The Variations Of The Bible
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Okay. Hippolytus is the student of Irenaeus. So if we want to know what Irenaeus believed, we can go to him, he wrote a lot. Now unfortunately, he did get in trouble with the church, the Roman Catholic Church, and they threw him in the mines, he died there, I can’t find a student of Hippolytus. So, here’s where this chain of custody stops.
But, as it turns out, I can track Paul’s, teaching through Clement, who’s mentioned in Paul’s letters by the way, who became a Bishop in Rome and wrote a beautiful letter called First Clement, so I can check it and see what Paul taught him. And I can follow him through down all the Roman Bishops, all the way to Tatian, or I can take Peter, check what he says by checking Mark, according to Papias, who then hand-selected and hand trained the first five Bishops in the North African church, who formed a school in Alexandria, by Pontinaus.
I can check the writing of all these people all the way down to the council. So, I’ve got picture after picture, after picture, after description of Jesus over time. Is He changing? Does He start off as the simple itinerant Jewish preacher, and then becomes God over time? Is that what’s happening? His legend is growing? No. If you lost all of the Gospels, and all you had was the writing of the first officers in the chain of custody, here’s the Jesus you’re stuck with.
You’re stuck with the Jesus who’s born of a virgin, who worked miracles, who claimed to be God, who received worship, who died on a cross, who rose from the grave, who ascended into heaven, and who through in faith alone, you can be saved. You’re stuck with that version of Jesus. He is not evolving over time, He’s written about early, attested early and often, and he doesn’t change. You’re stuck with this guy.
Let me show you this though, I always run late, but I got to show you this. Right now, I don’t know if you realize, Bart Ehrman claims that there are more variations between ancient, manuscripts of the Bible than there are words in the New Testament. And he’s doing it by showing places in scripture, where there are actually words, that in one ancient document are slightly different than they are in another ancient document. Did you know that?
We create the Bible by examining ancient documents. So, he’s claiming that there are thousands and thousands of these, therefore you can’t trust the Bible because there are more variations among our manuscripts, than there are words in the New Testament, so you can’t trust it. I want to knock this down now because this is what causes a lot of young Christians to stumble, when they read his work and Jesus interrupted, this could be a deal killer for a lot of young Christians.
It’s absolutely nothing to worry about, I’ll show you why. The number of variations don’t matter, the number of copies matter. Here’s why. My son David is always broke, he’s at USC Med School, his first year of federally insured loans, $80,000. That’s for year one. So, he’s always broke. So, he writes to me all the time, “Hey, can you help me out?” “Yeah, sure, I’ll meet you next week, say about four o’clock on a Wednesday. I’ll meet you at Starbucks, and I’ll give you $5,000.”
So, I text him this. Now, I got a problem, I got a typo. And I guess it’s starving instead of Starbucks. So I’ll text him again. I want him to understand what I’m doing here. Okay. This is better. 5,000, you need to meet me at Starbucks. Ah, I said weakness instead of Wednesday. Let do that again. Now I’ve called him a nerd instead of needed, a nerd. Okay. Meet me at Starbucks. I’ll do it again. Okay. Now I should be, nope, nope, main streak. Now I’m naked. Let’s do this again. Oh, meek, meek instead of me. Okay. Let me ask you guys a question. Where’s David going to be next week on Wednesday?
Starbucks.
Which Starbucks?
What time?
Four o’clock.
For how much money?
5,000.
How do you know? You’ve got more variations here than you have words in the text. How could you be certain about what it is I’m trying to communicate to David? You can be certain because now you have enough copies, to compare to one another that I don’t care how many variations you have, you’re able to compare to one another and eliminate them. And if I was not sure that four or five could get it done, I could send a lot more.
These are the documents we compare to one another right now, to create our Bible. We have more than enough copies to compare, to remove any variations we might find. So, don’t let anyone fool you with the variation stuff. This is not true. Last area, we got to go, we have two minutes. Here we go. Present, verify, accurate over time. Are they biased? Why should we trust these guys? After all, if you go to a house where there’s two people are living in that house, a woman and a man, and they both been smacking each other around, and you get there, and she says, “See this, he did this to me.” He says, “Wait a minute, you see this? She did that to me first.” “He should go to jail.” “She should go to jail.” “He started it.” “She started it.” Who goes to jail?
They both go.
They both go to jail. That’s right. Because how do I know who to trust? They’re both biased. They want the other one to go to jail. When you got bias involved in a case, it’s really hard to make out the truth. So, was there bias involved here? Bias all comes down to motive. Today, it’s all about motive, but even 2000 years ago, it was all about motive. There are only three reasons why anyone commits a murder, only three. They’re the same three reasons why you ever tell a lie. Why you’ve ever done anything you shouldn’t do. Why you’ve ever done anything that you would call a sin. Only three reasons. You know what they are? I’m just going to tell you, we’re out of time.
Financial greed. That’s number one. I want something financially. The second one is relational or sexual lust. Relationships, sex. The third one is, the pursuit of power. They can be very nuanced. Nobody comes in my neighborhood, disrespects me. Pop. That’s a power issue. That’s an authority issue. That’s where that would fall. Make sense? A lot of gang shootings are all about authority power. Okay?
Now my question, of course is, if you know this is the only three reasons why anyone does anything wrong, it’s also the only three reasons why anyone would lie to you, including the disciples. So, we don’t have to worry about, I can’t imagine what all the disciples could be having in mind. No. It’s only one of three things they would have in mind. These are them. Which of these three areas do you think the disciples is making out on? Do you think they’re getting, a ton of money out of this?
I don’t think so. You think they’re getting lucky out of this?
I don’t think so. You think they’re getting power out of this? Now some people will say that’s where it is. It’s power. Because think about it. These disciples became leaders in the fledgling church. Oh really? So, like Paul, who was already a leader, in Judaism had been given the commission of persecuting the Christians? He’s now going to leave his position of authority, and power to join the very group he’s supposed to be eradicating, so now he can be beaten.
It’s a big difference between infamy and fame. To be famous is great, to be infamous is not so great. And the leaders of this movement, they all had a bullseye on their forehead. The leaders of this movement all died for what they believed. They didn’t even have the power to control their own deaths.
You’re telling me that, Paul would leave his safe position of authority and power to join this group. Really? Okay. Hey, it’s possible, anything’s possible. But it’s not reasonable. I mean, come on. This is how these folks died. This is not a group you want to be part of, because if you’re a part of this group, you’re going to die broke, alone, with none of the power to control the way you die. So, we’ll finish this last question.
But why should I trust the Gospels as history, because think about it they are written by the friends of Jesus? I mean, sure, of course, they’re going to say lots of nice things about Jesus. After all, they’re his buddies. That’s just so stupid I want to show you how stupid that is. Okay? If you’re working in robbery homicide, and you’re not assigned to a homicide case, what are you working? Think about it. You’re assigned a robbery homicide and there’s no homicide.
Robbery.
Robberies. Good. Like this bank robbery. In which this guy comes in and does what’s called a simple demand note robbery. It’s really easy. You come in, you have a gun and a demand note. You put them both on the counter. She reads the demand note, she gives it back to you, you put the gun and the demand note back in your pockets. And now this thing looks like a regular transaction because she’s given you everything that you’ve already demanded. But you don’t actually stand there with a gun in your hand.
These are pretty successful usually. But when he walked in, he had a slight problem. He walked into this bank and immediately this lady back here, recognized him they had been to high school together. Okay? So, he picked the wrong bank. Okay. Because he walks in and sure enough, there’s a high school… It’s like all you guys from south and north… We are so creative in Torrance. We have schools named very creatively. We have Torrance High.
I think it’s better. We have West Torrance High.
Yeah.
We have North Torrance High. And then we have, no, South Torrance High, which is the best school of all.
That’s where I went.
Come on. The point is, he went to high school with her and now he’s basically stuck. And she was going to go say hello to him while he was standing in line, but it was a long line and she had a customer, she figured, hey, when he is done with this transaction, I’ll say, hi. See if he remembers me. But now she looks across this counter. She sees her coworkers got that look on her face like I’m being robbed. And this girl is absolutely shocked at this point, I know because it says so right here.
And because she’s shocked because she’s known this guy since they were in high school. Super smart guy, super sweet guy. In student body leadership, great grades, excellent. It’s not the whole package. Okay. If, she was going to make a list of all the people she thought would ever commit a robbery, this guy be the last on her list. That’s why she’s shocked.
Should I go interview her? I mean she knew this guy, Robert Smith, when they were in high school, maybe I should go talk to her, huh? No, no. She’d be a terrible witness. Don’t you think she’d be a terrible witness? I mean, after all, she’s now convinced that Robert Smith is the bank robber, you might say that she’s like a Robert Smithian you can’t ask Robert Smithians about Robert Smith.
Could you see how stupid that is? She didn’t start off convinced that Robert Smith was a bank robber. She thought just the opposite, that’s why she was shocked. She now has arrived at this conclusion on the basis of observation. She didn’t start with a bias. She ended it with a conclusion on the basis of observation. Now let’s just take about for a second. I think she’s an excellent witness. The same way that someone like Matthew would be an excellent witness.
Do you think that Matthew, started off with a bias in favor of Jesus? No. He’s collecting taxes, when Jesus says, dude, come with me for a few, I’m going to show you some stuff. And after three years of that nonsense, he’s in. He believes it. He’s seen it with his own eyes. He’s writing a gospel about it. Not because he started with a bias, but because he ended with a conclusion on the basis of observation. Do you see the difference?
Big difference. Now we start off with this guy. We say we can’t trust him because of all this, these facts. Now we’re going to make the case for the reliability of the gospels about Jesus in a similar way. There are four elements we’re looking for, for reliability it turns out we’ve got all four of them in our case with Jesus. Is it written early? We’ve got good evidence, good reasons to believe that that is true, therefore we can conclude the gospel writers were present.
We didn’t talk about this section at all. Tonight Dr. House will talk about archeology, but there’s actually many more, categories that I use, to corroborate the scriptures that are all in the book. But if I’m correct about that, we could conclude there actually can be corroborated, but not only that we talked about, are they accurate? Have they changed over time?
Well, we can examine their changes over time and conclude that no, they’re the same, they haven’t changed over time. And finally are they attested by people, who were willing to die for what they believe. And by the way, you might be willing to die for what you believe, and it will have no evidential value at all. Lots of people will die for a lie, but these folks actually saw it with their own eyes. If they’re going to die for it, that’s got huge evidential value.
By the way, the first three eyewitnesses to the Mormon plates. They didn’t die for what they believed, as a matter of fact, all three were either chased out of the Mormon church or voluntarily left the Mormon church. When people are willing to walk away from their truth claim, and not die for it, there’s a good chance it’s not true. So the point is after doing all this work, all these point to the same conclusion, I got a guy who seems to be accurately and reliably described in history.
What do I do with this? This is how we make a case for reliability. We build it circumstantially. The same way we made a case in trial. It’s the same skillset folks. And when you’re there now you conclude, well if I ask these questions of Jesus, can I trust his answers? Yeah, I can trust. This is different than the suspect, because I’ve got now good foundation, good reason to trust Christ. We talked about truth, God’s existence and now Jesus. Any questions, bring them to me, we’ll talk about Mormonism too, if you want, at Porch Chat at six o’clock. There you go.
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