is choose the reading which best explains the rise of the others And clearly in this instance the reading that best explains the rise of the others Is that jesus barabbas is what the evangelist wrote in both verse 16 and verse 17 And scribes as well as church fathers like origin Eliminated the name jesus before barabbas because it was offensive to them to have that same name given to an oritorious criminal That was the name of their lord and master jesus christ The textual problem in romans chapter five verse one Is a very interesting one for illustrating what textual criticism is all about It says Either Therefore having been justified by faith. We have peace with god through our lord jesus christ or Having been justified by faith Let us have peace with god through our lord jesus christ The only difference between these two texts is either we have peace Or let us have peace and the difference in greek is a single letter In we have peace the word in greek is It's uh the indicative verb of we have which means we do have Now in the present time peace The other one is the subjunctive verb The difference between those two is an a and an o it's either Let us have peace as a common we have peace You can hardly hear that distinction as i'm saying it now But here's where the issue gets complicated in ancient greek The amicron which is the short o and the omega the long o were pronounced alike. They were both pronounced Oh, so the first reading would be pronounced echomen The second one would be pronounced echomen exactly alike So how can we tell what paul originally wrote here? Well, when we look at the manuscript evidence when we look at the external evidence Most of it goes in the direction of saying the subjunctive With the omega that is let us have peace is what was originally written However, there's some interesting very intriguing Evidence that suggests that maybe the indicative was in fact original Our earliest manuscript for this passage is manuscript zero two two zero And it's a third century document that has just the end of romans four in the beginning of romans five in it But we're not exactly sure what it said because at exactly this letter in the middle of this word The amicron or the omega is shorn in half And so it's hard for us to tell did the author write to the scribe write to the indicative or the subjunctive the amicron or the omega However on the basis of how this scribe writes his other amicrons and omegas Scholars have been able to determine that almost surely he wrote an amicron here And consequently it doesn't curve quite as much as the amicron omega as you can see on this slide So consequently the earliest manuscript has We have peace with god But then you get into the fourth century and now our manuscripts have let us have peace with god although They have been corrected later on sometimes Perhaps at the same time when the manuscript left the scriptorium and went to the church where it was heading Or it was corrected in later centuries So the external evidence we would have to say for the most part goes in the direction of the subjunctive let us have peace Although there are some important and early witnesses that have the indicative When you look at the internal evidence however now a different situation emerges Up until this point in paul's letter to the romans he has Used an imperative only once in what's called a hordatory subjunctive Just once or twice through here Hordatory subjunctive means It's a command to the group of which the author himself is a part and so it means let us do something After this point there are over 60 imperatives 60 commands in greek from this point on in romans And there's seven hordatory subjunctives So what we have is the author is moving in the direction Of making the indicatives of the faith into what we should be doing The the statements of what god has done in christ now become statements or foundations on which we build how our behavior should be And in fact in the rest of this chapter paul doesn't seem to use other than indicatives He begins in the next chapter and moves into the imperatives So at this stage in his writing of romans. He is building that foundation of what god has done Not only that but when we get to verse 10 in this chapter The assumption is that we have been reconciled to god in the sense that therefore we do have peace Unless paul is stating it explicitly in verse one. It's difficult to see why he would all of a sudden assume it in verse 10 So internally it looks as if what he's doing is saying we do have peace with god And on that basis now he builds his argument into where he's going so that when he gets to chapter six now He can start giving commands about how christians should relate To god and how they should be obedient to him So most scholars would say the internal evidence here like in matthew 27 16 and 17 in an earlier lecture We noted that the internal evidence is against the external evidence But the external evidence in this case is much more balanced, although it's In favor of the subjunctive is not Radically in favor of the subjunctive so that we just say we've got very little evidence for the indicative But the internal evidence is pretty compelling that what paul wrote here originally was we have peace with god And therefore the combination of external and internal evidence suggests that the indicative is what is What he originally wrote and so most textual critics looking at this passage would say In romans 5 1 what the autographic text says is therefore having been justified by faith We have peace with god through our lord jesus christ How do we define a textual variant what constitutes a textual variant as far as textual criticism is concerned That is scholars determine how many numbers of variants we have among the manuscripts And it's important to know what actually is a variant A textual variant is any place in the wording of the text where there is a difference Now what this does not count Is capitalization Or punctuation because the ancient manuscripts would not have had a distinction between the capitalized words and the non-capitalized words And they didn't use any punctuation So as far as the original text is concerned neither capitalization nor punctuation are important However, what is important is the wording The word order and even the spelling of words and those all count as textual variants There are essentially five types of textual variants that scholars Would recognize when it comes to the new testament The first is what's called an omission That is if you look at a particular text and you compare it to a manuscript and that manuscript lacks a word or more than one word That would be called an omission Another kind just the opposite of this is an addition So you've got this manuscript that differs from the text that you're comparing it to and it adds a word or more than one word That's called an addition What's the size of omissions and additions? Well the smallest by definition would be a single word The largest is as much as 12 verses and we have two places in the new testament Where 12 whole verses were either added to the text or were deleted from the text It certainly cannot be in either of these places considered to be an unintentional change Because two scribes in different parts of the ancient world could not possibly have come up with exactly the same wording for 12 verses So there must be some kind of a genetic or genealogical connection Connection among these manuscripts going back very early. The two places are john 753 through 8 11 the story of the woman count adultery And we've discussed that in an earlier lesson And the other place is mark chapter 16 verses 9 through 20 Those 12 verses are found in the majority of manuscripts But our two earliest manuscripts lack them and we'll talk about that in a later lecture Apart from those two places of 12 verses the next largest textual variant that is Found in English translation in other words the the kind of variant that Most students of the bible through translation know about is only two verses long And then we have some that are one verse So we've only got a couple dozen or so that are one or two verses two places where it's 12 verses And then we've got after that phrases and clauses and all the way down to individual words And that number is in the tens of thousands if not more of omissions or additions at that stage Besides omissions and additions. There are three other kinds of textual variants One is a transposition and this has to do with the word order change where a word order can change In terms of just two words words Jesus christ versus christ jesus and that's a typical textual variant we see in paul's letters Did he write jesus christ or did he write christ jesus? Those words are transposed very frequently among the manuscripts Transpositions can also involve a number of larger Issues and one manuscript codex bay's eye. That's at cambridge university Transposes at times as many as nine or ten words. So the order gets in a different sequence It makes sense But that probably tells us that this scribe is copying out a text Where he's grabbing whole bites at a time large bite fills at a time and writing out what he thinks it should say And uh, that's why this manuscript is Probably the most bizarre manuscript among our new testament texts In that it changes the text more than any other manuscript out there Now besides omission addition and transposition. We have substitution is the fourth kind of a textual variant Substitution is simply the substitution of one word For another word so in john 4 1 When jesus knew or when the lord knew is it jesus or is it the lord? That's a substitution. Those are the kinds of things we have as well and when it comes to These textual variants sometimes you can get a combination where you can have a transposition Four or five words But where you have an omission in another variant or you have an addition addition in another variant after that or you might have These four or five words that are transposed and there's a couple of substitutions in there Each of those has to be treated as a discrete textual variant Finally, there's what we might call a total rewrite where the text is so different in one manuscript than what it is in another That we just give up and say we can't classify this by transposition and omission and substitution It has to be just a total rewriting of the text and again It's codex bezi or contra brigandis at cambridge that leads the charge in having total rewrites of the text Any textual variants do we have among our new testament manuscripts? Well, there've been a couple of different calculations and one has been something that's been out there since 1965 in a popular new testament introduction and that count is It's the source of a folk myth if you will it's completely wrong and we need to deal with that first In 1965 that author said that a textual variant Is one in which Anytime you have a number of manuscripts that differ with a different number of manuscripts You count each manuscript that differs as a variant But this is a very unorthodox and unacceptable definition for a textual variant And yet it has gotten into all sorts of popular literature in the last 45 years that has Infected a popular culture, especially within the church where people say oh well There aren't really that many textual variants if you understand that each variant involves a number of of Counts is just involving one manuscript so At that time they were known something in the neighborhood of 150 2000 variants that this Author knew about and he said well, here's how you actually count a variant if we have a thousand manuscripts that read Jesus In this particular verse and a thousand manuscripts that read lord in the same verse That means that there's a thousand variants from the wording jesus That's not true. That's not how we should count the textual variants And so this was a way for him to say Because there's a couple hundred thousand variants when you count how many manuscripts are every manuscript that counts against the text Counts as a variant Consequently it didn't look like there were that many variants among our manuscripts The real way to count variants, however, is this Every single time you have a change in the wording among these witnesses that counts as a variant Regardless of how many manuscripts you have that back it up it still counts as just one variant So how many variants do we have among our new testament manuscripts? The best estimate that we have today is somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 000 possibly as high as 500 000 And again, what this means is every time I see a difference In the manuscripts where they're the wording is different that counts as a variant When we look at the number of words we have in the new testament, there are approximately 140 000 words In the greek new testament as it was originally written Give or take a few hundred here and there. It's actually 138 162 in our standard published greek new testament So when I look at that I say there's 400 000 variants among our witnesses What that tells me is that for every word I have in the greek new testament There are approximately two and a half variants Or as one scholar is fond of saying we have more variants among our manuscripts than we have words in the original new testament So it's a very high number on one level In the next lesson we're going to look at the nature of these variants and determine how significant this issue really is But for now just to understand there's About 400 000 maybe as high as 500 000 variants among our witnesses In only about 140 000 words in the greek new testament That means we have approximately two and a half variants for every word in the new testament Which is one of the reasons why we need to examine these manuscripts and try to determine the original as best we can There's kind of an epilogue to the number of variants And it is simply this The reason we have so many variants is because we have so many manuscripts If scholars had only one copy of the greek new testament today a handwritten copy we would have no variants Two copies now we'd start getting a few thousand variants three copies would get more But the point is we have a far more textual variants For our new testament witnesses than we do for any other greco-roman literature Because we have so many manuscripts and yet the more manuscripts that we have the more that we can examine and And really look at intently the more we can start tracing this genealogical relationship among these manuscripts Which helps us to ultimately get back to the autographic text What is the nature of these textual variants these Thousands upon thousands of variants that we have among our new testament manuscripts If one just had the number of 400 000 to 500 000 variants One might think there's no way we could possibly get back to the original text of the new testament But when you examine the nature of these variants now things come into view that you might not otherwise recognize Here's a way we can categorize these variants we can do it into four different groups And the two poles on each of these groups or in this categorization is Meaningful on the one hand and viable on the other By meaningful what I mean is that it changes the meaning of the text to some degree By viable I mean that it has the likelihood or the possibility a distinct possibility of Going back to the original wording And that means it has to be found in sufficient manuscripts either that are early enough or important enough or that could Plausibly go back to the wording of the original you could refer to an earlier lesson on Matthew 27 16 and 17 that Has some fairly late manuscripts But they are significant enough that they could go back to the original because they are belonging to their own textual family And so that would be considered a viable variant So meaningful and viable are the two poles and here's the way we can categorize all textual variants First those that are neither meaningful nor viable Second those that are not meaningful but are viable Third those that are not viable but are meaningful And fourth those that are both meaningful and viable Well, let's examine these And in this order first we'll start with those that are neither meaningful nor viable That means that it doesn't affect the meaning of the text And they don't have much plausibility of going back to the original in fact We'll take this category with the next one those that are not Meaningful but are viable and we'll group those two together Well over 75 of all of our textual variants belong to these two categories The most common kind of change we have among our manuscripts Are spelling changes and the most common spelling change we have among the manuscripts is what's called a movable new This is the use of the letter n at the end of a word when the next word starts with a vowel Do I put it the letter n in there when I have a vowel afterwards? Well, just like in English we have a book and apple So in greek you have a movable new before a word that starts with a vowel And the older manuscripts always had that new there. They didn't take it off The later manuscripts start to nuance it so they would drop the new when the next word started with a consonant That's the most common textual variant we have among our new test manuscripts. It affects nothing And so spelling differences especially those that are not meaningful, but may or may not be viable account for a good 75 of all of our textual variants the next group those that are meaningful, but not viable is a significant group and it's uh Again, this is this will probably be about 24 percent or really more than 24 percent of all of our textual variants belong to this category. They are variants where It it makes for a significant change in the meaning of the text But there's hardly any plausibility that that wording could go back to the original It may be found in one late medieval manuscript or one group of versions that don't have a very good pedigree Or a few church fathers that talk about a variant, but they don't really go back to the original One of the interesting ones is in first Thessalonians 2 7 and this really borders on Neither meaningful nor viable, but in first Thessalonians 2 7 Paul says to the Thessalonians that we were little children among you Or he says we were gentle among you now those two variants are both meaningful and viable It changes the meaning of the text whether Paul says we were gentle among you or we were little children And many scholars would say it has to say gentle because it goes on it says like a nursing like a nursing mother And so does this mean that Paul is saying we were little children among you like a nursing mother? That would be too harsh of a metaphorical shift for paul He does some things like this elsewhere, but not quite that extreme Or if you repunctuate the text you could say we were little children among you period Like a nursing mother cares for her children something along those lines paul goes on and says that So if you put a hard stop there there is not nearly as Disruptive a metaphor shift However gentle and little children there's only one letter difference in greek It's either napioi or apioi and the word that precedes it ends with anew So in 1st Thessalonians 2 7 we have But read together What did I say did I say napioi or apioi? It's very difficult to tell and consequently this has created an extremely difficult textual problem for scholars to try to figure out But there's another variant that sounds like apioi sounds like napioi But it's sufficiently different that it could not have been created quite in the same way that these were created And it only occurs in one late manuscript. It's the word hippoi We became horses among you now it's a funny variant and It's obvious that paul and sylas could not have become horses in any capacity no matter what you're thinking about That makes no sense here. So most would say that's not a meaningful variant at all But it may be that we've got a discreniled usc fan when usc lost the rose bowl against the university of texas in 2005 And so she says we became horses among you who knows, but uh, whatever the Reason is this is not at all a viable variant There are plenty of these non viable variants that are meaningful But they just don't have a sufficient pedigree to go back to the original text The smallest category of variants is those that are both meaningful and viable This is less than one percent of all textual variants are both meaningful and viable variants That is they have some good plausibility a good possibility of going back to the original And they change the meaning of the text to some degree Let me give an illustration of a textual variant that is both meaningful and viable In revelation chapter 13 verse 18 we read that the number of the beast is 6 6 6 Everyone knows the antichrist number is 6 6 6 Well, not so fast. There's a manuscript at the bibliothèque national in paris It's a fifth century manuscript And it's probably our second most important manuscript for the book of revelation And it has the number of the beast as 6 1 6 Most scholars think 6 1 6 is not the number of the beast. It's the neighbor of the beast You know, he lives a few doors down But with one manuscript it didn't seem like it had much plausibility Except that Irenaeus the second century church father spoke about textual variants And he spoke specifically about this textual variant And he said the better manuscripts the earlier manuscripts that I've seen have 6 6 6 But there are some that have 6 1 6 So the number 6 1 6 we know existed in the second century because Irenaeus is writing in the late second century But we also know that he is commenting on this thinking that the better manuscripts have 6 6 6 So its pedigree may not be as good as that But it may well be that Irenaeus is motivated to say that the number is 6 6 6 instead of 6 1 6 Up until a few years ago This was the only manuscript that we actually had that had the number of the beast As 6 1 6 But then at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University They found another manuscript that had been excavated decades ago And it had been in the library waiting for some paparologists to go through and examine these documents And this manuscript also has the number of the beast as 6 1 6 It is now our earliest fragment for Revelation chapter 13 in its third possibly fourth century But it says 6 1 6 like this other manuscript in Paris says And so consequently here's a reading that is both meaningful and viable It has a sufficient pedigree to possibly go back to the original text We have to examine this in terms of external evidence and internal evidence to make the decision And yet when the day is done we may not have a very strong feel as to which wording is original Most likely 6 6 6 is but it may be that some scholars can make a great case out for 6 1 6 going back to the original text It's going to take hundreds of hours of research to determine this and even when it's all over with There's not absolute certainty as to what the original text is But it's a meaningful variant It's the kind of a variant that if English Bibles and Bibles and other languages Translated this as the number of the beast is 6 1 6 It would probably send several tons of popular Christian literature to the flames Just google 6 1 6 or google 6 6 6 sometime on the internet and you'll discover all sorts of crazy ideas about what 6 6 6 is all about But if it says 6 1 6 then all bets are off now. They have to go back and Do their strange rancings about these mysterious numbers Now we've talked about the manuscripts in terms of are they papyri are they majestuels menuscules or lectionaries But now we want to think about the manuscripts in terms of their contents that they have And there are four different groups That the manuscripts fall into do they have the gospels Do they have acts and the catholic epistles also known as the general letters These are the seven letters that we have in the new testament other than those by paul or Allegedly by paul namely hebrus So the third category is the pauline Corpus which includes 14 letters It includes hebrus because the early church believed that hebrus was written by paul And so we always group hebrus with the pauline corpus And the fourth group is the book of revelation So these are designated E for evangelist a for acts and the catholics p for pauline r for revelation Now one of the things that's interesting to think about is how many copies we have Of each one of these groups of manuscripts to be sure some of the manuscripts have more than just one of those categories We have manuscripts that have almost any number of combinations You can have the gospels and paul's letters or the gospels in the book of revelation Or you might have the catholic letters in the book of revelation or you might have the catholic letters and paul's letters but when you think in terms of What manuscripts we have or the number of manuscripts we have that have each one of these categories The numbers are very illuminating The gospels far and away more than any other category are our best represented We have about two thousand or more manuscripts that have the gospels in them of the 57 5800 manuscripts that we have of the greek new testament The next largest category is paul's letters, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of about 700 to 800 Manuscripts, so it's about one third as many as we have of the gospels It's significantly less the next category after that is acts and the general letters or the catholic epistles Designated with the letter a now these manuscripts comprise About 650 to 700 750 manuscripts have The acts and the general pistols in them or portions thereof So it's pretty close to what we have for paul But then the final category, which is really bringing up the rear Is the book of revelation. We only have about 300 to 350 Manuscripts of the book of revelation in greek among our new testament manuscripts. The question is Why is it that there is such a great disparity between the copies of the gospels on the one end and the book of revelation on the other? Well, the fundamental reason has to do with the canon That is how long it took before particular books were recognized as scripture And accepted into the canon that we call the new testament The book of revelation struggled for a long time to get in Unlike the gospels, which were readily accepted and treated as these are authoritative because they contain the words of jesus christ And consequently they were very soon recognized as a christian scripture paul's letters Completely were recognized as scripture Shortly thereafter or perhaps even at the same time as the gospels All of them except for the book of hebrus that one had a little bit of a more difficult history to it Then you've got the Acts and the catholic letters at various stages of acceptance Some of them early on like acts and first peter and this kind of thing first john Others took much longer to get accepted. So canonicity is an issue that affected the copying of these manuscripts What's interesting though is if the gospels are accepted very early on Then that means you get to a fourth century copy of the gospels There may be 10 generations of copies between it and the original text But you get to a fourth century copy of the book of revelation And there may be only three or four copies Intermediately between the original and the copy that we have in the fourth century So one of the interesting things on this is that the book of revelation in the fourth century Most likely is going to come closer to the form that it was in When john wrote it in the first century then those gospel manuscripts in the fourth century One of the other implications that we can begin to think about on this is that if we have Nearly eight to ten times as many copies of the gospels as we do of the book of revelation What does that tell us about what the early christians valued when it came to these new testament documents? To them by far the most important thing was the life and teaching and death and resurrection of jesus christ Which they read in the gospels very clearly. Well, it's not all of the rest of the books of the new testament speak about such things How do scholars classify greek new testament manuscripts? Well, there's a couple of different organizations and one of them is very simple and straightforward But it's not the primary way in which they're classified. We'll address this first You could classify these manuscripts by the material that they're written on And in that case there are three kinds of manuscripts. There are those that are written on papyri Which is an ancient substance kind of like paper and we have a A lesson on what the papyri were all about that you can watch a video on that Secondly are those that are written on parchment or animal skins And third are those that are written on paper. The later manuscripts tend to be written on paper Those are the three materials and how manuscripts can be Written and this is not just greek manuscripts, but all other manuscripts Now the way that greek new testament manuscripts are classified though is a fourfold Classification that is partially content Partially material and partially handwriting. It's a it's a hodgepodge kind of an approach But it has served scholars well for Decades even centuries and I don't think it's going to be changed anytime soon The four groups are papyri Unchills or magiskules Then monustules and lectionaries Papyri are manuscripts that as their name implied are written on the material papyri or papyrus And these manuscripts are Generally speaking our very oldest manuscripts of the new testament And they are the fewest in number. We have approximately 125 papyri known to exist today of the new testament And they are numbered with capital p and then the number in sequence. So one through 125 is what we have essentially today The next group of manuscripts are the unchills or magiskules And these are manuscripts that are written with capital letters. That's what unchill or magiskule means But all of them by definition are written on parchment And also by definition They are Continuous text manuscripts. That is they have a whole book in its normal chapters in its normal order The other kinds of manuscripts are lectionaries that don't have A whole book organized. They'll have snippets from a book for the example They'll have 15 or 20 verses that are to be read out loud for that day And then they'll skip over to another section. So you might have a gospels lectionary That quotes from mark and then it might quote from john next and then luke and then back to mark and then Matthew this kind of a thing But continuous text manuscripts are all the others except lectionaries So an unchill or magiskule manuscript means it's written on parchment It's continuous text and it's capital letters And those manuscripts are designated in one of two ways Either by letters or by numbers that start with the number zero every time Now if by letters we start with the latin alphabet And so we we don't have j but we go through and have the rest of the letters And then after that we have the greek alphabet for those manuscripts Where the greek letter is not identical to a form in the latin alphabet So you can't have a codex zeta because we already have the letter z You can't have a codex eta which looks like a capital h because we already have A manuscript h so you have the the latin alphabet followed by the greek alphabet and these manuscripts Take us through the first few dozen and then we peel off into the numbered manuscripts only All of those manuscripts that have a latin or a greek letter also have a number And so codex vaticanus is also known as codex b And it's also known as codex zero three We have other manuscripts Codex n is also known as zero two two Now there's one Manuscript that has a different alphabet that it follows and that's the very first one in the list It's known as codex saniticus. This is a fourth century manuscript that konstantin fontisandor for german textual critic in the middle of the 1800s discovered at St. Catharines monastery at mount sinai at the base of mount sinai in egypt And in 1859 he brought that out of the monastery and we'll talk about that at some point about Why he took that out whether the monks really allowed him to do so or not But the point here is that he was so excited about that manuscript That he gave it a new designation to give it priority to over the others And he gave it the hebril letter alf So it would stand at the front of the list of all these manuscripts It's very similar to what we see in the yellow pages when somebody says triple a Pest control and then somebody else says well, I want to be the first one who's noticed So I'll have five a pest control. It's just a matter of putting giving it priority by alphabet Alphabetization and consequently tishendorf got to have his manuscript a very important manuscript listed first among all the others That's unshills, magiskills, greek letters Latin letters or in one case hebril letter and all of them also have a new numerical designation that starts with zero We have over 300 magiskill manuscripts today The third category are those that are Menuscules and these also have to do with handwriting and that's why they're described as menuscules They are written on parchment or they are on paper Now these menuscule manuscripts are Almost always later than the magiskill manuscripts and the basic difference is that the magiskills are capital letter manuscripts Menuscules are cursive hand But they're later the earliest menuscule manuscript We have is from the 9th century and it goes all the way up to the 18th century for The few stragglers we have at the very end that are still written by hand after the time of the printing press And are apparently not copies of a printed greek new testament We have over 2900 manuscripts that have a menuscule number to them right now These are continuous text manuscripts and they start with number one all the way to 2900 and five I think is the latest number we have on these manuscripts now Again, they start from the 9th century to about the 18th The magiskills go as early as the 3rd century and as late as about the 10th And then finally the last category or lectionaries lectionaries can be written on parchment Or they can be written on paper and a lectionary also, which is very unusual Can be either menuscule text or magiskule text It's unusual in the sense that it could be almost anything But the thing that categorizes that an lectionary is not the material that it's written on Not the kind of letters that are used But is it a continuous text manuscript or something else the lectionary is something else It's the kind of text that has Passages that are read for a particular day of the week or a particular saturday or sunday lesson And the ancient church began to have the practice of reading various passages of scripture on certain holy days Certain saturdays certain sundays and this became the lectionary system that involves A couple of thousand of manuscripts the oldest lectionary we have goes all the way back to the 5th century And they go as late as the 17th or 18th century as well just like the menuscules do All together we have Almost 5,800 numbered greek new testament manuscripts that exist today And they are broken into these four categories papyri magiskules menuscules and lectionaries The categories of witnesses to the new testament that are other than the greek manuscripts include three things First are versions second are patristics And third are other Let me start with other because that's the one that we can dispense with easily enough The other category involves things like talismans, which were essentially ancient lucky charms That people would use to ward off demons and this sort of thing and those talismans Often had scripture in them, especially from the book of revelation But new testament scholarship does not regard talismans as Serious witnesses to the new testament texts. So For the last 50 or so years they have not been regarded At all in trying to determine the wording of the original text of the new testament Besides the talismans what else belongs to the other category would be ostrica The text of scripture on other than actual manuscripts that is not on parchment paper or papyrus but on broken pottery on The walls cave walls on stone this kind of thing The last item in this other category Would be early christian papyri in which they quote from the new testament But the papyri themselves are not the text of the new testament And we have early christian writers Writing to friends and quoting from this passage or that passage And so far those have really not been catalogued or really even examined By new testament textual critics Now the broad categories that are very important besides the greek new testament manuscripts Are the versions and the and the fathers as far as the versions are concerned what this simply means Is the translation of the new testament into other ancient languages And a version therefore is the translation of the the greek new testament into latin or syriac or coptic Those are the three leading versions or ethiopic georgian gothic old church slavonic Arabic armenian all sorts of different translations And these versions As i said the most important ones are going to be the latin the coptic And the syriac and that's in part because they are direct translations from the greek And in part because they are the earliest translations that we have of the greek new testament into these other languages We'll see the importance of the versions when we discuss In a later lecture the textual problem of first timothy 316 The fathers or the patristics is the last category of non greek manuscript witnesses And these are quotations from the new testament By church leaders bishops and presbyters and and deacons and scholars of the ancient church As they're writing either commentaries or homilies sermons And these church fathers for the most part are broken down into three languages greek or latin or syriac Now the church fathers We have them as early as the late first century And they go all the way through typically the 13th century is normally how they're canard But the church fathers are In a little bit of a different category than the versions because it's not the continuous text of scripture They are quotations and that might be lengthy quotations from scripture But they need to be treated a little differently from how the versions are treated I'll discuss the problems and the value of versions and the problems and value of the church fathers in later lessons The value of the ancient versions is that once the greek new testament is translated into another language Then that language text of the of the new testament generally speaking takes on a life of its own It no longer is interacting with the greek text And so if you can find out what the earliest form of that version is You can find out what that greek text that it's uh translated was saying at about that time In other words, uh, we know that the latin uh text of the new testament was translated as early as the second century And so when we look at latin manuscripts and we can determine the earliest Form of the latin text what we can tell is that that form of the latin text is a second century text that Uh duplicates what the greek text was before it Now that's the great value of the versions as well as Placing those versions in different geographical locations So you've got the latin text that's going to be especially in the west And then you've got the coptic text of the new testament That's especially in the south and the syriac text, which is especially in the east Those are the three most important uh early versions Now there are problems to the versions at the same time First of all, we are trying to reconstruct the text of a version to determine what its original form is We don't have those second century latin manuscripts anymore We have later manuscripts that point to the source of the latin text being done in the second century But we don't have the second century manuscripts So that's one of the problems that we've got is we have to reconstruct the latin text to figure out what that second century text said But another problem with these ancient versions is the Principles of translation that the translators followed. Did they follow something like a dynamic or a functional equivalent translation? Or did they do a more rigorous formal equivalent translation of the greek text those that are more formal that are almost We might say bad latin or bad coptic or bad syriac Are going to be the versions that are the most valuable for us for getting back to the underlying greek text because they're translating it so Woodenly that we can see what that greek text really said But if a translation is loose or is very fluid or very dynamic Then it's much more difficult to see what that underlying greek text said The third problem that we have with some of these ancient versions is that they are not translations directly from the greek But they are translations from an intermediate language And consequently all of the difficulties we already have with looking at a version trying to get back to its underlying greek text And what the principles of translation were are compounded by this two-stage translation that's Two steps removed from the original greek The final problem that we have with the versions has to do with the internal language makeup And especially dealing with grammar and idioms in one language. For example, they might have a A gender for a particular word That is masculine while as in the translation of it into another language that that same word might be feminine or neuter and consequently in Say aphesians chapter one verse 14 Where in the greek it speaks of the spirit as a down payment in one fourteen it says Who is a down payment? Now what we have in greek is the word spirit is neuter in verse 13 And then in verse 14 the who which goes back to the greek is also most likely neuter But the word down payment is masculine But in latin everything reverses the word spirit in latin is masculine The word down payment is neuter and consequently To judge what that relative pronoun there is is it it or is it he That's going to be a far more difficult thing to assess So the differences in the grammatical structure between the two languages Often give us a false reading as to what that Original greek must have said if they are just the opposite from one another Another issue would be the definite article the word the in greek we have it But in latin there is no the and consequently the latin cannot Properly represent When there is a textual variant between having the article and not having the article So it's it's voice is completely nil at those points At the same time the great value of the versions is especially when you're dealing with a phrase Or a whole verse whether it's there or not or the wording of it is Because the basic grammar of the language is not going to interfere with that if you add a verse or take it away It's not going to be due to grammatical differences between two languages It will be due to whether it had that in the greek manuscript that it was copying from or not So to sum up these are the Value and the problems of the versions for trying to get back to the autographic text of the greek new testament In terms of the church fathers there are three things that we want to discuss First is how many quotations are by the church fathers of the new testament Secondly what the value of the patristic writings are For recovering the text of the new testament and third are the problems of using the fathers to access that text and get back to the original wording In terms of the number of quotations It has been calculated that in fact tabulated that there are over one million quotations by the church fathers Of the new testament now the church fathers span a period from the late first century all the way typically through the 13th century And to have over a million quotations of a text that is less than 8 000 verses is absolutely astounding Some of these verses get quoted many many times others get quoted just a handful of times But the whole new testament is duplicated more than once in these church fathers and the writings Now in terms of the value of the fathers there's really three things in which they are especially valuable The first value of the church fathers is that they actually pinpoint for us The use of the text in a particular location At a particular time we know about the church fathers who lived in Antioch of syria or who may have lived in Caesarea maritima or Alexandria egypt and so these fathers are using the text We know the dates of the fathers and we know the places of the fathers when they're using these texts That helps us to locate a particular reading in a place and time When we don't have sufficient evidence from the greek manuscripts, especially through the first three or four centuries Where the the manuscripts are not as frequent as what we get in later centuries So the fathers help us to pinpoint the text in a space and time A second value is that what this also helps us to do is to understand what's known as text types Most textual critics today would say that the new testament manuscripts are organized Into three or four categories known as text types. These are broad families in which the manuscripts are copied Whether it's by an official recension or just by the natural growth of the text in a particular region And so you have the alexandrian text type which Grew up in and around alexandria egypt you have the bizantine text type which grew Up and around in a constantan opal and to some degree Perhaps a cesarean maritima And you also have the western text type Which started in the east but ended up going to the west and became really the text Of rom and its environs so The fathers help us to Fix the text types that we have in a particular locale as well And this was some work that the fellow by the name of b. H. Streeter Did in the 1920s to locate the text types by using the church fathers and help us to understand better the nature of these various regional originals that were copied by hand for Centuries in each locale for example A third value of the church fathers is that there are times when these patristic writers Actually discuss textual variants and when that happens They are worth their weight in gold. They will talk about Here's a text that has this reading, but this manuscript has this reading now They won't necessarily specify the manuscripts, but they'll say things like Well, for example, ucbius talks about the longer ending of marx gospel in mark chapter 16 Verses nine through 20 and he says most of the manuscripts that i know about don't have these 12 verses And of course he didn't say 12 verses because verse numbers were not added to the greek new testament until the year 1551 But he talked about that and he said most of the greek manuscripts or most of the manuscripts He knew about did not have those verses And then later gerome adds to this most of the greek manuscripts that he looked at did not have those This may imply that now by geromes day That ending those 12 verses had been found in other versions in particular latin, which was The language they did he was most acquainted with so these church fathers talk to us about The particular variants as they occurred and what their frequency is in various centuries We read in later centuries that another church father is quoting from mark 16 And this becomes the standard text and he says this is what is found in most of his manuscripts So there are some people who like to Count our text of the new testament our Due textual criticism by counting manuscripts But the problem with that is when do you count and what do you count? If you're counting in The 20th century and looking at all the manuscripts that are still in existence Then we can have the majority of manuscripts that have a particular reading But if you go back in earlier centuries and you ask this church father Who may have had access to a great number of manuscripts What he knows about and he'll say the vast majority of the manuscripts that I know about have this wording But not that wording and consequently when they discuss these textual variants and when they talk about the frequency Of a particular reading that occurs in the manuscripts that they are aware of Especially if there are a patristic writer who has access to a number of different Resources that becomes extremely valuable for doing textual criticism in terms of the problems That the fathers pose for us and trying to get back to the Autographic text of the new testament there are essentially four Difficulties that they they create First of all, we don't have the actual original manuscripts of these church fathers What we have are copies of them that are generally speaking of medieval origin And consequently we have to do textual criticism on these extant or now existing manuscripts to try to get back to the original wording Of what that father actually wrote and when we do that then we can try to reconstruct the greek text Or the new testament text that he's actually using So the first problem then is we don't have the church fathers originals We have copies of them that we have to use to get back to what that church father actually said when he's quoting from the new testament The second problem in the use of the fathers Is whether they are actually quoting from the new testament Or whether they are just alluding to it. For example We have an early church father in the second century who talks about the story of the rich young ruler Now Everyone who reads the gospels knows about this story And yet he is never called the rich young ruler in any one of the synoptic gospels. Matthew mark and luke all record the story But he's not called the rich young ruler in any one of those And so if a church father is saying the story of the rich young ruler Well, which form is he talking about? Matthew's form mark's form or luke's form And uh, is he alluding to the text or is he quoting from it in flippians 4 13 for example Paul says I can do all things through the one who strengthens me But an early church father Alludes to that reference or maybe he's quoting from the text and he says I can do all things through christ who strengthens me Now the addition of christ Is found in some later manuscripts. Is this church father Uh following that text form even though he predates those manuscripts Or is he just interpreting this text or just alluding to it? And for him the one who strengthens him is in fact christ Those are some of the difficulties we have are they quoting directly from the text or are they alluding to the text? A third problem with the church fathers has to do with the source that they are actually quoting And this especially is a difficulty when it comes to Them quoting from the synoptic gospels matthew mark and luke When they say as our lord said and then they quote what jesus said Is the form of it what comes out of matthew or mark or luke? And the problem is that we'll have manuscripts that will give it as the form of what the lord said in matthew Or other manuscripts that give that as the form of what jesus said in mark's gospel And so is he quoting from this group of manuscripts in mark or this group in matthew? If he doesn't say as is written in matthew or as is written in mark Then we have some difficulties in trying to determine exactly what he is quoting from the final problem With the use of the church fathers is that there are times when a particular father is going to quote from the new testament From the same passage more than once And the difficulty comes when he quotes it in different forms Sometimes he may quote from it three or four times each time is a little bit different So which text did he follow was he being sloppy in his quotations? Did he use a different manuscript each time or is he just alluding to the text? Is it from memory or is it from copying out a manuscript in front of those are complex issues that are not Exactly easy to resolve. However, the lengthier the passage that the father quotes from The more likely it is that he is copying out the text that is in front of him And consequently we have a greater degree of certainty that he is actually quoting from that text of the new testament Rather than doing so from memory or alluding to the passage Well to sum up there are certain values to the church fathers that are extremely important But there are also problems with the use of the church fathers and on a sliding scale scholars have come up with a view that says Here's the way we can tell whether this church father is really quoting from this text or not And there's levels of certainty that we can have about it The father's therefore become extremely important for the text of the new testament For us to get into the window of what that original text must have looked like But there are going to be difficulties along the way and sometimes It's just too difficult to use the quotations of a church father to establish much of anything about the wording of the original text