← The Alisa Childers Podcast
The Alisa Childers Podcast
#170 The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible, with Dr. John Mead and Dr. Peter Gurry
01:16:28
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- [00:00]
Elisa Childers
Mom, can you tell me a story? Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car. Was she brave? She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
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Dr. Peter Gurry
Did she have to fight a dragon?
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Elisa Childers
Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
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Dr. Peter Gurry
Was it scary?
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Elisa Childers
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
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Dr. Peter Gurry
Did the car have a sunroof?
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Elisa Childers
It did, actually. Okay, good story. Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
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Dr. John Mead
Progressives are getting very bold. They're getting very bold. And, and unfortunately, the Evange. This is just my two cents now. I think the Evangelical church is at its weakest right now, Elisa, and they don't really have great answers to these sorts of things. And so, so, so we're all going to sound like voices crying out in the wilderness at this point. But if Christians and evangelicals especially know their tradition, then none of this stuff should, should bother them at all, frankly, because every one of these fathers that I could mention that have these views of the books of the Old and New Testament probably heard similar criticisms and yet held steadfast to the tradition, to what the church has always said about these book. Foreign.
- [01:36]
Elisa Childers
Welcome to the Elisa Childers podcast, where we equip Christians to identify the core beliefs of historic Christianity, discern its counterfeits, and proclaim the gospel with clarity, kindness and truth. Today we're going to be talking about my favorite topic, the Bible. The Bible is the best selling book of all time. But often there are some misunderstandings surrounding how we got it. There are all kinds of rumors floating around out there. Some say the Bible is just a human book that was written by people about God. Others say that the books of the Bible were simply picked by the winners of theological battles. Others say that the books of the Bible were even picked by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea. So if you've heard any of these rumors, we're going to clear those up today and we're going to talk about the Bible, a book that has been written across thousands of years, gathered over centuries and copied by hand. It's been translated, forbidden, feared, argued over, abused, and above all, treasured. That's actually a quote from a book that we're going to talk about today. So today we're going to have an Old Testament scholar and a New Testament scholar, and they're going to help clear up some of these rumors and help us understand how we Got our Bible. But before we get into that, I want to tell you about a couple of things we have coming up. So you may have noticed if you're watching on YouTube, that we have a new background and it's a temporary background and it reflects the COVID of my new book that's coming out October 18th called Live youe Truth and Other Exposing Popular Deceptions that Make Us Anxious, Exhausted, and Self Obsessed. I am so excited about this book coming out October 18th. I wanted to let you know that the pre order is open. You can go to alisachilders.com to get links for the pre order. And if you pre order the book between now and October 18th, you're gonna receive exclusive access to some bonus videos that I made where basically talk through each chapter of the book, give you a little bit of extra insight, tell a little bit about what I was thinking when I wrote those chapters and why I chose those particular slogans to comment on. But I'm really excited about this book. So if you're a regular listener of the podcast and you want to help us to promote the book, man, it just helps if you would share a picture of your pre order. If you want to, just share the book with your social media friends and those in your circle. Really helps get the word out about the book. All right. The other thing I wanted to mention to you is for the first time in the history of the Alisa Childers podcast, we have merch, guys. We have merch. So you may have noticed that I've been opening the podcasts lately with our new mission statement that we try to just make sure every episode that we record is right in the bullseye of equipping Christians to identify the core beliefs of historic Christianity, discern the counterfeits, and then proclaim the gospel. So these three words, identify, discern, proclaim. We had designs made up and we've got mugs. I'm gonna show you this mug here that is pretty fun. We also have sweatshirts and T shirts of that design. And then my favorite is this more 70s look, because I like all things that look like they're from the 70s. Identify, discern, proclaim. So you can go to elisachilders.com and click on the store tab for those. Also, if you're watching on YouTube, just look below and those links will be right there where you can see previews of the merch. All right, without any further ado, I want to get into our topic today. So Dr. Peter Gurry is Associate professor of New Testament at Phoenix Seminary, and Dr. John Mead is professor of Old Testament at Phoenix Seminary. They are both the directors of the Text and Canon Institute. They've just written a book called Scribes and the Amazing Story of How We Got Our Bible. It's a great book. I was very honored to be allowed to endorse that book. So I want to welcome our guests, Peter Gurry and John Mead. Welcome guys. Thanks so much for being with us today.
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Dr. John Mead
Thanks Elisa. Good to be here.
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Elisa Childers
All right, well let's see. Peter, why don't you tell us about the Text and Canon Institute, tell us what you guys do there and how people can connect with you and learn more about what you're working on.
- [05:38]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Sure, love to. So John and I co direct the Text and Canon Institute at Phoenix Seminary and listeners can go to textandcanon.org to learn all kinds of things about it there. And I should specify that's Canon C A N o N. If you put
- [05:52]
Elisa Childers
three can shooting cannon.
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Dr. Peter Gurry
Exactly. You'll end up at a very different website. If you go there. I can't promise what you'll find. So what we do there is we in a nutshell, we try to illuminate the history of the Bible and we do that through resources for church folks. And then we try to foster academic, high level academic scholarship on the history of the Bible. And then we also have a mentoring program as part of one of our programs at the seminary. So the one your listeners are probably most inclined to be interested in is the resources and if they go to the website they will find articles that span, span the, the range of things on how we got the Bible. So everything from the question of canon to translation to how the text was copied to even a little bit, we get into what we call sometimes the Bible's reception or how it's been used and read over the, over the ages. So a lot of the same things that we're going to talk about today on the show, but we have what we hope are both responsible and accessible articles there that you can find. And those two things are really key to what we try to do with, at least with our church resources, is make them well informed but also still engaging and accessible to church folks. You want to add anything to that, John?
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Dr. John Mead
Oh, that's great. That's a great overview of the texting Canon Institute.
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Elisa Childers
Yeah, and I agree with the accessibility and all this. And your book accomplishes the same thing. It kind of give this amazing walkthrough for the average person to understand. I mean all the way from the history of how writing began all the way to how we got our Old Testament, our New Testament, how we ended up with the books we have, the translations. We have so much great stuff we're going to try to get through today. So, John, let's start with that. We talked about, you know, the history of writing plays an important role in the formation of scripture. Even in scripture itself, we read words about words being written on scrolls and parchment and papyrus. We read about words being etched or engraved in stone. And possibly the most famous of this is God writing the Ten Commandments. And directly the text says with his finger. So, you know, there's two copies of that. And what you point out in the book, which I think a lot of people don't realize or maybe fail to think about, is that that had to do with the covenant, right? There were two copies of covenant. So talk about the ancient idea of covenant and. And what relationship that might even have to things actually getting written down.
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Dr. John Mead
Yeah, so covenant has a clear, well, emphasis in the Old Testament, right. We see God making covenants very early on with Noah and Abraham, Israel, David, and then, of course, prophesied about, right, in Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah, something called the New Covenant or the Everlasting Covenant or the Covenant of Peace or something like this. But one thing we learn, at least with the Mosaic covenant, and we can read about this in Exodus 19:20 through 24, is that the terms of that covenant are written down. And as you just said, Elisa, I mean, the 10 words, which is kind of a summary of all of the expectations of Israel in the old. What we call the Old Covenant, or the covenant made with Israel, they are etched by God's finger into stone. Yeah, that's exactly right. But we're also this, this. There's another document in Exodus 24 called, like the Book of the Covenant, right. Which clearly implies that Moses wrote things down there. So, so no doubt writing develops, right. To be able to create these sort of diplomatic, political. Right. In their original context type documents. But of course, coming over into the. Into the Israelite context, this is a covenant that Yahweh makes with Israel. Okay, so that's no doubt, and a very important background to writing. One of the areas we explore in the book is how writing is said to have developed in ancient Sumer, just before the time of Abraham. We have this text of a Sumerian king named Enmakar, who is said to have invented writing in a messenger context, which I think is really interesting. So the messenger could no longer remember the message that a king gave to him and that he was supposed to give to another king. And so because the message became too heavy or difficult to memorize, the. The king whips out a clay tablet and a stylus and starts to, you know, write the message down. And I think what this shows is, is this impulse for accuracy and communication. And why that's really interesting for us is we use the term prophet, which is a, you know, the translation we've given the Hebrew term navi. But a prophet is a messenger. Every time we read in the prophetic books, thus says the Lord, we are being let in on Yahweh's message to Israel via the messenger or the prophet that we call. So. So actually, I think it's really interesting that, that some of the earliest glimpses into writing in the history of writing occur in this messenger context, which the Bible is filled with. It's just that we call them prophets, if that makes sense.
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Elisa Childers
Yeah, that's good, that's helpful. And then Peter, as we get more toward the New Testament, we have this thing called the codex. Talk about the codex and what role did that play in the formation of the New Testament canon? And even, you know, just how Christians even would have access to reading what they did.
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Dr. Peter Gurry
Sure. So the codex is a, may sound like a fancy term to listeners that refers to what we would today just call the book. It's a group of pages folded and then sewn together at the spine so you can open it like we would open a book. But the reason why we use the technical term codex is to distinguish it from a different format of the book that was much more common before the New Testament. That was the scroll, which of course we're familiar with that today now on our phones and on our computer screens, because we now scroll on the Internet. So maybe we've gone back in time, I don't know, we've retrogressed. But the codex is significant in that it allows sometimes for smaller formats, it allows you to include more because you write on both sides of the parchment now, whereas a scroll is only written on one side usually. And it seems to be pretty popular among early Christians. So most of our earliest copies of the New Testament are in a codex form, even if it's not still bound together because of deterioration. You can tell because it's written on both sides. And that allows some interesting innovations to come along with it. One of the innovations is it allows for things like better comparison side by side. So John is an expert on a second century early Christian scholar named Origen who invents a six column Bible where he's able to lay out in six different columns, different texts, and compare them side by side. Around the same time, a man named Eusebius, the famous church historian, is able to use the codex format to produce a re what becomes a really popular comparison of the Gospels to each other. And so it just sort of. The codex form takes off. And again, it's the form of the book that we all know today, unless you're reading on a Kindle in which you're back to scrolling to some degree. But. But the codex is really a significant innovation in the format that written works take. And as I say, it's very, very popular among Christians pretty early on. Then they adopt it and then use different innovations with it. And part of what we're trying to do in the book is not take the form of the Bible as we know it for granted, but ask ourselves questions like, how did it get to look like this? Yeah, Everything from the book form to why are most Bibles in two columns, why they have chapters and verse numbers and all that. So the first chapter in our book really tries to not take anything for granted, all the way back to the invention of writing, as John's already talked about.
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Elisa Childers
Yeah, you mentioned retrogressing, and now we're back to scrolling on Kindles and stuff. And John, you mentioned that first in Sumer there, he picked out a stylus, and immediately I thought of an iPad or iPad. What are they called, those, eye pencils or something like a stylus.
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Dr. John Mead
That's right.
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Elisa Childers
See, nothing changes. Right. So obviously when the Bible was being copied, both Old Testament and New Testament, this is before the printing press. So we don't, you know, I think today we think you, you, you know, you type a paper into your computer and whatever you type in there just stays exactly the same. And you can print it or you can, you know, copy and paste it or whatever, but we're talking about lots and lots of manuscripts being copied by hand, largely by scribes. So I'd love to talk about the scribes, both Old Testament and New Testament. So, John, let's start with you. What would an Old Testament scribe have to, you know, what would qualify someone to be an Old Testament scribe? And what did that process look like, copying those ancient books of the Old Testament?
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Dr. John Mead
Yeah, that's a great and huge question, Elisa, because we're still trying to piece together much of that puzzle in the book. In chapter one, we talk about writing, but that chapter could almost have been entitled something about early scribal culture in Israel. We're trying to piece together like from the invention of the Alphabet, how is it that Hebrew scribes learn to read and write? And the fact of the matter is there's just a very real paucity of evidence coming out of the land of Israel from, say, the 10th century BC all the way down to the period of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which we tend to date to say, let's just say the third century B.C. down to when the Romans kicked the Jews out around 132 A.D. okay, so that's, that's the general chronology that we're talking about. There's a, there's a little bit of a blip in that. Several, like, ancient letters are discovered in the 6th century BC which also give us some more glimpse into how Israel was writing and, and copying those things. So there's really three main periods, like the earliest period of, like, the 10th century B.C. the 6th century B.C. and then the 3rd century to again when the Romans kicked the Jews out. That's, that's kind of it for us to piece this puzzle together. So all we, all we can kind of guess is that most scribal activity happened in the area of the Temple. Okay, so many references to going back to Ezra, right, Who's a priest and a scribe. Right. And, and, and, and most of the writing, it seems to happen in that sort of main center of, say, the royal palace and the temple at Jerusalem. But archaeologists are starting to piece other parts of that puzzle together. So there actually are military outposts now, like a place called Cantilit Aj Rud, we talk about in the book quite a bit. But it's a military outpost kind of close to the Sinai Peninsula, which, from what we can tell, has no religious significance, no real political significance. And yet scribes are learning how to read and write in this outpost center, which, again, I think points to a bit more of a literacy rate than sometimes is understood. Okay, so more of that puzzle is being put together. And no doubt scribes there are learning how to read and write for political and diplomatic purposes, but it also gives us a glimpse, I think, into how scribes were copying the scriptures during this time, you see? So I think that's important. When we get to the Dead Sea Scrolls, that's really where things really explode, because that's where. That's the period in which our biblical manuscripts first appear. That's difficult maybe, for the hearers here to understand. We think the books, the scriptural books, were written centuries before the first manuscript evidence appears at Qumran, around the Dead Sea. And so that's honestly our first glimpse into what the state of our Old Testament text looked like. And the fact of the matter is, it's good news. I think there's a. There's a lot of reason to believe that the text of Scripture was simply copied conservatively during that period. They. In other words, it required a very accurate scribe. Okay? Someone who could copy a text in front of him letter for letter. Okay, that's important. We also learned, though, that it. That's not all that was going on. Inscribable culture in Israel, much like today, we have a gamut of English Bible translations, don't we? It's hard to go into a bookstore these days, though, isn't it, Elisa? So you can't actually see them all on the shelf anymore, but it used to be you could walk into a Christian bookstore and find no fewer than 20 different English translations, okay? Everything from your common NASB to your NIV to something like the Precious Moments Bible, right? And. And you pull that off and it's like, oh, this is for little Johnny's baptism, you know, and it's got a very specific purpose for which it was, you know, written and prepared and all that. Well, much. Much like that. In. In Qumran, it does seem that there were scrolls prepared for specific functions. We might call them liturgical functions. Maybe they played a role in ancient Jewish liturgy and reading of the. Of the Torah, you see. Or maybe there was the early commentary and exegetical and interpretive kind of copying going on. What's happened is scholars have said, well, the. The scribes at Qumran were really genius. They were really ingenious that they could prepare such texts, but somehow they were not quite up to snuff. And being able to keep those different texts distinct, you see. So. So what happens is you get these hot takes on the Dead Sea Scrolls that say something like, well, there's just a fluid Bible. The scribes didn't keep track of which copies were conservative, so to speak, and. And which ones were free or prepared for other functions. Well, in my opinion, thankfully, that narrative is starting to change. I think there's been some really good scholarship on that exact question saying, no, no, no. If we're saying the scribes were brilliant enough to prepare those liturgical and exegetical type copies, well, then they're also smart enough to realize that there's two different copying techniques going on here, okay? And then that would mean they could also keep them distinct, you see. So these are better takes of the evidence of that situation. So what we find is lots of conservative copies, copies that would definitely be the base text for our much later Hebrew copies. We'll talk about those later in the Masoretic text. But we also see a desire for scribes to make the text intelligible and understandable for its users in that particular 3rd 2nd 1st century Jewish context. You know, so, yeah, so much like we see today, our tendency is to, on the one hand, preserve and on the other hand, innovate for the purposes of understandability and that sort of thing.
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Elisa Childers
Very good. All right, well, Peter, let's come to you now. When we talk about scribes for the New Testament manuscripts, you read. Oh, gosh, you open the Internet and you're gonna read all sorts of stuff about who these people were, their abilities. You know, I mean, I've seen articles depicting the scribes as everything from the highest level intellectuals to just like literally untrained people running around with parchment. Right. So set the record straight. What are we talking about when we talk about scribes from the. For the New Testament manuscripts?
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Dr. Peter Gurry
Yeah, so I think when we, when we, if we could contrast it for a second with the Old Testament. Okay. One of the differences between the New Testament and the Old Testament is for the Old Testament, you have this centralized location of authority, which is the temple in Jerusalem. Okay. We know the Dead Sea Scrolls are separate from that, but that's partly interesting precisely because they are separate. Right. When it comes to the New Testament, there's never any central location of authority for the early Christian movement. Right. Obviously, Rome takes on importance early on. Antioch has importance, Jerusalem has its importance, but there's no central state building where, you know, the apostles all meet. And that's where they could store, you know, the best copies of anything. So Christianity is pretty diffuse right from the start. And I think probably what happens in this early, in the earliest period is, say, Paul's writing a letter to a church. We know from something like Colossians that he intends for other churches to read letters not directly written to them. In Colossians, he refers to a letter to the Laodiceans and essentially tells the two churches to swap letters. So probably what happens is, as word gets out that, say, Paul's written a letter to the church down the road, so to speak, you would. Might send somebody down there. And if you had, if you're a church that has enough money, you go down and have somebody copy it for you, who are you going to get to copy it? Probably somebody who does it for a living at that point. But they may not be a Christian because you're. There's. You're right at the beginning of the movement, right? So I think in the early centuries of Christianity, the copying of our manuscripts could. Was often by professional scribes, but not always by Christian scribes. And. And they were of, you know, varying quality. Some were. Some were very careful. Others, you know, seem to be less careful. I think overall, most listeners should have the impression that when we're talking about scribes, their job is to copy what's in front of them. So their job is not to invent new things. It's not to rewrite the story. It's not to say they don't make mistakes. They obviously do. And it's not to say that some readers don't make changes to their own copies that maybe then later get copied. But I think, by and large, we should not conceive of scribes as out to change the text. Their main goal is to preserve the text that they're copying, and at times they may be willing to change it precisely because they think what's in front of them is wrong. Fast forward. And as you fast forward in church history, by the time you get to the Middle Ages, Christianity has become the dominant religion in the west, okay, Both east and west, if you want to think, say, Latin speaking West and Greek speaking East. By that point, copying is done very much in the controlled environment of the monastery. And so by then, copying becomes much more careful, I think, than it was in the early period. Now, I always say when I talk about this, I think it's fair to say that the later scribes in the New Testament were more careful and, generally speaking, better than the earliest scribes. But we shouldn't think that because they are better, that means the earliest ones are bad. And the analogy I always use for this is Michael Jordan and LeBron James. All right? It's. It's clear. It's clear to anyone of my age and older that Michael Jordan is the greater basketball player, right? He is better than LeBron James. But it does not follow from that LeBron James is a bad basketball player. No matter how much you love Jordan, you would never say that LeBron James is a bad basketball player. Okay, It's a little bit of a stretch in the terms of analogy, but it gets the point that just because one era is worse than another area does not mean it's necessarily bad. Okay? So we do have examples of early manuscripts that are not amazing. P.72 is an early copy of Second Peter and Jude, for example. It is not our best copied manuscript. Codex basa from the 5th century is A. There's no way to say it other than just a wacky manuscript. But these are exceptions, and we can identify them as exceptions precisely because, for the most part, scribes did a very good job.
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Elisa Childers
Yeah, well, that's a good lead in to kind of this next topic I want to cover. So we've talked about writing and things getting written down for the first time. Who were the people that were copying these manuscripts for both Old and New Testament. I'd love to talk now about how we know what is the accurate version of what they actually wrote. So this is going to involve a science called textual criticism. We've talked about it. In fact, Peter, you've come on the podcast before to talk about your last book, the Myths and Mistakes in Textual Criticism. So my audience is sort of familiar with this idea that we don't have the original manuscripts. Right. So this science of textual criticism is what scholars use to figure out what the original wording was. And so I'd love to talk through. And of course, as we've talked about on the show before, you want to have early manuscripts. You want to have the most accurate manuscripts. Sometimes my understanding is those aren't one in the same always, not always the earliest one, that's the most accurate one. So scholars have lots of different ways of analyzing those things, but ultimately you do want to have a lot of copies so that you can compare them with each other. And like you mentioned, that's how you know that this one particular manuscript is wacky or whatnot. So, John, let's go to you for Old Testament. We've talked a lot actually on the podcast about New Testament textual criticism, but I have never broached the topic of Old Testament textual criticism. So, you know, give us just the basics of it. You know, how many manuscripts are we looking at? How early do these manuscripts go? What would you say is that accuracy that we could see, safely say, and conservatively say exists for the Old Testament.
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Dr. John Mead
Right. So as I said earlier, the Dead Sea Scrolls largely constitute our earliest evidence of anything biblical. Dead Sea Scrolls is a bit of a misnomer. It sometimes gives the impression that archaeologists just went into those caves at Qumran and around the Dead Sea and sort of, you know, hauled out fully rolled up scrolls or something like that. But of course, that's not what happened. Only in the case of Isaiah did scholars retrieve a full copy of the Book of Isaiah, which we appropriately call the Great Isaiah scroll, because it is pretty unique. Okay. In that way. Most of these Dead Sea Scrolls come out in fragments. Okay? So we're talking about the remains of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But once you put all the remains together, you're talking about somewhere around 210 such copies, okay, that exist. The main books are books like Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Psalms, you know, some, maybe 36 remains of the cop of copies of the Book of Psalms exist. You know, that might be the most preserved book in some ways. So, so that's, that's kind of for the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I'll come back to that in a moment. Then what's, what's interesting, Elisa, is with the exception of a handful of texts, fragments, again, a handful of fragments of the Hebrew scriptures from the 2nd century A.D. up until about the 9th century A.D. we only have a handful of texts that, from that period, like we might want to call that the real Dark Ages of, of evidence for the Hebrew Bible because there's, there's hardly any. It's mostly from the, from the Torah, from the Law. There's maybe a Job fragment from this period, but there's simply not a lot of evidence in Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible. But once you hit the 9th, some scholars might date it to the 8th, but the 8th 9th century A.D. there becomes this explosion of copies of the Hebrew Bible, primarily from what is known as the Cairo Geniza. So the Cairo in Egypt had an old synagogue and there was a geniza or a storage compartment in the kind of upper back part of this synagogue. And when scholars found this in the late 19th, early 20th century, it greatly enhanced our knowledge of Hebrew writing from this period. And I want to say there's over 10,000 Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible from this period. And if you contrast and if you add to that records in the, the National Museum, National Library of Israel, you can get up somewhere to around 30,000 copies of the Hebrew Bible. It's an extremely well attested book. Okay. But the copies are mostly late. Okay. So that's something that we have to sort of maybe take seriously. But that's the very reason we engage in textual criticism. But before I do that, one more thing I should add is that the Hebrew, Hebrew Bible text criticism is not just based on Hebrew manuscripts. From the, from its very beginning, the very beginning days of trying to retrieve the original text, scholars have made great use of the most important Bible translation of all time, which is what we call the Septuagint. Okay. This was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Initially it was just a translation of the Torah or the first five books of Moses. We date that to about 280 BC. Okay, so that's pretty old and the manuscript copies of the Septuagint are in many cases older than our Hebrew copies. Okay, so, so if we could understand the Hebrew Bible underneath. Right. That's what's a little bit tricky about this. But underneath the Greek translation, then we can actually get a real glimpse into the text that the Jews were copying and, and reading and using. Okay, so. So Old Testament textual criticism for that reason gets a bit more challenging, I would say, and a bit more technical than some of the New Testament projects out there. But we're, I don't know what else to say about this. There's tons of evidence. There's a lot more work to be done. I have found that there's sort of a dearth of evangelical scholars concerned about Old Testament textual criticism. Whereas anytime I open up Facebook or Twitter, there seems to be some, like, wonderful debate and discussion going on on the New Testament side of things. Like, like Elisa, do we really need more fresh takes on the ending of Mark? Right.
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Elisa Childers
And texting.
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Dr. John Mead
Canon.org is guilty of this.
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Dr. Peter Gurry
Jealous. Yeah.
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Dr. John Mead
Yes, I'm jealous. I'm jealous. I'm more zealous for Old Testament text critics to, to come aboard. So that's the, that's the, that's the quick plug there for that. But. So it's a fascinating field. It's wide open. Our English translations don't signal all the difficulties like, say, for our, that our English versions do for the New Testament. So there's lots to learn, lots to explore in this area.
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Elisa Childers
So when you just said that, what you're talking about, if I'm understanding you rightly, is that, of course, as my audience is probably well aware with the variations between the manuscripts and the more meaningful ones that would affect the meaning of the text in your New Testament, they're footnoted in most modern study Bibles, like we know what they are. There's going to be like you mentioned the long ending of Mark and there's other ones we've talked about on the podcast before. So those. Are you saying those really aren't necessarily footnoted in the Old Testament?
- [34:13]
Dr. John Mead
Yeah. Let me just give a quick example because at least I can point to some articles that TextAndCannon.org put out last April. We did a short series on Isaiah 53. Right. Super well known chapter. I'm sure your listeners have read it numerous times. But there are no fewer than five or six major textual problems in that short chapter of Scripture. I want to say the only, the only real problem that gets flagged in our English translations is the 1 in Isaiah 53:11, where the prophet prophesies that the servant will see light. And it's that word, light that is not in our Masoretic text, therefore it's not in, say, the English Standard Version, but it is found in three independent Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, which is the best and most ancient witness to the text there. And so that's why the NIV has something like, he will see the servant will see the light of life, you see, and that because they've read with a different Hebrew text than our, our received Masoretic text. But I wish I could say, though, the other problems were flagged, they're not. So. So these articles, I'm sure, came off to some readers as, whoa, I just had no idea, because some of these aren't even footnoted. But clearly we had Dr. Peter Gentry write some, myself and Anthony Ferguson, we wrote these up just to kind of show that there are problems that English readers would not necessarily be aware of, you see. So, so, yeah, it's, it's a wide open field and it needs to be worked through a bit more. And evangelicals need to work harder at getting the problems across and, of course, showing the solutions to those problems.
- [36:09]
Elisa Childers
Yeah. And what, you know, it's, it's interesting that you'd mentioned those problems in Isaiah 53, because I've just, on a lay level, I've come up to that myself because one of the big progressive Christian claims is that substitutionary atonement, and more specifically penal substitutionary atonement is cosmic child abuse. This is not how we should look at the atonement. And then often if you come back with Isaiah 53, they'll point out the textual problems in Isaiah 53. And I did it fairly. I mean, I'm not a scholar, but I did a fairly deep dive on that a couple years ago and really discovered that, yeah, there are some differences between, say, the Septuagint and the Masoretic, but when you really dig down to it, there's really only as far as I was able to discover one that would actually affect the substitutionary language in Isaiah 53. And even if you completely removed that one, you still have substitutionary atonement. So, yeah, the articles like that are important, especially for us on the lay level to engage with progressive Christianity and other movements like that.
- [37:12]
Dr. John Mead
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
- [37:14]
Elisa Childers
All right. Well, Peter, let's talk about New Testament textual criticism. Obviously, you wrote an entire book correcting some false information that people were often repeating. You Know, this can happen, right? There can be somebody that says something that becomes almost canon in apologetics. And, you know, it turns out some of these things are not quite the right way to word them. So give us an overview of what we're looking at with the New Testament. I know you hear people say we have anything from, you know, 5,000 to. I've heard people getting up towards 7,000 manuscripts. And I always try to go on the conservative side when I'm talking about it, but, you know, clear up some misinformation about new text, textual criticism for it, for us. And, you know, just what are we looking at? How many manuscripts? How early are we looking these days? Where are we at with these things?
- [38:00]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Yeah, so 5,000 is a good, nice, good round number. You could probably go up a little bit higher than that in terms of that. The reason we don't have a very precise number is because these manuscripts are spread across libraries, monasteries, museums, mostly in Europe, but not entirely. And some of these places are big, and they don't always know everything they have in their own library, or sometimes they get sold to a new library, so we lose track of them. So there's. There's various reasons why we might not have a very exact number. But I think the main. One of the main things to say in terms of numbers is that more is not always better, or at least not immediately or necessarily better. I always tell my students, if I have one bad manuscript and I copy it 10,000 times, I now have 10,000 badly copied manuscripts. So, thankfully, that's not the case in the New Testament because most of our manuscripts are copied pretty well overall. But again, sheer numbers is not the goal. And sometimes I think it can be helpful for us as Christians, especially to realize that Christians from the past have not always had Bibles based on the same huge amounts of evidence that we do today. And we ought not pull the rug out from under them if we can help it when it comes to our apologetics. So I'm pretty keen in my sort of apologetic approach to not do that for my forebears in the faith. I think they had good manuscripts. I think they were right to use them and base their faith on them and do their theology from them. And if I'm in an even better position today because of discoveries in time, then all the better. But we've gone from good to better, not bad to good. Let's put it that way. It's good manuscripts. So that sort of was one thing to say about it, I think, in terms of New Testament Old Testament, John's, John's right that we actually need more work on the Old Testament. It's bigger. Some of the problems are naughtier there. And the New Testament has just received a lot more attention, I think, over the last two, 300 years, at least, in terms of text criticism. So we don't have as many of those places in the New Testament where we just have, I mean, ever. In the New Testament, things have been argued about for a long time. So even where people may still disagree about this variant or that variant, it's not like, you know, the debate is new. It's been around.
- [40:26]
Dr. John Mead
Right, right.
- [40:28]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Whereas I think in the Old Testament there really are some bigger areas where it's like, man, there's been very little work done on this. I don't know. Am I speaking fairly? John?
- [40:35]
Dr. John Mead
Oh, I think that's, I think that's right. Or, or we could at least say there's been some good, say, dissertations or pilot projects on some of these problems. Like, you know, we, we just call it the Jeremiah problem. Right. So the, the Septuagint. Right. And in this case, it's not a translational issue because the Jeremiah, Greek, the Greek translator of Jeremiah was fairly literal. And so the, the problem there is he probably translated a shorter Hebrew text than what is in our Masoretic text. So when.
- [41:09]
Elisa Childers
Tell us what the Masoretic text is really quickly.
- [41:11]
Dr. John Mead
Oh, yeah, right.
- [41:13]
Elisa Childers
Okay. What is that?
- [41:14]
Dr. John Mead
No, no, thank you. That's. You reminded me, I was going to come back to that. The Masoretic text is what we would call our received text. It's the text that our English translations are based on. Okay. By and large, it's, I mentioned that explosion of manuscripts that Hebrew manuscripts that show up in the 9th century AD and forward. Well, we have the Masoretic families to thank for that. These, these were Jewish families who inherited very, very important texts from the Middle Ages and made copies of them. They primarily preserved the text. In fact, Masoretes, we could maybe call them the masters of tradition. Okay. They were primarily preservers of a text, but they also innovated a little bit just so that they could make that text more readable, usable, able to be studied. Probably their biggest innovation is they were the ones, I think, that started moving away from copying the Hebrew text just on a scroll and actually moved it to the Codex. Okay. They were probably the ones that made that movement. So Jews, as Peter laid out earlier, Christians, were like earliest adopters of that book form or codex form. The Jews were much slower in receiving that Technology. So the move from scroll to codex was even a big deal at that time period. So, so the Masoretic text is this, again, this very conservatively copied text. It was done by mate, like I said, primarily preservers of the text. And it's, it's, it's the only one we can go to, to say, hey, here's a full copy of the Hebrew Bible. Right. And over and over and over again thousands of times. But that's, that's, that's maybe just a brief overview of the Masoretic text. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So, trying to remember where I was going with this. Where was I going with this?
- [43:06]
Elisa Childers
I broke your chain of thought. Sorry about that.
- [43:08]
Dr. John Mead
It's okay. Oh, that was such a necessary.
- [43:11]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Yeah, you're saying something about the New Testament being better than the Old Testament, if I remember.
- [43:14]
Elisa Childers
Yeah, something like that.
- [43:18]
Dr. John Mead
I love it. I love it. Yes. I was definitely not saying that. No. But I guess what I was saying is because that text has been so revered, the Masoretic text, and again, I want to emphasize for good reason, it is a rugged textual tradition, but it's not perfect. All manuscripts, all hand copied texts have mistakes. Okay. And, and in this case, we just, we simply need good text critics to go in and show places where the MT or the Masoretic text can be corrected. Okay, but, oh, that's where I was going. Jeremiah. Right. Is a shorter version in the Septuagints Hebrew text than in the later Masoretic texts. Right. So, well, what do we do with that? Which one is earlier, which one's older, which one was maybe the process of a later revision. Scholarship's out on that. I think, I think there's more good work to be done on problems like that.
- [44:18]
Elisa Childers
Yeah, that's good. So let's talk about canon. We've talked about kind of just a real 30,000 foot flyover on how it was copied and how the manuscript, how we kind of piece those manuscripts together to understand what the original wording was. We're getting as closely close as possible on that. But let's talk about canon. How was the Old Testament canon formed? And particularly, you know, a question that I've tried to investigate a bit is what exactly when Jesus was quoting the Old Testament scriptures or the Jewish scriptures. Right. What was the canon in Jesus day for the Old Testament? I mean, I think, you know, obviously it's going to be the law, but the Torah would be, would be pretty established by then. But what outside of the Torah, what, what did Jesus think the Old Testament Was.
- [45:07]
Dr. John Mead
Yeah. Well, these are the, these are the questions, aren't they? Yeah, no, yeah. So the earliest period. In fact, can I maybe. I just. It might help to work backwards to answer that question, because I, I think, I think we can say something about that, but we need to work backwards. So the first clear indicator of a Jewish canon comes from the Jewish historian Josephus in a work entitled Against Appian, which we think was written around 100 A.D. okay? So not much after the time of Jesus and the apostles, but it is after Jesus and the apostles, okay? And it's the first clear statement. He says that every kind of, that all of the divinely inspired books amount to only 22 books. Okay, now some of you are going, Whoa, 22 books. There's 39 books in my Old Testament. So how do, how did Josephus get to 22? Well, actually, I think the 22 are equivalent to the 39 books of our Old Testament. So what Josephus is doing is he's engaging in a numeration scheme where books are counted as double, okay? So we have like 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st 2nd Chronicles. All of those books are counted as one book, okay? So we can crunch some numbers that way, can't we? Books like Lamentations too small to be reckoned as their own book. They are added to Jeremiah, you see, and counted with Jeremiah as one book. Ruth works similarly, Ruth was counted with Judges as one book according to this 22 book scheme. And then finally the big one is the 12 minor prophets are actually, they were short enough to be all fit together on one scroll. So we actually have a book of the 12 prophets, okay? So, so once you crunch all those numbers, the 39 books actually becomes 22 pretty quickly. So here's a clear statement of canon, though he says only 22 books, that is, this is an exclusive testimony, okay? He knows there are other books out there. In fact, he's used other books to write his own histories. But only 22 books are afforded the status of divinely inspired, okay? For someone like Josephus, as soon as you fast forward even just a little bit further into the second century, the earliest Christian canon lists also seem to reflect this 22 book tradition. So Melito of Sardis, around 170 AD he travels from Turkey back to the land of Israel. He learns, probably from other Christians greatly influenced by Jewish views on these things, he learns that there's basically, he doesn't give a number, but his, his list of books kind of assumes a 22 book canon. Okay? So, so that tradition is really strong. Okay, but does it tell us what Jesus had? This is the. This is the question. So what scholars do is they try to go behind Josephus's statement. They say, okay, well, Josephus says all Jews everywhere at all times have only had these 22 books. Can we test it? Let's go to the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's no canon list of books, unfortunately, coming out of Qumran. What we have are manuscript remains. And the good news is, is that every book of our Bible is found at Qumran, right, In some fragmentary form or another. Except the book of Esther, though Esther's not actually found at Qumran. So that. That opens up a little bit of a question as to what was the status of Esther at the time of the Qumran community. This is just before the time of Jesus, so let's just leave that to the side for now. Okay, but then there are other ways of getting at this. What about the Jewish philosopher named Philo of Alexandria? Right, so he lives just before the time of Jesus, maybe contemporary with Jesus, but he doesn't live in the land of Palestine or Israel. He lives in Alexandria, Egypt. What's his canon? Well, again, unfortunately, Philo doesn't give us a list of books, but he does give us a whole lot of quotations. So scholars have scoured the writings of Philo. What books does he quote as scripture or which ones can he, you know, can we assume he thought were divinely inspired? Well, he clearly thought Moses was inspired. He cites the Torah or the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, just thousands of times. We know he thinks that the law is established as canon, but what about the other books? Well, that's when things get dicey, because he doesn't quote all of our books. But what's interesting is the books that he quotes as scripture are only the ones in our own canon. Elisa. So he will say that Jeremiah is inspired. He will make comments about Isaiah and Zechariah. He makes comments about Solomon and David as inspired authors. Okay, so so many of the books, just not all of the books are attested by Philo as being divinely inspired. Then we come to our New Testament because that's. That's the last. That's the last piece of early evidence for this. What books do the New Testament authors quote? Okay. And what we find there, of course, is that mostly they quote books found in our Old Testament canon. The number of times Jesus and the apostles quote from Deuteronomy, Psalms, Isaiah. Right. It's just all over the place. But even lesser, lesser books like Daniel quoted alluded to often, but like, no quotes of Ecclesiastes, no quotes of Esther. Okay, so there are still some unknowns. And so although I think the Jewish canon probably comes together in the first century ad, I do wonder what sometimes when Jesus and the apostle and the disciples are sitting around the fireplace at night, are they even discussing Esther? Yeah, they might be, but it's, it's just a. It's a really. From an evidential standpoint, it's a really open question, okay. As to whether that book's being talked about. But I do think that the canon is coming together and really does crystallize in the first century A.D. which is what allows Josephus to make his statement at the end and many of the early church fathers to talk about the Old Testament, you know, in a fairly solidified form.
- [51:45]
Elisa Childers
Yeah, yeah, that's really helpful. So let's move into the New Testament here. Peter, you know, at the beginning of the podcast, I mentioned some rumors that people often. It has to do with the New Testament formation of the canon. Can you give us a basic flyover of how that, you know, people often use this language of which books were picked, as if there was like a group of people that sat around and said, let's take all the books and see what we think should be in the Bible, and we're going to pick this one and we're going to vote for this one. But that's not really how it happened. Right, so give us a picture of how the New Testament was canonized. And, you know, like, is this something that the Emperor Constantine, you know, in his, like, wicked scheme to try to make Christianity into his own image, did he pick these books at the Council of Nicaea, as we often hear?
- [52:36]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Yeah. Short answer is no. He did.
- [52:38]
Elisa Childers
Yeah. Just it's no, it's. No, it didn't happen that way, people.
- [52:42]
Dr. Peter Gurry
I mean, it's always be nice if he did, because it would make it a lot neater. You know, it'd be a much tidier story to just say we got these books because the emperor at some point said, these are the books that are in. I mean, even then you still have to explain why he picked these ones and not the other ones, which somehow people have a hard time thinking through that sometimes. But the actual story is a bit messier and takes a bit longer. But what I think happens is pretty early on, you have what we might call a core canon that's received by pretty much everybody. So I'd put that in the second end of the second beginning of the third century, where you've got the four gospels that we have are accepted. It's interesting that no New Testament manuscript has a fifth gospel ever, or even a non canonical gospel with the other one. So you never have like a copy of say here's Matthew, Mark and the Gospel of Thomas. Okay, so those four gospels from very early on is about as early as we have evidence seem to be. The four that are accepted, there's some, some evidence of other gospels like the Gospel according to Peter. We have an account of some Christians reading that and then essentially being told to stop doing that. But for the most part those four gospels are pretty, are recognized pretty early on. And, and, and frankly one of the reasons why is because if you compare them to what we now call the non canonical gospels, they're, they're fairly markedly different, especially something like the Gospel of Thomas. It's not a narrative at all. It's a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus. And some of them clearly have parallels in our canonical gospels, others don't, but there's no narrative at all. There's no death and resurrection of Jesus, which if you're thinking of the gospel in terms of what Paul says In say 1 Corinthians 15, there is no such thing as a gospel that does not have the death resurrection Jesus. So is it, you know, is the Gospel of Thomas used by some, some people who might have considered themselves Christians? Sure, of course, yeah. But, but is there, is there any sort of conspiracy behind why it wasn't accepted?
- [54:43]
Elisa Childers
Because it also comes later, doesn't it, doesn't it written later?
- [54:45]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Probably second century. Yeah, so it's later than the other four for sure. But you know, I mean John is later than Mark. So being later in and of itself doesn't immediately disqualify something. But I think the key issue is what does disqualify something is whether or not it can be connected to an apostle or a close associate of the apostles.
- [55:03]
Elisa Childers
Right.
- [55:03]
Dr. Peter Gurry
So this you see very clearly in something like the shepherd of Hermas, which is a second century document, very popular. Christians love it in the early period, but they don't accept it as canonical. And the reason is very simple because they know it was written too late to be written by an apostle or a close association associate of the, of the apostles. So here you have, it can't be conspiracy that explains their rejection of the shepherd because they're very clear that they like it. Yeah, but what they do say when they discuss it is Something to the effect of, well, we know it was written too late and so we can read it because we like it, but we can't accept it on the same level that we accept the other, the other apostolic writings. So I would say the key criterion, if there's a key, if there's one key criterion here it is apostolic authority. They believe the apostles had particular authority. As the apostles begin to die, the question is where does that authority reside? And the answer is in their writings. And so then it becomes a matter of trying to identify which writings are from the apostles or as I said, their close associates and which ones are not. So if a book can be shown to be written too late, then it's rejected, even if they like what's in it. If a book has all the marks of not being written by the apostles because of the nature of what's in it, and say the case of the Gospel of Thomas, they're looking at going, this is clearly not the gospel story. This couldn't have been written by an apostle either. So I think that connection to the apostles is pretty key. There are other things that come into play as well. There are some other ways of trying to determine that date, of course, being a key one. Theology of the book, its use among other churches is a big one. By the time we get to the 4th century or so, that's when the New Testament canon starts to look pretty much like it does for us today. And, and then that canon is accepted pretty much by every major branch of the Christian faith. I shouldn't say pretty much. It is accepted by every major branch of the Christian faith by the time we. If I fast way forward now to the Reformation, the debate in the Reformation, the canon is entirely a matter of the Old Testament. The New Testament is not in play at all. Yes, Luther says some silly things, let's just call them silly things about the Book of James. But, but even Luther can't single handedly overturn the church's acceptance of the Book of James.
- [57:21]
Elisa Childers
Right.
- [57:22]
Dr. Peter Gurry
And, and it takes less than a generation for Lutherans to go. No, that's what Luther said during his table talk over dinner when he was drinking. We don't. I'm elaborating a little bit here, but it isn't his table talk. He says this. And Luther is famous for his loose lips. So. Yeah, not everything Luther said over dinner needs to be taken.
- [57:43]
Elisa Childers
Yeah, Luther's not infallible.
- [57:45]
Dr. Peter Gurry
No.
- [57:46]
Elisa Childers
Right.
- [57:47]
Dr. Peter Gurry
But you know, he did, to be fair, he did register doubts about it. He placed it a different place in his German translation of the New Testament. But pretty much everybody who came after him said no. Sorry, Luther. Yeah, John, Anything you want to correct on that? John is the candidate.
- [58:01]
Dr. John Mead
No, no, that's. That's good. Okay.
- [58:05]
Elisa Childers
Awesome. Well, okay. So Canon, you know, we've talked through all the way up through canon. I'd love to. If in the few minutes that we have left, if we can do it quickly enough, I'd love to hit on translations and also what we mean when we talk about biblical inspiration. Because this, I think, especially in my work, engaging with the movement of progressive Christianity requires a lot of knowledge. Even when it comes to. A lot of people seem very confused about why there are so many translations and what effect that might have on the doctrine of divine inspiration. So maybe let's start with inspiration, and either one of you can take this. But what do we mean when we say the Bible is divinely inspired? Do we mean that it's a text that becomes inspiring to us, that maybe the Holy Spirit makes inspiring to us? Or is it mean that this, this is the very word of God breathed out through humans? Of course, in the progressive movement, they're going to put a heavy emphasis on the human element, almost to the exclusion of the divine element. What is the correct way to think about the doctrine of divine inspiration,
- [59:10]
Dr. Peter Gurry
John? I'll give that one to you.
- [59:12]
Dr. John Mead
Okay. No, it's the latter. Right. I think 2 Timothy 3, 16, 2 Peter 1 what, 1921, I think, describe clearly a situation where God inspires in the sense he has a special revelation to give. He wants a certain thing written, but there are human authors involved. Okay, so theologians, I think, have described this rightly as saying something like, man wrote what he wanted to have to write while God had written what he wanted to have written. Do you see? So on the one hand, I'm trying to preserve a real determinism in the sense that God's word, we can point to the Bible in its original languages. We'll have to come back to that original manuscripts as what was inspired and having written what he wanted to have written, even though the human authors of Scripture still wrote in the languages of their own right, of their own people, they wrote in the literary forms that, that they. That they wanted to write in. But all along, God is having written his special revelation to his people. Okay, so. So that's. It's complicated. It's a bit mysterious, but I. I think that's how. That's the best way to put what the Bible says about itself. Right? And God's own inspiration of these sacred scriptures. But because of that caveat, that qualifier there about the original languages, the original manuscripts, I think that opens up a whole lot. And I'm going to let Peter, I'm going to tee it up for him right here. He's got to explain why now we can talk in any meaningful, reasonable way about having God's word today. Right. Okay. So. And I think he probably needs to say 30 seconds. There it is, Peter, 30 seconds on the manuscripts, and then maybe a few. And then maybe a few more minutes on what we mean by translation.
- [61:26]
Dr. Peter Gurry
But, you know, when it comes to inspiration and the text we have. What we've said so far in terms of text criticism is what gives us confidence. What we have today is substantially the same as what was written by, say, the apostles in the case of the New Testament. Right. So. And even where I have some doubts, okay. Or it could be this word or that word. It's not like I'm. I'm choosing between the apostles saying, jesus rose from the dead and the apostles saying, well, the resurrection is really just a nice idea. Right. Like in terms of something as different as, say, traditional Christianity and progressive Christianity. And I would suggest there's a significant difference. Difference between the two. The differences have nothing to do with textual criticism. Right. There's no progressive man.
- [62:09]
Elisa Childers
Right, right.
- [62:10]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Progressive Christian manuscript out there.
- [62:13]
Elisa Childers
Right.
- [62:13]
Dr. Peter Gurry
From which you could say, well, if that's the original text, then your progressive Christianity is founded in the Bible. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, yeah, it's just the differences are not of that level. I mean, the question at the end of the day, I think, is, are you going to submit yourself to what this book says or are you going to try to make it submit to you? That's a difference in attitude. Finally, that is sort of like a continental divide.
- [62:37]
Elisa Childers
Yeah. Why do we have so many different translations? And maybe, you know, if that's a stumbling block to somebody where they're saying, well, the Bible was written in, you know, I've even heard people have, you know, they struggle or they wrestle with the idea that it was written, you know, the New Testament is written in largely in Koine Greek, but people were probably speaking Aramaic, so you had to have a bit of a translation happen even just to write it down, and then that has to be translated into other languages. Like, how can I even be confident in the translation that I'm reading right now?
- [63:08]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Yeah, that's a good question. Well, okay, two questions. One, you ask, why are there so many. The short answer, very short answer, that is because they sell, because people keep buying different translations. So as long as that happens, publishers will be happy to make new ones as long as they make money. Not to say they're crass, but just that's the bottom line. Publishers have money to. The second question of a person who's saying, how can I trust, say, my translation, given that there are so many, you know, a good thing to do would be to honestly sit down, take two and compare them and see how different they really seem, and then ask yourself if the differences really are a cause. I mean, if you took two radically different ones, I say, you know, a King James and the contemporary English version, they might look so different to you that you would find yourself in a place of doubt or skepticism. But realize that what's behind that is simply massive changes in the English language over the last 400 years, combined with very different translation philosophies between the contemporary English version and the King James. Right. So those can be issues. Sometimes what people think are differences, say, in the underlying texts are actually just differences of translation techniques. So actually, John gave a good example from Isaiah 53:11, he will see the light of life. Well, no matter which text you take, the words of life are not there, right, John. It's just, he will see light. But the NIV is trying to help the reader by understanding what the metaphor of light there means. And actually, I think John would argue their interpretation there is spot on. Okay. Now, depending on what your translation philosophy is, you may or may not like them interpreting it for you, right? But the fact is they're trying to be faithful to. To understand it and help you as the reader, understand it correctly. So I think the bottom line would be to say translators, by and large, you know, I may make a few exceptions. There are some really bad translations out there. They're not the mainstream ones. They're not the ones you're going to find at Walmart, frankly, or in your hotel room from the Giddies. But the major English translations, say the esv, nasb, niv, these are all very good translations. None of them are going to lead you astray. I might have my own preference, and frankly, I think they're all wrong in places.
- [65:22]
Elisa Childers
Yeah. And is this because when scholars are translating from the manuscripts, a lot of times it requires a choice, right? You have to look at the context of the thing to figure out which word is the correct word to use in that. And some of that, if we're honest, we have to be honest here, it does require a bit of interpretation sometimes in order to be able to get to what the text actually means. And I think that can make people feel a little destabilized as well. But again, when I think about it, you're talking about people who are trained. They're doing their best to get to the original meaning. This is why we have teams of scholars. I think it's a great idea to have teams of scholars so that their own personal pet theology can't necessarily or will have a more difficult time getting into the text. But, you know, both of you read the Bible in its original languages. Do you have a favorite. If there was one, if people said, just give me the one that you think think is the most accurate or anything else. You want to comment on this topic as well?
- [66:21]
Dr. John Mead
I love Peter's answer to this. But, but let me just say, Let me just back up real quick though, before Peter gives his excellent answer to that question. The. The Greek term for translator is hermeneutais, and in the plural be like hermeneutai or something. And this means interpreter. It's actually where we get our, our fancy word hermeneutics from in the Latin. The Latin term is simply interpress. They are interpreters. So we've kind of. I, I would be. I want to know where we got our word translation from. There are some Greek and Latin verbs to talk about conveying a word or a phrase in one language into another, like bringing it over into another translating. But what's fascinating is when it comes time to name a translator, they just call them an interpreter murder. So, so we don't do ourselves any favors when we deny that there's interpretation going on in translation. But the good news is again, the history shows from ancient Jews and ancient Christians, this is the way it's always been actually on the translation project.
- [67:30]
Dr. Peter Gurry
So some of, I think some of the blame for this does belong to publishers. Okay. Think about anytime a new translation comes out. Have you ever seen a publisher market their new translation as less accurate than the one before them? Or even literally? Like, they just don't. They're always, somehow they always manage to be more accurate. Okay, yeah, that's just a problem because it, it gives, it gives people. And I understand it's marketing. I know how marketing works. And not, you know, I'm not, I'm no fool, I hope. But, but, you know, this is. You can't have infinitely more accurate and more accurate at 1 until at some point you reach absurdity. We go into week. John and I could go into examples, but we won't. I'll cut to the chase. The best translation is the one you read. Okay. That's the answer John wants to hear. I think that he likes.
- [68:17]
Dr. John Mead
There it is.
- [68:17]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Right. Okay. Because if you don't read your Bible, doesn't matter what translation it is. Who cares? Right?
- [68:24]
Elisa Childers
Yeah, that's good.
- [68:24]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Doesn't do you any good. Just read the one. You haven't quit worrying about it.
- [68:28]
Elisa Childers
Unless it's the Passion Translation or something, you know, like that.
- [68:32]
Dr. Peter Gurry
I have had to catch myself on this more recently because the Passion Translation is basically garbage.
- [68:37]
Elisa Childers
Yeah.
- [68:38]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Do not read it. It's total nonsense.
- [68:41]
Elisa Childers
Yeah.
- [68:41]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Every time it refers to the Aramaic, I want to throw up. But anyways.
- [68:44]
Elisa Childers
Yeah.
- [68:46]
Dr. Peter Gurry
So, yeah, there are some really bad ones, but that's why I said the mainstream ones. Any one of them are good. They're going to serve you really well. So my advice to people is pick the one that's the most literal that you can still understand. So if that's the niv, go with it. If that's even the new living translation, because you're a new believer, go with that.
- [69:01]
Elisa Childers
Yeah.
- [69:02]
Dr. Peter Gurry
If you're, if you want to study, at some point you got to move to the more literal. Okay. And there are problems with this term literal, but we'll avoid them for now. So, you know, John and I think both use the ESV in our, say, preaching and teaching, but there's rarely a week that goes by that we're not in the other's office complaining about something in it that we don't love, you know, because that's what scholars do. We complain about stuff, but, you know, they serve people really well. I'm sorry. Super thankful for our Bible translations. The teams that have produced them have worked really hard. In many cases, the work continues. They still meet. The NIV committee meets every year to go over things and we ought to just. Honestly, the main response we ought to have the proliferation of translations is gratitude. I'll leave it there.
- [69:49]
Elisa Childers
All right. Well, we're about at the end of our time, but I want to close with something kind of fun here. We talked before we came on the air about how we are going to schedule. So everybody kind of be ready for this. We're going to schedule a live stream with Peter and John and we're just going to read through some memes about the Bible and they agreed to do it, but they said only if we don't see it beforehand. You just throw it up there and get our just instant reaction to it. So we're going to do a live stream where we'll invite people to ask, you know, ask your questions about the Bible, the formation of the canon, the translations, the original languages. Bring all those questions. We'll schedule that real soon, but we'll give a little preview. So I'm going to read to you guys. And this kind of, this really has to do with the doctrine of divine inspiration and what application that would have to how we read people like Paul and Peter. But this is a progressive Christian pastor wrote this on Facebook. And I just want to get each of your two cents here on what you think about these thoughts of this progressive Christian pastor. He says this. When we finally realize the first century Christian church was the infant and not the archetype, we will be wonderfully relieved to just keep growing. The Apostle Paul was a wonderfully sincere kindergartener, but an absolutely abominable professor. Honor him for what he was instead of judging him for what he wasn't.
- [71:13]
Dr. Peter Gurry
Thumbs down. First reaction is thumbs down.
- [71:15]
Elisa Childers
Thumbs down.
- [71:16]
Dr. John Mead
Well, yeah, just thumbs down. Clearly. I don't, I don't know how sometimes these folks get called progressives. Even like, what's, what's the word for radical departure. Progress assumes that you're at least kind of working within the DNA, you know, and sort of this is. I, I just. So many statements of the church fathers just went through, not from the first century, but, you know, from the first several early centuries went through my head. And the way they talk about the scriptures, I mean, Athanasius talks about the canonical books as the sources or the springs of salvation so that the one who drinks of them will never thirst again. And I just go, wow, like so. So Athanasius would have to be the naive guy to go back to Paul and the rest of the apostles to say something like that, right? But the fact is I just pulled one out of the air there. Every single one of these early church fathers venerate the authors of the scriptures and the scriptural books themselves. That's what's interesting. Not just the living voices, what is of them in written book form. They say these things about Augustine and against the Donatists. The Old and New Testament are the supreme canon. That is the supreme authority over everything else. You don't say that. If you think, if you think the writers were kindergarteners. Like, it's just like to me, the whole thing is nonsense. And progressives are getting very bold. They're getting very bold. And unfortunately, this is just my two cents now. I think the evangelical church is at its weakest right now, Elisa, and they don't really have great answers to these sorts of things. And so we're all going to sound like voices crying out in the wilderness at this point. But if Christians and evangelicals especially know their tradition, then none of this stuff should, should bother them at all, frankly, because every one of these fathers that I could mention that have these views of the books of the Old and New Testament probably heard similar criticisms and yet held steadfast to, to the, to the tradition, to what the church has always said about these books.
- [73:49]
Elisa Childers
Peter, anything to add other than the thumbs down on a second thumbs down?
- [73:57]
Dr. Peter Gurry
I mean, I think here's what I would say to the person who maybe not to that pastor, because he's in a, he's so far down that road that he's probably not reachable. But to the person who reads that and goes, there's a part of them that goes, that feels life giving to hear that I might challenge them and say, where else are you going to go? And particularly to that, that particular expression of it. Who's going to say, who's the kindergarten? Who's the adult? Because I have a feeling that in 50 years that Pastor's view is going to look like the kindergartner. And people are still going to be reading Paul and finding that this guy will blow your socks off what he says. And the reason is because he's an apostle. And so that, that would maybe be what I say. The person who, who really does hear that and part of them thinks that is really attractive to me. I would say think very carefully about what you are giving up and what you are getting. It reminds me of the apostles themselves when, when, when Jesus looked at them, everybody else had left them. And he said, are you two going to leave me? And they said, where else are we going to go? You have the words of life. And that's what I would say to people who are wrestling with the Bible. And they have questions maybe they've never realized they should be asking before and they're feeling a bit unnerved by some of this stuff or wondering about the kinds of questions that progressives might be raising for them is ask yourself, where else are you going to find the words of life? Because at the end of the day, that pastor has to say to his congregation, I'm the source of the words of life. And my moral intuitions and the moral intuitions fed to me by my surrounding culture, that's what allows me to then stand a judgment over the apostle Paul. And I want to say, friends, the Christian church has stood for centuries, for millennia, by standing on the authority of the Apostle Paul and the other apostles and the Old Testament and being able then to confront the culture around them with that. So that's what I'd say.
- [75:51]
Elisa Childers
Awesome. Well, I want to thank my guests, Dr. John Mead and Dr. Peter Gurry. Pick up their book Scribes and the Amazing Story of How We Got our Bible available October 18th. I'm pretty sure you can pre order that now. And while you're there, pick up Live youe Truth and Other Exposing Popular Deceptions that make us Anxious, Exhausted, and self Obsessed. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure and subscribe. Click the Bell icon to be notified every time we release a new video. And if you're listening on audio platforms, it really helps friends if you go leave a good review. It kind of triggers those algorithms to put it into the news feeds of the right people. And of course, if you see this on social media, even just clicking like leaving a comment helps. But of course really, really helps if you share it out to your friends in your social media circles as well. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time.
- [76:42]
Dr. John Mead
Sam.