#376 Top Bible Scholar Debunks TikTok Bible Myths | Dr. Dan Wallace

Summary

The Alisa Childers Podcast - Episode #376: Dr. Dan Wallace — Addressing Progressive and Skeptical Claims Against the Bible
Date: May 17, 2026
Guest: Dr. Dan Wallace (Senior Research Professor, Dallas Theological Seminary; Executive Director, Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts)
Host: Alisa Childers

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Episode Overview

This episode tackles some of the most persistent and popular skeptical claims about the Bible (textual corruption, the “telephone game,” Constantine’s alleged invention of Christianity, canonical manipulation by the church, and more), which are frequently circulated on social media and in progressive Christian circles. Drawing on the expertise of Dr. Dan Wallace—one of the world’s leading New Testament textual scholars—the discussion seeks to provide listeners with a robust, historically grounded understanding of how the New Testament text has been transmitted, how textual variants work, and why claims of massive corruption and theological manipulation are far overstated or false.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Dr. Dan Wallace & the Importance of Textual Criticism

• Alisa recounts how Dr. Wallace’s work helped rebuild her faith during a period of intense doubt, particularly when she was exposed to skeptical teaching about the Bible's reliability (07:10).
• Dr. Wallace clarifies, with humility, that he now simply goes by "Dan" (08:33).
• He explains textual criticism as the discipline of recovering the original wording of texts where the autographs (original documents) are lost, comparing the process to attempts to reconstruct things like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (08:59).
• Historical context given for the preservation of Greek literature and the New Testament, including the effect of the fall of Constantinople and the move of Greek manuscripts into Western Europe, leading up to Erasmus's first printed Greek New Testament which influenced the Reformation (09:50-13:08).
• Dan shares his personal journey into textual criticism, sparked by a faith crisis in high school over Jesus’ deity, leading him to study Greek and manuscript evidence (13:18-17:30).
• Wallace contrasts his journey with that of Bart Ehrman, another well-known textual critic who ended up as a “left-wing fundamentalist” (16:15-17:18).

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2. What Are Textual Variants and How Significant Are They?

Definition & Scope:

• Childers points out confusion around Bible reliability (canon, manuscript copying, variations) frequently encountered in skeptics’ claims (23:00-24:38).

• Dr. Wallace explains a textual variant as any difference in spelling, word order, additions, omissions, substitutions, or nonsense readings between two or more manuscripts (24:38-26:05).

• Quotes Bart Ehrman's claim of 2-400,000 variants, but recent scholarship (Peter Gurry) puts it at about 500,000 meaningful variants—excluding spelling/nonsense, the total is about 1.5 million variants (26:05).

• However, the vast majority of these are trivial (spelling, minor word order changes). Using an example, Wallace breaks down the categories of variants into:

  • Meaningful and viable
  • Meaningful but not viable
  • Viable but not meaningful
  • Neither meaningful nor viable

  Of these, only about 0.1% (around 1,500) variants are both meaningful and have a chance of reflecting the original (31:48-38:45).

• Notable stat: There are more variants than words in the New Testament; however, the structure of Greek and multiple copying lines means this is less concerning than it sounds.

Notable Quote:

“At most, we have 1/10 of 1% of the textual variants that are both meaningful and viable. And that is a very comforting thing right there. The differences. What textual variants do is they don’t affect doctrine.” — Dan Wallace (31:48)

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3. The “Telephone Game” Myth in Bible Transmission

• Timestamp: 43:55+
• Played a clip of comedian David Cross, who claims the Bible is the world’s oldest game of telephone, rewritten, re-edited, and translated so many times the original is hopelessly lost (43:54-44:58).
• Dr. Wallace outlines key differences:
  • Telephone is linear (one line), but New Testament transmission is branched (multiple streams, wide geographic transmission).
  • In the game, errors are compounded with each iteration and can’t be checked against earlier statements; with manuscripts, you often have multiple independent lines and can compare early with late versions.
  • Early manuscripts: We possess Greek copies from as early as the 2nd century (e.g. Papyrus 66, ca. 200 AD), and by the 4th century we have full Greek New Testaments.
  • Scribes mostly copied by sight, not sound, and used mechanisms for correction (Dior Thotes).
  • The text has “grown” in 1,500 years by only about 2%.
• Notable moment:

“If this is the telephone game, it’s the most poorly devised telephone game ever. […] In 1,500 years of copying, the growth of the text […] is no more than 2%.” — Dan Wallace (59:30)

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4. Are There Differences in Early Manuscripts & Did Scribes “Change” the Text? (Origen’s Complaint)

• Responded to a TikTok video quoting Origen about scribes adding, deleting, and changing the text (61:55+).
• Dr. Wallace gives historical context: Origen’s fastidiousness, Alexandria’s reputation for careful copying (especially after Aristophanes’ rules in ~200 BC), and early textual criticism practices (e.g., scribal marks noting suspected interpolations).
• Most wild and “looser” copies were not typical—Alexandrian manuscripts (our best witnesses) are known for accuracy.
• Additions in the Western textual tradition are primarily due to missionary work and tend to appear in later, not earliest, Greek manuscripts.
• Notable analogy: Wallace compares Origen’s focus on discrepancies to a grammarian’s annoyance at sloppy English, e.g. misuse of "between you and I," showing even the most careful writers can get irked by details that are trivial to most.

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5. Constantine, the Council of Nicaea, and the “Invention” of the Bible

• Responded to a viral TikTok explaining (falsely) that Constantine chose the books of the Bible, invented the deity of Christ, suppressed “diverse” Christianities, and that the canon was finalized under imperial sponsorship (86:16+).
• Wallace’s key rebuttals:
  • Constantine did NOT invent the doctrine of Christ’s deity: Manuscripts pre-dating Constantine (e.g., Papyrus 66, c. 200-250 AD) clearly affirm Jesus as God (see John 1:1).
  • Council of Nicaea (325): Did not decide the books of the Bible. It met to resolve doctrinal disputes, particularly Arianism; the vote for Christ's divinity was 318–2, not close.
  • No early “ecumenical council” set the New Testament canon: Regional synods (e.g., Hippo 393, Carthage 397) affirmed the 27 books, but consensus on the core was widespread long before official lists.
  • Process of canonization: Criteria were apostolicity, catholicity (widespread use), and orthodoxy. Most New Testament books were accepted from the very beginning (Homologumena), with a handful more debated but ultimately affirmed (Antilegomena).
  • Muratorian Fragment (late 2nd century): Affirms 22/27 NT books, showing large-scale consensus already by 180 AD.
  • No evidence that "state power" or "winners" determined the canon by conspiracy or violence.

Notable Quotes:

“An ounce of evidence is worth a pound of presumption. When people come with glittering generalities, say, ‘Where’s the evidence for this?’” — Dan Wallace (93:34)

“The Council of Nicaea [never had] a word on the canon. In 332, when Constantine said make 50 Bibles ..., Eusebius already knew what they were because that was his big side project of his whole life.” — Dan Wallace (105:13)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Bart Ehrman’s claims:
  “No cardinal doctrines are jeopardized by these textual variants.” — Wallace summarizing Ehrman's admission (38:24)
• On scribes’ accuracy:
  “Alexandria was like the Oxford University Press of the ancient world.” — Dan Wallace (70:49)
• The impact of careful scholarship:
  “It is such an honor to introduce you now to Dr. Daniel Wallace. [...] you were one of those people that the Lord really used in my life to help me get the information that I needed to stabilize my faith and to really rebuild what had been kind of broken down.” — Alisa Childers (07:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [07:10] Alisa’s introduction to Dan Wallace and personal faith testimony
• [08:33] Dan Wallace’s introduction; “Please, call me Dan.”
• [08:59-13:15] What is textual criticism? Story of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament
• [13:18-17:30] Wallace’s testimony—into textual criticism via faith crisis; comparison with Bart Ehrman
• [24:38-31:48] What is a textual variant? How are they counted and classified? Magnitude of variants and what they actually mean
• [31:48-38:45] Only 0.1% of variants are both meaningful and potentially original; No doctrinal impact
• [43:54-47:03] The “telephone game” claim dismantled
• [47:03-61:34] Detailed explanation of transmission vs. telephone game; early manuscripts as confirmatory, not radically different
• [61:55-86:13] Origen’s comments on manuscript differences; examples of textual criticism in action; explanation of “wild” copies and the role of Alexandria
• [86:16-105:55] Refuting claims about Constantine, Nicaea, and the canon; process of canon formation; Muratorian Fragment

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Conclusion & Resources

• Dr. Wallace offers listeners info on the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM.org), the digitization of primary sources, and a special “Scribal Fellowship” opportunity.
• Listeners can invite Dan Wallace to speak at their church by contacting [e-mail].
• Free book offer for podcast listeners who join the Scribal Fellowship and mention Alisa’s show: Reinventing Jesus, co-authored by Dan Wallace.
• Call to Christians: pursue reasoned, historically informed faith; don’t be swayed by unsupported viral claims.

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Final Thought from Alisa:

“Let’s remember as we pursue Christ, to keep a sharp mind, a soft heart, and a thick skin.”

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Has the Bible been written, rewritten, translated a bunch of times, rewritten again, edited, re, edited, translated again, all before it came to us in English? Did the emperor Constantine invent the version of Christianity that we know today? Did early Christian scribes change the Bible? Well, these are all claims that are often made on social media and they're claim that are honestly deconstructing the faith of so many people who grew up in the Christian church. Maybe you have encountered some of these claims and maybe some of them have even been made by some of your friends and family members who have been influenced by these social media trends. First, I want to let you know about a few things going on. So the first thing is the Cross Examined Instructor Academy. Do you love apologetics? I'm guessing that if you listen to this podcast you are interested in topics like defending the Bible, giving reasons for why Christianity is true. Well, if you've been studying that and you want to learn how to present that information, whether it be on an online platform, maybe a podcast or a YouTube channel, or maybe you just want to get better at teaching apologetics in your local church, well, you are going to want to come to the Cross Examined Instructor Academy. This is actually the three day event that launched my entire ministry back in 2016. I attended cross Examined Instructor Academy as a student and back then I didn't really want to start a podcast or a YouTube channel or write books or do any of the things I'm doing today. I just simply wanted to meet some of the people whose work was so influential in God rebuilding my faith after an extreme time of doubt. And it was through that training event, just three days together, presenting and then getting feedback and critiques, where I was really encouraged to start a blog. And then I started my blog and the rest is history. So if you're interested in learning how to do that better. Or maybe you're just an apologetics nerd that wants to get some life breathed into you by hanging out with other apologetics nerds for three days. You are going to want to come to the Cross Examined Instructor Academy. So if you want to apply, you can go to crossexamined.org, click on the Events tab and then you will find the application where you can join me, Natasha Crane, Hilary Ferrer from Mama Bear Apologetics, Greg Kokel, Frank Turek, Alan Parr, and many others for an amazing three days. It's honestly my favorite event and every single year. So go to crossexamine.org, click that Events tab and apply today. I also wanna Let you know that there are some ways that you can support this show. If you find this content helpful, if it has equipped you to interact with people in your life who are skeptical to the Christian faith or maybe are coming from a more progressive perspective. There are several different ways that you can support the show. Number one, if you wanna see podcasts early and ad free, I know that's a complaint some people have is that they have to listen to. You can listen to every show ad free and you can get it early by signing up to support on patreon. Com. So if you go to patreon.com and search my name, you'll find that there, there are different tiers that you can sign up for. One of the tiers will give you a monthly live stream that I do on a private Facebook group for Patreon supporters. And honestly, it's such a sweet time every single month where they can just ask their questions. I give updates, prayer requests. It's a lot more personal. So if you ever just had a burning question that you really want to ask me, consider signing up for Patreon and joining us for one of those monthly live streams. Another way that you can really support this show is by shopping with our sponsors. I am very, very picky about which organizations, ministries and companies I partner with to have ads on this show. I've turned down a whole bunch of requests because a the product has to be something that I truly believe in and really would recommend. Number two, the own have to be Christians. But they can't be giving money to pro abortion causes or woke causes. And in many cases, in fact, in all of the cases of the sponsors of this show so far, our sponsors give money to pro life causes and other wonderful causes like that. So if you want to support this show, shopping with our sponsors gives you a great product but also a way to support us. And then the final thing I wanted to mention to you is I want to crowdsource a question. So wherever you listen to this podcast, whether it be on YouTube or maybe on one of the audio platforms or if you're connected with us on social media, which by the way, I'm Lisa Childers on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and on X, I'm Elisachilders. But wherever you're connected on social media or in the comment section on YouTube, would you please let me know what types of topics you'd like me to talk about? Maybe there's a specific question you'd like me to do a show on or at least to answer in one of my shows. Are there specific guests that you just love? And you listen to me and you listen to them and you're like, this would be a match made in heaven. Would you please leave a comment and let me know all of that, because I really want to give you the content that is going to equip you the best in your daily life and in your walk with the Lord. All right, on to today's show. So excited. Okay, I have to give you a little backstory, and probably you will hear me gush over this particular scholar because back when my faith was in crisis almost 15 years ago, one of the biggest questions I had was surrounding the rel reliability of the Bible and specifically surrounding the process by which we got the Bible, whether that be the canonization of the Bible or even the copying of the manuscripts. I had my head spun in circles by skeptical claim after skeptical claim, saying that there are hundreds of thousands of mistakes, that there are contradictions, that we don't even have an accurate copy of what was originally written. And there were all these other books in early Christianity that got silenced in favor of the theological winners who wrote the New Testament Testament. Maybe you've also heard some claims like that. So I dug deep into the scholarship on this topic, and one of the scholars that I took in so much content from was Dr. Daniel B. Wallace. He is one of the world's leading New Testament scholars. He is the Senior Research professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, and he's the Executive Director of the center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, which, honestly is such a cool website. It documents and photographs New Testament manuscripts from all over the world. He has written, edited, or contributed to more than 30 books, including the standard textbook for Greek grammar called Greek Grammar beyond the Basics, which is used in seminaries around the world. He has spent decades studying the reliability and the transmission of the New Testament text, participating in manuscript research and discoveries of all around the world. His work focuses on New Testament textual criticism, which we're going to get into, we're going to define for you today also Greek grammar and the historical credibility of the Christian Scriptures. Now, I am over the moon to have him on the show because he is the guest that I have wanted to have on the show since I started my podcast in 2017. We were finally able to make it happen. It is such an honor to introduce you now to Dr. Daniel Wallace. Well, Dr. Wallace, this has been an episode that I wanted to do since I started my podcast in 2017, and I have shared a little bit in the intro of the impact that your work had in my life when I was literally discipled by a progressive pastor who basically introduced me to all of the Bart Ehrman ideas about the Bible, questioning the canon, questioning the transmission of the scribal copies. And that really threw me into a dark night of the. And you were one of those people that the Lord really used in my life to help me get the information that I needed to stabilize my faith and to really rebuild what had been kind of broken down. So very thrilled to have you on today. I'd love for you to introduce yourself a little bit to my audience and let us know who you are, what you do, and maybe what caused you to want to be in this type of scholarship.

[C]

Well, thank you, Alyssa. I appreciate. I mean, I really like being on this show. I'm glad we finally got this to work. You know, it's been a while misses and things. But here. Here we've got it going on today. But I need to correct you on one thing. I'm not Dr. Wallace anymore. That's when I was a professor for 39 years, teaching new Testament Greek. Now I'm just Dan, so.

[B]

Okay, got it.

[C]

So please, call me. Call me Dan.

[B]

Okay. Well done. Thanks, Dan.

[C]

Sure. I got into what's called textual criticism, which is the discipline, broadly speaking, of trying to ascertain the wording of the original document of something which has either been lost or destroyed over the centuries and over the years, in fact, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, they had to do textual criticism on that. He wrote it, allegedly, on the back of an envelope while he was in the train. We don't have that. But even what he said was more than what was written. It's really fascinating to say that, but when you go to the Gettysburg. I mean, I'm. To the Lincoln Memorial, what they've put up there is their best guess as to what was originally said. And the difference is five different scribes, I think, and newspaper. Hundreds of newspaper reporters there all have some slight differences, but it all comes out really very, very close to each other. So I think there's. It ends up being one or two words that we're not sure of. Okay, so that's something of recent vintage when it comes to ancient texts. We don't have the originals of any ancient Greco Roman literature. None. We have to do textual criticism on all of those. When this really began to be a big thing to do in modernism, it was something that church fathers did on the New Testament way back in the third century and even the second century. But modernism, which really starts with the Renaissance and the reformation coming in 1517. Starting then, you've got the movable type printing press of Gutenberg in 1454. And then just the year before that, you have Muslims attacking Constantinople, which is today's Istanbul, but the Greeks still call it Constantinople. So when I'm ever there, I always. Well, I prefer to call it that way. When they invaded Constantinople in 1453, six weeks it took for them to lay siege to the city and break through the famous Constantinople wall, the wall of Byzantium that kept out marauders for centuries. When they finally broke through, you had monks and scribes who fled out the back door into Western Europe. And they brought with them their manuscripts. They brought with them all these manuscripts of Greek philosophy and politics and religion and history and this kind of thing, as well as biblical manuscripts. Ancient Greek was not taught in any university in the west until 1460, I believe was when the University of Paris was the first university to offer a course in Ancient Greek because it was largely unknown in the West. And now with all this stuff flooding into the west, you've got people reading Greek for the first time. And they got swept up in this. And that's why in 1516, Erasmus of Rotterdam, a Dutchman, a brilliant man, published the first Greek New Testament on a printing press. Really, really remarkable time to be alive. If Luther had not had Erasmus novum instrumentum omnia, brand new instrument, it's what it means, the Reformation never would have started. He got the truth of justification by faith out of the Greek, not the Latin. And so the timing of this, if we didn't know better, we'd almost think there's a divine agent who's working these things for his own glory.

[B]

Yeah, almost as if.

[C]

Okay, so my interest in it started when I was in high school and I had made a strong commitment to the Lord through a particular event that I won't get into. But at that time, I'm 16 years old. January 6, 1969. I made such a commitment to the Lord. And I'd already been a Christian for a dozen years. I said, I'm going to commit myself to full time Christian vocational ministry. And so my education from that point on was in that direction. I went to public schools till college. But there was an event that happened during those early weeks when I had made this commitment. I was actually reading through my New Testament every single week. And I'm a very, very slow reader. I read like a lawyer. You know, they would read 60 words a minute. They're Always looking for the loopholes and things, you know, and I'm reading all these things. I got today's English version of Goodness for Modern man from a guy who had an independent real estate office in Costa Mesa, California. I'm from Newport beach, hence I always wear Ren Spooner Hawaiian shirts. So just to remind me of home. And this fellow had a big billboard over his real estate office said Jesus Saves. And so I thought, oh, he's my kind of guy. So I went in and I found out that he would sell me a box of the paperback, today's English version. I don't know how many were in a box, but if I bought a whole box, I'd get them for 25 cents apiece. So I'd buy the whole box. And then I would be driving up and down coast highway, picking up hitchhikers, sharing the gospel and giving away these New Testaments. And I'd come back every few weeks and get another box and another box. One of the times I was there, he said, you know, Jesus is not God, and the New Testament does not call him God. He was an Aryan, not a Jehovah's Witness, but an independent heretic. And he was showing me passages out of the TEV that they looked suspicious. And I thought, oh, if this is true, then I need to reconsider what I'm thinking. And it was that crisis of faith that brought me to the place of saying, I need to know that Jesus Christ truly is who he said he was, truly is God in the flesh. And how do I find that out? I need to learn Greek, I need to get in Greek grammar. I need to get into the text and the textual variants. And so that's been. Basically my career is working in Greek grammar and in textual criticism. I've done other things, of course, but that's what I've worked on. So it's due to a faith crisis that has driven me into this in the first place. It's interesting, Bart Ehrman also seemed to have a crisis of faith, but he went to the left. First time I met him back in 82, he was first year in the doctoral program at Princeton, and he was still an evangelical, but he was starting to question things. But I think that what he did was he still had a. He basically was a fundamentalist, I think, when he went to Moody Bible College. And today I think he's still a fundamentalist. He's just a left wing fundamentalist. There's fundamentalists in the right aisle, those on the left aisle. He's on the left aisle. Because you see so many things just in black or white terms when there is a tertium quid, a middle way, you know. So anyway, that gives you a little background with me.

[B]

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[C]

That's fascinating.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I think his understanding of evangelicals came from his time at Moody and Wheaton, and I don't think he's kept up with evangelical scholarship. We've had three debates publicly, and by the way, one of them is posted on my center's website, the center for. For the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. Maybe we'll talk about that here in a little while.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

CSNTM.org and you go to one of the dropdown menus is going to show you videos, I think. And the first video that pops up is this two hour long video professionally filmed at Southern Methodist University in their largest auditorium. Over 1400 people came and at the time it was the largest debate ever on the text of the Bible. The previous time I debated him in New Orleans, we had 800 people and people were coming from all over the world. And that was at the time the largest debate ever on the text of the Bible. So it's a great video. And there's Q and A afterwards for about an hour and then there's exit interviews. Now, we paid for the photographers, videographers to do this and I explicitly told them, I want you to interview people who thought that Bart Ehrman won. Don't make it lopsided. I don't want to. It's not that I'm looking for strokes. I just want to get people that would say he won. Those who said I won. Now, I've actually not even seen the video since it came out. I saw the rough cut when we were in their studio and I was very upset at them. I said, why didn't you have anybody who felt that Bart Ehrman won the debate? They said, we couldn't find them.

[B]

Hey, that's a good problem to have.

[C]

There were people who had big, big letters embossed on their T shirts, Muslim or Mormon. And they would ask these people and they would just walk away. So it's important for. This is a great thing for your audience to share with people. Sit down for a couple of evenings with your neighbors and friends and go through the debate and discuss it because it presents both sides as fully as possible.

[B]

You know, when, when my faith was being rebuilt, watching debates was a huge part of that because I wanted to, I wanted to see the bright on both sides of a particular issue. And then I knew that in a debate they're gonna bring their best arguments. And so that debate you're describing with Bart Ehrman was one of the most impactful debates that I had watched. And just to encourage you, just last week somebody that I know asked me, have you seen this debate? And described the debate you're describing? And honestly, it was kind of like a lifeline for this person at a really difficult moment where he was being challenged with lots of different things. So God is still using that. So I definitely wanna men that website again. That's csntm.org that's the center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, which, by the way, I want everybody to go take a look at, because part of the work that you're doing there is digitizing all of these manuscripts that we're finding all over the world. So you can actually go and look at these beautiful pictures of manuscripts of the New Testament. And, yeah, it's just. You can lose hours of your life looking at these things. It's very fascinating. But you used.

[C]

I wouldn't call it lose, because I don't think you lose anything.

[B]

No, you don't lose. That's right. That's right. You get to spend some quality time. That's right. Yeah. Do that instead of Doom scroll. That's what everybody needs to do. But you used a phrase a minute ago, and maybe this. So what we're going to be talking about in today's episode, we're going to be looking specifically at three TikTok videos that people have put out against things like the canon, the Bible, historic Christian beliefs, that sort of thing. And I chose these specific three because these. These were three of the most common things I was facing in my faith crisis. And I thought that would be good for us to visit those things. But before we do that, I want to lay a little bit of a foundation for people. So there is so much confusion out there about how we got the canon, how were the manuscripts copied? Because honestly, I'll be in a Q and A and somebody will ask me, well, what do I do about the reliability of the Bible? Is the Bible reliable? And I'm thinking that's a hundred questions right there. Are you asking about, did they write, you know, is what they wrote true? Was it copied accurately? Do we have the right books? Do we know who wrote the books? I mean, what are you actually asking? So there's a lot of questions within that broader category. And your specific area of expertise is in textual criticism, and you used a phrase a minute ago called textual variance. So I wonder if maybe you could just give us a thumbnail sketch of. You mentioned that textual criticism is figuring out the wording of an ancient text when we no longer have the originals. How is that done? And what is a textual variant?

[C]

Great question. That's 100 questions you just asked, by the way.

[B]

Yes, I did. I know. I tried to narrow it down. But.

[C]

Okay. How does textual criticism work? It's an examination of all of the evidence that one can get a hold of to. To determine the original wording. Now, because writing is a human thing, after that original document Human scribes copied it and they made mistakes. We have. You wouldn't believe how many mistakes we have in the manuscripts for the New Testament. Bart Ehrman said 2 to 400,000, I think a few years ago. Peter Gurry, one of my former interns, he got his doctorate at Cambridge University. He wrote an article in the most prestigious journal for the New Testament, which is New Testament Studies, published by Cambridge Press. And it was the number of variants in the New Testament manuscripts. He's the first one who did a real kind of an estimate on this. And he said there are about 500,000 variants among the manuscripts, but he was not counting. He explicitly did not count spelling differences or nonsense readings.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

That's the majority of the variants. That's about another million. So I think we have about one and a half million differences among our manuscripts. Now, a textual variant is any place in the manuscripts where there's at least some deviation in spelling, word order, additions, subtractions, substitutions, nonsense readings, versus others, where you've got at least two manuscripts that disagree. Now, an older definition that was really, really wrong was published by one of the evangelical publishers in Grand Rapids, either Baker or Zonovan, I think, in 1963, where the person. He was doing a treatment of the Bible, and he said, here's how you count textual variants. If you have in one place it says Jesus, but in another manuscript it says Christ. But let's say it's in the Gospel of John, and we do have exactly that variant at John 4:1, is it when Jesus knew that the Pharisees had heard, and it goes on from there. Or is it when Christ or the Lord knew, when the Pharisees had heard? There are something like 1600 manuscripts for John's Gospel alone. And so let's say you have 800 that have one wording, 800 that have the other. This person counted the variance as not just a wording difference, but multiplied that by the number of witnesses that have it. That is not how a texture variant is counted. He is not a textual scholar. He was. I don't think he's alive anymore. But that's never how textual critics count a variant. If it's a difference of. If there's just one manuscript that has a difference from all the rest, that's a textual variant, and it doesn't happen if it's. Almost all the manuscripts have this. All of them except one have this, that still counts as just one variant. So the fact that we have about a million and a half at first may be very, very startling. To someone. But I think we'll get into this. So make a note of this when we talk about. I'm not sure. I think it's David Cross's video you wanted to talk about. And that would be a good place to mention how these variants break down.

[B]

Well, as you can see from this conversation, it's not enough anymore to just tell our kids to believe the Bible, or tell them because the Bible says so. They need to know why the Bible is God's word, why we can trust it, why we know it's been copied accurately, and how to think critically about some of the questions that we're tackling in today's podcast. Because, as you know, in this culture, even the youngest of our children are presented with thousands of competing truth claims every single week. Which is why my number one recommendation for a curriculum is Biblical Worldview curriculum from Foundation Worldview. We did this in our home, in our home school a few years ago. My son learned so much about what other religions believe, how to interact with truth claims. He learned to answer questions like, what is truth? Who is God? How did life begin? What does it mean to be human? How can I tell right from wrong? And this was so valuable, not just for him, but to shore up some of my own thinking. And this curriculum can be easily implemented in the home, church or Christian school. So if you want to be really intentional about preventing that future pain, point of your kids hearing Some of these TikTok claims when they're an adult and have had no prep before that, you're going to want to get the Biblical Worldview curriculum from Foundation Worldview. You can go to foundationworldview.com and use the promo code ELISA for 10 off any family, church or Christian school like license. Again, foundationworldview.com, use my code Alisa. Okay, well, with that definition in mind, you know, honestly, what's kind of interesting about what you've just said is when I was in my progressive class, I was told there was 400,000 variants. And what was so interesting to me when I really started looking into it is that there's actually more than that. But they have different levels of significance, you might say. So maybe can you talk about the different? Because even Bart Ehrman in the debate with you, I remember him saying something along the lines of that the vast majority of these differences between the different manuscripts, they're not going to change or affect in any meaningful way a cardinal Christian doctrine. They're not going to change the gospel. They're not going to change the core of what Christianity is. So what are we talking about with. I know you mentioned that the vast majority are spelling differences, maybe word differences like Jesus and then Christ. But what about that smaller percentage of variants that would affect the meaning that even scholars still are debating about whether or not this one is going back to the original or not or this one is. So can you talk about that a little bit and then we'll get into this David Cross video because I think a lot of this is really articulated quite well by his skeptical video that he made. It was really stand up comedy and had people really laughing.

[C]

Yeah, that was hilarious. Total myth.

[B]

Yeah, total miss. But it was funny. Yeah. So maybe just lead us into it that way and explain what we're talking about. Because when somebody hears that, I know when I heard that there's, you know, even 400,000 is rattling for a Christian to hear that there's that many differences. So maybe talk about what that actually means.

[C]

Yeah. Bart Ehrman in his book Misquoting Jesus says he said this in interviews and other places. He said there are actually more variants in the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. And this is one of the few times that he's actually understated what's going on. And significantly. So we have approximately 138,162 words in our critical text of the Greek New Testament. We have one and a half million variants or so readings is what we call them. If it's a variant, it actually has, it's meaningful. And that begins to be a much, much smaller category. But that million and a half differences is more than 10 times the words we have in the New Testament. Now I heard this at first when I was taking Greek at Biola University and the professor Harry Sturge, who was a really decent textual critic, I learned, got my teeth cut, eye teeth cut on that. He said, one Friday in first year Greek there are approximately 120,000 variants among the New Testament manuscripts. And he let it stand. He didn't say anything else. That was. I'm driving home because I lived off campus 35 miles away and I'm going, oh my gosh, what does this mean? How it really disturbed me. Then the next class he talked about and explained the difference. So let me explain it from the way I view these things. All textual variants or differences can be classified in one of four ways and will use the matrix of meaningful and viable meaningful means it changes the meaning to some degree. Now, in John 4:1, if it says Jesus or the Lord, that is a very meaningful variant. It Changes the meaning in some degree. The reference is still the same, but we would not consider that as a trivial variant. It's a real variant, and scholars struggle with it. So none of the manuscripts say Peter or Mary or anything like that. It's always Jesus. So meaningful and viable. That's one category. On the opposite end of the extreme are those. And I'll just call them variants. Even though most of these are just differences, you know, difference between a variant and reading. I'm getting into too much detail. I'm sorry. You asked me to be. You prayed that I'd be concise. So let's. Let's back up. So the opposite end of the spectrum is those differences or variants that are neither meaningful nor viable. Viable means it has a good chance of going back to the original wording. Now, then there's two others. Those that are meaningful but not viable. Those that are viable but not meaningful. So you look at these other three categories besides meaningful and viable, and that constitutes, by my estimate, at least 99.9% of all textual differences. At most, we have 1/10 of 1% of the textual variants that are both meaningful and viable. And that is a very comforting thing right there. The differences. What textual variants do is they don't affect doctrine. And. And I'll back up and mention about Misquoting Jesus and what Bart said when his book came out as a hardback. It came out in 2005, I believe. And a few weeks later, he was on the Jon Stewart Daily show. And three days later, it shot up to number one on Amazon. And Stuart talked about the woman caught in adultery. And Bart said, no, this is not part of the original text. And Stuart said, well, the scribes changed it and added this kind of stuff. And it almost makes you feel more godly that way. And then he said, wow, I congratulate you. This is one hell of a book. Not normally something you'd. Not the adjective you'd use to speak about.

[B]

Right, right.

[C]

Yeah. Scripture, I mean, it's just. Just. It's hilarious. Okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

He sold, I think 100,000 copies in the first three months. And then the editors and publisher wanted to keep the sales going. It was number one on Amazon, on New York Times, too, for some time. And so what they did is they added an appendix to the paperback version. Now, this is very important. If your listeners want to pick up a copy of Misquoting Jesus, and it would be very good for them to read it, they should only get the paperback version because it has an additional appendix. The way you read Ehrman's material through his book. The unwary will think that man, the text changed so much, I don't know what to believe anymore. All our cardinal doctrines are shattered. And the scribes played a telephone game, all this kind of stuff. But they asked him point blank on page 252 of this appendix, said, why do you disagree with your mentor, Bruce Metzger, about the variants where you believe that they affected cardinal doctrines? And so this is their understanding of having read through this book carefully, you know, and I presume it's the editors, it's something who's doing this as well. He said, oh, I don't actually disagree with Professor Metzger. No cardinal doctrines are jeopardized by these textual variants. Now, that's not an exact quote. You can see it on page 252. But he also added something else that really plays into this really well, and that is about the 1/10 of 1%, the meaningful and violence Bible. I'm giving a really broad estimate on that. That would be about 1500 textual variants that are meaningful and Bible. They asked him, if you were locked in a room with Bruce Metzger and the two of you could not leave until you hammered out your differences of what you think the original New Testament said, how many difference do you think there'd be? And he said, oh, one, maybe two dozen.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

So I'm saying 1500. And he's saying between him and Metzger, one or two dozen. Now, what is considered a viable variant is whether the text has but or and in it. And sometimes these conjunctions change transpositions, the word order that you're not going to see in English and all that changes it a lot. But I'll give you an illustration of how many differences we theoretically could have for the New Testament. It would be an infinite number, absolutely infinite tens of millions. I give this illustration in my lectures on this. So I have a little Greek geek exercise that I show and say, how many ways are there to say John loves Mary in Greek? And since every time it would be translated, John loves Mary, not Mary is loved by John, not the passive. It translates always exactly the same John loves Mary. You have to take into account the article. We would call it the definite article. We don't know why it's used with proper names altogether. It's still. It hasn't affected any doctrine, but it's interesting to wrestle with Greek can say the John loves Mary, John loves the Mary, the John loves the Mary, or John loves Mary. So you got differences right there. Then you've got two different ways to spell John. It's Ioannes Johannes, you know, the German name for John. And it either has two N's or one, two nus is what they're called in Greek or one Nu. Every time we have that name, there are variants. Then Mary. There's actually five different ways to spell Mary. So you get this John loves Mary, three word sentence in English. And I spent literally eight hours one day coming up with all these. And then I realized, oh, I missed a whole batch of them. But I came up with, well, there's one other thing that is there's particles that don't get translated. They just add perhaps a little emphasis. Usually they're not translated. So I added a few of those particles in and I came up with 384 ways to say John loves Mary using present tense of agapa, the verb form of agape, not any other verb. And I realized, oh gosh, I think I missed close to 150. I never finished it out there, but I could say easily you could say John loves Mary. Over 500 ways of Greek.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

And the only change would be emphasis. Is it John or is it love's or Mary Transposition. These can be in any word or Greek's, a highly inflected language. So over 500 ways. And then I realized after I came up with this that there's a kind of construction for the verb that could be used that doubles everything right there. It's over a thousand ways, over 1000 ways to say John loves Mary in Greek. So a three word English translation, you've got how many. You know, when we say we got 10 times as many variants in the manuscript says we do words in the New Testament. Well, this would be 300 times the variance for what John loves Mary would be. So. And, and we could go on with a lot more. So.

[B]

Yeah, because I think for airmen, like,

[C]

you get the idea.

[B]

Yeah, I do, yeah. And for airmen, that it has such rhetorical punch for people to hear something like that. And I think what I appreciate about the work you do is it causes us to though to go, okay, let's think about what that actually means. Yes, there are more variants than there are words, but does that actually affect our ability to understand what the word says? And so I think that, yeah, I appreciate that explanation. Well, if you've got nothing further there, let's get into some of these clips because I feel like we can flesh this out even further as we look at some of these clips now. Now I will say this first clip is David Cross, who's a very well known actor and comedian. And I have. Actually your intern Peter Gurry was on my podcast before and we looked at this clip, but it's been years, so I'm kind of curious to see what you might say about it.

[C]

Yeah, Guri is so funny.

[B]

Yeah, he's great.

[C]

He's one of the two or three up and coming scholars that are going to make a huge impact in this field.

[B]

Well, he already has with his Fix and Mistakes book. I. That was just so corrective for so many of us in the apologetics world and all of that, so.

[C]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, let's watch this and then we'll get your thoughts about it.

[C]

All right.

[D]

One of my favorite things about the Bible is how antiquated all the things that are supposed to take place in the future are already. How all the prophecies, how completely antiquated they are because, you know, when the Bible was written and then rewritten and then edited and then re edited and then translated from dead languages, and then re translated and then re edited and then re, re, re edited and retranslated and then given to kings for them to take their favorite parts out and then re edited, then retranslated and then re edited and then given to the Pope for him to approve and then re retranslated, then re rewritten, then rewritten, re edited, re translated, re edited again, all based on. On stories that were told orally 30 to 90 years after they happened to people who didn't know how to write.

[B]

So.

[D]

I guess what I'm saying is the Bible is literally the world's oldest game of telephone.

[B]

Yeah. So there's that oops, going back to both of us here, that's that charge that you always hear. It's like a game of telephone that we all played when we were kids. And I remember playing in first grade, you'd sit in a circle and the teacher would whisper something into the first person's ear. Then they'd whisper it into the next person's ear and you'd go all the way around the circle. And almost always by the time you got to that last person, it wasn't just a little bit different from what was originally spoken. It was an entirely different message. And so this is something we see very commonly and skeptical TikTok and social media world. And then of course articulated here by David Cross. So, Dan, is the New Testament like a game of telephone? Like he said, was it written and then edited and then re edited and then translated and then written again and then edited more and then translated again and then kings and popes and all that, you know, had their say. Tell us what's really going on here. Springtime is here, which means summer is right around the corner and with everybody home more. Now that my kids aren't going to their homeschool tutorials for the summer, I realize how much of life actually happens in the kitchen and specifically around the table. And that's why it's so important to me to as often as I can have dinner on the table for my family. And that's why I choose Good Ranchers. So there are a few things that are so exciting going on with Good Ranchers right now. Number one, their custom boxes are now live. The second I heard about this, I went right into my account and I switched my box to get just the things that I want and that made so much difference. So now whether it's grass fed beef or better than organic chicken, I can just go to my freezer and pull out what I want to serve that night for my family. I would really encourage you to support Good Ranchers. They're Christian owned. They don't give your money to woke companies. They're pro life. And when you subscribe, you're gonna get free meat for life and $25 off your first order. So go to goodranchers.com today. Use that code ELISA to get free meat for life and 25 off your first order. Again, goodranchers.com use my code ALISA.

[C]

Well, you can tell immediately that David Cross has done his homework. He's a scholar of Hebrew and Greek and he really knows all the issues and how the text has been changed.

[B]

Clearly.

[C]

But in a different world than ours, it has no relation to the telephone game. I want to read something from Newsweek that came out in December 2014. It's a short quote, but it's along the same lines. And maybe this is where Cross got this. Do you know when he did that?

[B]

It's been a while. It's been a few years at least. I don't know exactly when that's from.

[C]

Well, Kurt Eichenwalt wrote an article in Newsweek that appeared in December of 2014. And it's interesting to note that when you have skeptics speaking about the Bible, the resurrection, this kind of thing, and they get airtime right around Christmas and right around Easter, always that's when the skeptics come out and say, you stupid Christians, get a life and be real. Okay, so this was in Newsweek, which is supposed to be at least representing the news in some sense. So he's got this article called the Bible so misunderstood it's a sin. And then he has a section called Playing Telephone with the Word of God. Here's what he says. No television preacher has ever read the Bible Bible. Neither has any evangelical politician, neither has the Pope, neither have I. And so far he may be telling the truth and neither have you. At best, we've all read a bad translation, a translation of translations of translations of hand copied copies of copies of copies of copies and on and on hundreds of times. That kind of statement is so unbelievably irresponsible. And it comes from. There are certain Muslims that like to say this, I guess, but the telephone game, if you actually parse what he's saying, it sounds like what David Cross said, that we don't have any access to the early forms, we only have the later forms and the ones that kings and popes have changed. Well, let's take a look at the difference between the telephone game and the transmission of the New Testament. The telephone game is a parlor game. It's also called Chinese whispers somewhere else, not in America though, I think. And it's a game where you have somebody read a story or relay a story, you know, a very short one, maybe 30 seconds of material, maybe even a little bit less, whispers to the next person in line. And that person then whispers to the next person in line. If you didn't quite hear it, you can't ask them to repeat it. So you're going to have stuff that's missing and if you can't quite remember it, you've got to make sense out of it. So you're going to have some additions and you're hearing it orally by whispers, no way to correct it. And it goes down the line. And it's meant to be a fun game that shows how fast rumors can spread, you know, orally. The last person in the line then says what the story is and everybody has a great laugh because it doesn't even come close to the first person. Okay, now let's say we had a telephone game with the New Testament. And instead of spread out just in an evening, we have it going through centuries instead of one room. We have the Mediterranean world. We have original manuscripts that are then sent to various places. And these churches started to copy them, others started to copy them. For example, Paul writes to the Romans from Corinth and they get this letter and then associate who new Paul comes from Corinth some years later, after Paul had died. And he says, I understand that you guys got a letter from Paul. We have two from him in Corinth. But you got a letter from Paul also. Would it be okay if my secretary wrote that out, copied it out and said, sure, sure, that's fine, that's great. This is before Paul's letters were actually even viewed as scripture for the most part. So you get people that are copying it, but that's not the only person who copies it. It gets copied and copied and copied and copied that original document until by the end of the second century they've all turned to dust. Written on papyrus, they no longer exist. But you have multiple copies that are first generation copies. And then somebody comes along, second, third generation, and there's ancient papyri in libraries of literary documents had a lifespan of typically between 100 and 300 years, or 150 and 300 years, something along those lines. So if it's a literary document, you can understand why it would still last. If you look at Plato's Republic, that's not your lifeblood to survive today from persecutions. You know, it's interesting reading. Nobody's going to come to your house and take it thinking that this is something that is heretical or suspect or, you know, something like that, right? The New Testament, not. So it gets copied and copied and read and read in that very first generation. Then you get the second and third generation and you got a guy who comes along and say he's from Philippi and he wants to go to Rome. And he says, I'd like to see that original journal of Romans. And they said, well, we don't have anymore, but we have these three copies that are really good first generation copies. And so he looks at them, makes comparisons, then goes on from there. Now you've got, in this telephone game scenario, we're going on for 1500 years and scribes are copying by sight, not by sound. That's largely a myth. A lot of scholars in the past have said the scribes were in a scriptorium where one person would read the scripture slowly out loud and everybody would copy it. That could hardly be true. The fact that the pens need to be re inked so often, the fact that maybe scribes couldn't hear so well, all those kinds of things. We have almost no evidence that scribes actually copied down what a reader is reading, almost all of them direct copies from a manuscript in front of them. Then you have these manuscripts before they go out of the scriptorium. They would be corrected by what's called a Dior Thotes. And that could be the same scribe if he's a really good scribe or she. Because the scribes were men and women, women. It could be a really good scribe who looks over the manuscript, corrects it by looking at the document they were writing from. Or it could be the person in charge of the copying of scripture, the de orthotes, and he checks it before it goes out. Okay. Then you've got not just the last person in the line. So we're not looking at manuscripts from the 15th or even the 16th century and guessing what the original said. So when David Cross said this, he has no concept of the transmissional history of Scripture. And even the King James Bible, which was for the New Testament, was based on very, very late manuscripts. It was based on nine manuscripts, essentially, the oldest of which was from the 11th century. And it was. They didn't like that one as much. So it was based on these later manuscripts. So it's, you know, 600 years older than them at the oldest. Now we have before the 11th century, we have nearly 1,000 manuscripts in Greek alone that have been discovered and examined. So you look at that and you say, oh, oh, we're in a whole lot better shape. Well, do we have any earlier from the 10th century? Oh, yeah. You go back to the third century, and we have. By the fourth century, we have 61 manuscripts including. So this is the three hundreds, including the first complete Greek New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Sinaiticus also was originally a whole Bible. And we have quite a few leaves of the Old Testament of this manuscript. It. It's now at the British Library on display. The New Testament is. And it's a fascinating story how they ended up with. It came from St. Catherine's Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai. I spent a week there and looked at some other manuscripts, but it's a very, very good copy, but with a lot of mistakes. I would consider it perhaps our third most important, if not second most important manuscript of the New Testament Testament. So we also have manuscripts from the third century and even from the second century. Now, here's the thing. We got these papyri from the second century. Not very many of them. The estimates can go as high as 12 or maybe sitting on the fence between the late hundreds and the early two hundreds. But when you look at these manuscripts and all the papyri, we have about 135papyri today that the latest one would be the early seventh century, but most are third and fourth century. And we have a number in the second century. What's amazing about these papyri is we thought when they started to be analyzed and scholars decided this is helpful material, they thought, well, maybe it's going to change what we think the original text said by giving us a new reading that we had not seen before before. Here's the amazing thing. The papyri, as important as they are, and they're extraordinarily important, have not changed one word in the text in that they haven't given us a word or a textual variant that we've not seen before in other witnesses. Now, my Greek New Testament has. Maybe I can show it on the screen here. This is Second Corinthians. Oops, I gotta. Gotta pull it back a little bit. There we go. It's hard for me.

[B]

Yeah, I've got you on full screen now, so you can see it.

[C]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Anyway, there's the text goes down to here, here, and then you got the apparatus where you have the texture variance. Every page is like that. Some of them have more variance than others, of course, but I would say that, except perhaps for one or two places, we know what the original text said because it's either above the line or below the line. It's on the page. The papyri, then. These early second and third century manuscripts especially, have functioned in a confirmatory role. They have not done anything radical. And so I think that's remarkable that the earlier we go, we still, oh, yeah, Vaticanus. At the Vatican, that's still our best witness. And we say, oh, these papyri, they don't look any better. So I think that's an important point. We get the early manuscripts multiple lines of transmission, and sometimes the lines cross, pollinate too. So we get a lot of mixture in these mixtures. It's fascinating. You don't just interview the 15th person on the line, you interview the second person in the line. Second century, you know. So if this is the telephone game, it's the most poorly devised telephone game ever. Because in 1500 years of copying the growth of the text, which we'd expect, we'd expect it to grow over time, where you get additions here and there, clarifications especially, it's grown no more than 2% in 1500 years. That's essentially the difference between the King James or the Greek text behind it and our early manuscripts. 2% growth. If I were a financier, I'd say, yeah, invest in the transmission of the New Testament, because in 1500 years, you're getting. Get a 2% return.

[B]

Right. No, that's so fascinating too. And the way I think about it, too, and maybe you can comment on this, is if it really was the game of telephone. The game of telephone requires there just being like one stream of the message going from this person to that person to this person. But as you've described just now, you have pockets kind of exploding from all over the place. Right. So you have scribes copying and this place, and then they send it over here. So it's actually flowering out from all over and not just in one continual line of like the telephone game.

[C]

Right, right. And that's so critical to understand. So when he says, you know, it's been copied, recopied, edited, translated. We don't have anything except stuff that the kings and popes have changed. Well, really, I mean, that goes back to the myth that Constantine added the deity of Christ to the New Testament Testament, which any historian knows is a really stupid statement to make because we have manuscripts from before Constantine that affirmed the deity of Christ.

[B]

And we're going to get to a TikTok video where she makes just about that same claim. Or maybe it's the next one. Let's see what this next one is. Unless you have anything else on the David Cross one, because we're kind of getting into this.

[C]

There's plenty. Just to say the telephone game. Wrong headed.

[B]

Okay, Wrong headed. I love it. All right, here is the second video.

[C]

In the third century, there was a church father named Origen, a very prominent and prolific Christian author. He wrote a commentary on Matthew and he noted some of the problems in the New Testament text that we still see today. He said the differences among the manuscripts have become great. Either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others, they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed or in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.

[B]

Okay, so there's kind of this claim that there were these additions and deletions made. And what do you have to say about that one? One of the ministries that my husband and I personally partner with each month by donating to them is Allian Family Services. They are a network of pregnancy centers whose vision is to compete directly with Planned Parenthood by operating a nationwide network of reproductive healthcare clinics that are medically exceptional and unapologetically Christian. They do all sorts of services like pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, STI testing and treatment, well, woman exams, pap smears, miscarriage management, and so much more. In fact, they do a lot of services that Planned Parenthood doesn't provide like life affirming prenatal care to 20 weeks. They're also one of the few pregnancy help organizations that give 24, seven care and immediate visits for women seeking abortion pill reversal. So if they regret taking that first pill, even if it's four o' clock in the morning, they can call and they can get that reversed right away. And they do this because they're donor funded and they're able to bring the gospel into to every appointment with nothing held back. I really want to encourage my listeners to give to them because they have a goal of having 30 clinics by 2030. They want to see child sacrifice and I want to see child sacrifice end in our nation. So by providing God honoring reproductive healthcare clinics to save as many lives as possible while advocating for laws that will protect the preborn. I think this could happen in our lifetime. So go toalliance family services.org Alisa today and you could do a one time donation or sign up like we did for monthly donations. Again, that's alliancefamilyservices.org Alisa

[C]

it's yeah, everybody, everybody knows about Origen's quote. It's been around for a long, long time. Let me give you the broader statement of what Origen says. This is in his commentary on Matthew, specifically Matthew 19:19. This is about the rich young ruler who comes to see Jesus and it's talking about what you need to obey. And he talks about honor your father and your mother and love your neighbor as yourself. Now that's different from what Mark has. But Origen had problems when the Gospels don't say exactly the same thing. And what's interesting is the most ubiquitous textual variant we have are variants that occur between Matthew, Mark and Luke because they're all using the same source, at least one source. Matthew and Luke both used Mark and they also used a different source that's called Q, which could be oral tradition or written. I think it's a combination of both. But the general consensus of New Testament scholars is that Mark's got Gospel was written first and Matthew and Luke changed some things because they were authors. Luke, he did it from spending two years in Palestine while Paul was in a Caesarean prison before he went to Rome. And so he's interviewing people he talked to, Mary talked to other people and sure. So he's going to get this from the eyewitnesses. He was a good historian. Mark Mark gets it from Peter. The ancient church unanimously said Mark got his gospel from Peter's messages and Peter would repeat These over and over and over again in different settings. One scholar pointed out, let's say Peter gave 16 messages a month, one for each chapter of Mark. And let's say Mark's Gospel wasn't published for, say, 30 years. Well, how many times would Peter have said the same story? So every year it's a dozen. And multiply that by 30. So, you know, it's probably about, what, 360 times he's saying the same story over and over again. And it's not to people who could not read. The Jews were far, far more literate than has been mentioned before, as were the Greeks and Romans. But we won't get into that. That's a different issue. Okay, so let me give you the full context, and then I'll just go through rapidly some key points about this. This is a blanket charge that skeptics love to use against the careful copying of the New Testament. But do they give examples? Hardly ever. And here's the quote in context. But it is clear that the differences between the copies have become numerous, either from the shoddy work, this is a more modern translation of copyists, or from wicked recklessness of some, either in neglecting to correct what is written, or even in adding or removing things based on their own opinions when they do correct. We discovered that the disagreements between copies of the Old Covenant he's talking about the Old Testament are cleared up up if God grants it when we use the other versions as a criterion. The Hebrew Bible was translated into Syriac and Greek and other ancient versions very, very early on. And then he goes on, he says, we marked some passages with an obelisk since they do not appear in the Hebrew text. We added other passages and marked them with asterisks that it might be clear that they do not appear in the Septuagint, but were added by us from the other translations in agreement with the Hebrew text. Now, what he's talking about here specifically is his major work, the hexapla. Have you heard of the Hexapla?

[B]

I haven't.

[C]

Hexapla implies that it's seven different versions of something. This was his life's work to look at seven different versions, each one in a different language for the Old Testament.

[B]

Hey, friends, just a quick pause here to jump in with a correction that Dan asked me to make. So Dan reviewed this whole episode and realized that he misspoke here. So the hexapla is not seven different versions of the Old Testament, it's six. So I just wanted to make that correction. So there's no confusion.

[C]

We don't have any complete copies of the hexapla. We have pages here and there and that's it. But it wasn't copied because it was massive, absolutely massive documents. Now what we do know though is it's the most minute details that Origen got frustrated at, that the manuscripts disagreed on these things. He was, it's really the best term to use for him. He was anal and he's a detailed scholar, great scholar, but he was very anal in terms of sometimes he'd miss the forest for the trees and he'd be looking at just the details that irked him. Now one of those details when it comes to the New Testament is the Gospels where they have different wording for things. And Origen said sometimes people make up these readings on the spot. Well, he made one up also about the legion, the man who suffered with a couple thousand demons in him. And anyway, so we do have these kinds of changes. But it's interesting we know that Origen did this. We have these early scholars who write commentaries, they talk about variants. So we know very early on from these various church fathers going all the way back to the second century about the variants. And let me point out then a couple of points here to make about all this. But first there was one principal locale where the copying of the manuscripts, the Greek manuscripts especially, was done very carefully and accurately. This is in Alexandria, Egypt, which had the world's leading library till Caesar destroyed it, then it rebuilt it and then the Muslims destroyed it later. But their goal was to have every single book, book ever published in their library. And Aristophanes of Byzantium, who became the head librarian in about 200 BC, developed some rules for copying to make the most accurate copies possible. Alexandria was known as if you want to get an accurate copy, get one from Alexandria. It's like, are you going to go with Timbuktu Press or Oxford University Press? Well we know which one has been looked at more carefully. Get self published books. And there's so many mistakes, it's funny. And you know, you get these from people really, really way out there and they just, they just need some help. But so Alexandria was like the Oxford University Press of the ancient world. And Aristophanes actually came up with symbols that would alert the reader to different things. And we see those same symbols at times in our Greek New Testament manuscripts. And the asterisk at times would be maybe used a little differently than what Aristophanes said are the same. But when we see an asterisk in the margin of a passage that often, if not usually, indicates that the scribe wrote it because he saw it in one of the manuscripts he was copying, but he did not think it was original. And so I actually photographed one of these manuscripts that Charles Ryrie, who had been a professor at Dallas Seminary for many years, he had this magnificent manuscript. It's about John 5, 3B and 4, about the angel coming down and stirring up the waters, which is in the King James Bible, but not modern translation. The scribe puts an asterisk right there saying, nope, not original.

[B]

So they were doing textual criticism as they were copying a little bit?

[C]

Absolutely they were, yeah. And that's the amazing thing is, especially when you get church fathers that are quoted in the margins, they will talk about the text and they'll say, well, this is what the original wording has to say. But then the text that's copied may have something different, but they'll comment about it. And that's, that's just extraordinarily helpful information. Okay, so let me add this about Alexander, because our best witnesses that come from the ancient world are, generally speaking from Alexandria or its vicinity. This would include all of the papyri because they come from Egypt. And it also includes these major parchment manuscripts that start going in the 4th century. And so you've got Codex Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, two great 4th century manuscripts, Alexandrinus, Codex Ephraemi, Rescriptus. All four of those manuscripts originally had the whole Bible in them in Greek. Now here's what Metzger has to say about the significance of Alexandria for copying the New Testament. Understand this. There are a number of scholars who say the earliest period was a period of wild copying and it took a century or more before they started to settle this all down. That's really based on classical texts. Classical texts, 4th and 5th century BC in particular, before Aristophanes came up with the rules for accurate copying. And consequently, because he's doing it in 200 B.C. all of the New Testament manuscripts that come from Alexandria or were copies of manuscripts that came from Alexandria are going to be more accurate and that we don't have that wild period of copying in the beginning. So here's what Bruce Metzger says in his book the Text of the New Testament. And I'm reading from the fourth edition where Bart Ehrman was co author. It's pages 277 and 78. It would be a mistake to think that the uncontrolled copying practices that led to the formation of the Western textual tradition. We'll get into that in just a second were followed everywhere the texts were reproduced. In the Roman Empire in particular, there is solid evidence that in at least one major see S E E that's you know, major, one of the five major churches of the ancient world of early Christendom, the city of Alexandria, there was conscious and conscientious control exercised in the copying of the books of the New Testament. Alexandria had a long history of classical scholarship. It is no surprise then to find that textual witnesses connected to Alexandria test a very high quality of textual transmission from the earliest, earliest times. It was there that a very ancient line of text was copied and preserved. A book that, that Bart Ehrman co authored and agreed with.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So what are the wild copies that Origen may be referring to? I'm not sure altogether if he's referring to a particular group of manuscripts or if it's just his sense of being such a detail oriented person with a hexapla that anything that misses it he's going to complain about. But people quote his statement without looking at the actual variants. So he would not have complained nearly as much about the manuscripts produced in Alexandria. But the so called Western text, it came from the east but got to the west was really a loose conglomeration of freer renderings. And what's interesting to me is that most of these manuscripts are either diglots or in a completely different language. What that tells me at least this is a good hypothesis to work from is the Western text seems to have been motivated by missionary impetus. Let's get this text out there to people as fast as we can. Hence the diglots. We only have three, only three manuscripts that are Western that are Greek alone.

[B]

What is a diaglot?

[C]

Oh, I'm sorry, I should. Yeah, that's where it's two languages, two gloss, two, two, two tongues. Yeah, thank you for that. Sorry, I'm speaking chop and I forget sometimes. So most of them are in, in Latin alone we have some in Coptic, some in Greek and Coptic, but just three papyri that have been sort of identified as Western. Now Westcot and where almost 150 years ago now complained about the Western text, they recognized that the manuscripts have a great ancestry because we have church fathers from the second period that quote from the Western textual stream. Our prime example of the wildness of these manuscripts is called Codex D or also Codex Beza. It came from Theodore Beza as a gift to Cambridge University and I've seen it in the flesh. I spent a day with, took three weeks to finally get Permission at the Cambridge University Library. But it had to go through several channels. And I understood that maybe it would end up going to Parliament to make a decision to see if I could see along with another scholar, Peter Hess. But we were able to spend a whole day with the manuscript and it had Bezos letter written in Latin to the effect that this is a manuscript that Cambridge University should have because it just seems to be a good place for Cambridge and some see that as a dig. Are you saying this manuscript, which is so crazy at times, Cambridge University is also crazy, so it fits in with their attitudes. I don't know. Know. But there has been an actual Basin Club in the early 20th century where scholars would debate about these readings in Codex Beza. And we have, when we look at variants of the New Testament, there's. There's five kinds of variants. Substitution, addition, subtraction and transposition. So those substitution, addition, subtraction, transposition. And the fifth kind is total rewrite. That's because of what Beza does, not because of what Alexandrian manuscripts do. He has the earliest form of the story of the woman caught in adultery, but it was not followed by others. It came out in different forms in the later manuscripts. So I'd say, yeah, okay. Origen was complaining about these and the Western text clearly existed in his day. And I suspect that he may have been thinking about that. So. And let me just make a final point about this and we can move on. I'm sorry, I'm.

[B]

No, it's good.

[C]

So much time. Maybe you'll break this into two episodes. Whatever you want to do. Yeah. So I suspect that Origen, as I said, was so detail oriented that he couldn't see the forest from the trees. At times, some scholars are so analytical that even the slightest textual error disturbs them. Now, you may know that I wrote a Greek grammar that's been largely the standard in the English speaking world. I wrote it 30 years ago. I'll be revising it soon. But it's been translated into half a dozen languages. It's almost 900 pages long. And so as a grammarian, not just of Greek, but also of English, there are certain sayings or combinations, syntax combinations that are like hearing somebody put their fingernails on a chalkboard and scrape it. It's brutal to my ears to hear this. I'll give you some examples. Between you and I. Between is a preposition. It requires the objective case. Would you say between I and somebody? Well, maybe somebody's going to butcher it like that way, but it's between you and me. It's a preposition. They don't take the subjective case, the nominative case. So that's one that I hear all the time. How about Julie and me went to Arkansas? I even hear that kind of thing from linguists, linguists of the Greek New Testament, sometimes who are unaware of even how their own language works. It's crazy to see that politicians do this kind of stuff. I was watching Faithful the Women of the Bible last night with my wife, which is a really unusual. Have you seen the series?

[B]

No, I haven't.

[C]

The Faithful Women of the Bible, where they take tons of licenses with the actual stories in Genesis. But actually in the script for the narrator, it was something like between you and I. And I thought even the script writers who are trying to emulate highbrow, almost King Jamesish, ish English, because everybody's got a British accent and it's going in that direction. They don't know language, how it works. Okay, here's another one. Let, he who is without sin cast the first stone. Let is a verb. So the object of the verb is never going to be he or I. It's going to be him. In this case, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. So they get the I because it becomes the subject of the verb cast, but it's the object of let to start with. So you have to do it that way.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

So you may be spinning your head thinking, oh, I've done that. I've done that. But I don't know. I don't know what that's.

[B]

I probably have, but I agree with you because I actually became a lot more aware of this stuff when I wrote my first book because I feel bad for my editor. I probably had a ton of that. And they were so good about correcting that kind of stuff, which made me more aware of it. And I suspect if I asked my editor, I think my third book was probably better than my first as far as that kind of stuff goes, because, yeah, I think there's. When stuff is in the common vernacular and you're not really thinking about it, then you know, from a grammar, you know, from third grade grammar that you had when you were a kid, it can be. You can almost adopt the. The common usage rather than what is the correct way. So. Yeah, that's a good point. And I mean, you know, when you write and you.

[C]

If you've got a good editor, they're going to correct that.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

Let me give one last example.

[B]

Yeah, please.

[C]

The one last example is I Could care less.

[B]

No, I've definitely said that.

[C]

The expression is I could not care less.

[B]

I could not care less.

[C]

If you could care less, this means you care more.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

But it has become so popular in modern parlance that we drop the knot. But, you know, when I see a journalist or a politician or. Or an author or a screenwriter, I see this kind of stuff on tv. And when I see it on tv, I let out a groan like, oh, my gosh, how could they? I mean, I was telling my wife that she doesn't care. She says, quit being so grammarical. You know, she loves to tease me on bad grammar all the time. But. So I realize I'm very anal, too, but I suspect this kind of thing affected origin much worse.

[B]

Yeah. And because there can be a personality or disposition type of thing behind this, and I'm not a scholar at all, but just my average Christian with a Bible perspective of seeing that video, it makes me want to say to that guy. So you're telling me that the early church fathers were extremely careful about things like textual criticism. They were actually really annoyed when people would change the text, and they were aware of it, and so that might motivate. Motivate them to be more careful in preserving it. And they still believed it was the inspired word of God. Like, you know, it's like they say on TikTok, it's not the flex you think it is. Maybe. I don't know. But that's. I mean, maybe that's not the right way to look at it. But I'm just thinking, like, that just tells me that these guys were extremely, like you said, anal and careful. And that origin especially. Yeah. Okay.

[C]

These various church fathers were in different regions and at different times. And so they may not have had access to some of these older manuscripts, but we can trace the variance through. It's. It's pretty easy. Okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah, we should.

[B]

Very good. All right, let's look at this last one here.

[A]

You know, Emperor Constantine 325 CE, he called the Council of Nicaea, demanding that the bishops agree on one official doctrine, the Nicene Creed. Then he turned around and condemned anybody who believed otherwise as a heretic. Many who refused to bow to that version were punished or killed. After Jesus and death, dozens of writings began circulating. Letters, gospels, poems, revelations, all from different communities with different beliefs. Some followed Paul's letters. You know, Paul, guy who never actually met Jesus, but somehow wrote half of the New Testament that Paul. Others followed mystical texts like the Gospel of Mary or Gospel of Thomas. There wasn't one single Bible. Just hundreds of voices trying to make sense of things. But the church needed one official story. So at the council of Hippo and Carthage, bishops affirmed the 27 books that fit the Nicean version of Christianity. They kept the four gospels that aligned Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They kept Paul's letters that backed obedience, sin, salvation through faith, Revelations, the fear and judgment book that kept people in line. Everything else was declared heresy, especially the text that said God is within you, that honored the feminine or that taught self sovereignty. Many texts were lost or destroyed under the push for a single empire approved religion. Constantine then commissioned 50 imperial copies of the scriptures for his new capital, Constantinople. Those became the first state sponsored Bibles. One version officially backed by empire. That's how the Bible was formed.

[B]

Okay, so Dan, when I was being discipled by the progressive like so much of these kind of claims were involved. So there's the, the idea that Constantine came in and corrupted everything. There's the idea that she didn't directly say this, but that there's this common claim that all of the books of the Bible were chosen at the, at the Council of Nicaea and that was because Constantine picked the books of the Bible. There's all these claims about even Gnosticism and that there's this notion that there were all these different options, almost like a buffet. And Christians, you know, was the theological winners that got to determined the state sanctioned Bible which was all going back to Constantine. There's a lot in this, there's a lot in this claim. But I do think that just boots on the ground, this is the kind of thing that the average Christian is facing when they're interacting with a friend at coffee or they're opening their social media. So help us untangle some of these knots.

[C]

There are so many people that believe this. To me it's amazing how the urban legend of Constantine inventing the Bible and inventing the deity of Christ still finds a ready audience today. Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, atheists and Muslims especially like to hold to this. I want to add one quote here from somebody who would be a tad more reputable than this woman. Do you know who that was?

[B]

No, I just, just in the, you know, in the whole deconstruction TikTok thing, it's, it's not like there's these, there are leaders, but there are so many just average people that have these TikTok accounts that get all these interactions and views just because they've deconstructed and they're not necessarily a You know, an authority on anything. They're just a guy with a TikTok channel. So I don't think that she's like any kind of leader, just. Just somebody that's making videos.

[C]

Yeah, well, she throws a lot of stuff out there, but I want to focus on. On the canon and the deity of Christ because she brought both of those up for the Nicene Council. But let me quote first from M.M. al Azami. He was a British Muslim apologist, the best known British Muslim apologist, and he wrote. He died just a few years ago. He wrote the history of the Quranic text, you know, the Quran from Revelation to compilation, A comparative study with the Old and New Testaments. So in this book he makes this statement. The Orthodox Church, being the sect which eventually established supremacy over all the others, stood in fervent opposition to various ideas, also known as heresies, which were in circulation. And he puts heresies in quotes because he says, no, those weren't heresies, they're all different views. These included adoptionism, the notion that Jesus was not God but a man, Docetism, the opposite view that he was God and not man, and separationism, that the divine and human elements of Jesus Christ were two separate beings. In each case, this sect, the one that would rise to become the Orthodox Church, deliberately corrupted the Scriptures so as to reflect its own theological visions of Christ while demolishing that of all rival sects. Now he's making some really interesting charges that are largely baseless. They deliberately corrupted the Scriptures? No, they carefully copied the Scriptures. The idea that Constantine invented the deity of Christ is proven absolutely false by our early manuscripts, like Papyrus 66, probably. It has most of John's Gospel and it was written somewhere between 200 and 250, so at least 75 years before the Council of Nicaea. And it says in John 1:1 what every single manuscript, no matter the language, no matter the date, says in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Now, there are some slight differences in later manuscripts, but none of them affecting that central statement that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. How could Constantine invent that if it was already around at least 75, perhaps closer to 125 years before the Council Nicaea. The Council of Nicaea actually happened because what was happening in Egypt between Alexander and Arius, a man who was just spouting that there was a time when Christ was not, when Jesus Christ was not the second person, so called, of the Trinity was not. And so Constantine sent a Spanish ambassador who was kind of representing more of the. The Western Church, the Catholic Church, down to resolve these issues. And it blew out of. It just blew out of proportion. So what happened is Constantine, from the advice of this Spanish scholar, said, we need to have a council to discuss what do we mean by the deity of Christ? And there were 320 members by some counts. All but two signed off on the Nicene Creed from all over the Mediterranean world. The two that didn't, well, they were Arians and their view was condemned. Now, Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code says, yeah, they had the Council of Nicaea and the vote for the deity of Christ was relatively close. He doesn't tell you the numbers. 318, 2. In what universe would you call that close? Relatively close. It doesn't make any sense. So this is the overall thing I'd like to say. Christians have evidence, and an ounce of evidence is worth a pound of presumption. This is what we need to ask people when they come with glittering generalities, say, where's the evidence for this? Where? In the Nicene Council, they took copious notes on what they decided. Where is it found that they said, this is what goes into the Bible? They didn't do that at all as far as the deity of Christ. It was. They were concerned with how do we define it clearly for the churches to follow. And about Constantine wanting to kill anybody who disagreed. Well, he actually changed his views a few years later. Now, about the canon then. It's interesting that no worldwide church council ever decided what was Scripture. That's an amazing fact.

[B]

Yeah, a lot of people don't know that.

[C]

Yeah, the Council of Hippo 393, Carthage, 397. They were regional synods or councils. The closest thing we have to a worldwide council that mentioned which books belonged in the Bible is actually the Council of Trent, which represented all of Catholicism in the 1530s. And they approved the Apocrypha. Those books that Protestants don't have in their Bibles, they put in theirs. The others were already recognized. Now, I think that's hilarious. You know that you don't get a council till the 16th century. And they're adding the Apocrypha because even Jerome complained about those books. I'm not so sure we should treat these as Scripture.

[B]

Right, Right.

[C]

So the Protestant canon for the Old Testament follows the Hebrew canon. Those 22 books were split into others. So we have 39 books in the Protestant Old Testament. And The Catholics have 14 or 15 intertestamental books that are not in heaven. Hebrew. They're in Greek. And some of it is. It's very interesting to read. There's some history. First Maccabees is pretty decent history. And you've got some stories in there that are really amazing to read. Every Christian should. Should read this. This is where synagogues come from, where Pharisees come from. And you know, you're reading that and you go, wait a minute. This is a Greek who has conquered the Jews. And then you get into a Roman era. And so none of it's scripture, but it's helpful history. It's the most important piece of history we have for that period among the Jews. Now, they even said in the Apocrypha that nobody is writing inspired scripture or prophetic scripture nowadays. There is no prophet today. And so how is it possible for this to be Scripture? You know, let me tell you a little bit more about the Council of Nicaea. I suspect your listeners by now will know who Eusebius is. He was the church father who wrote ecclesiastical history and several volumes. It fills in the gaps. He wrote it absolutely no later than A.D. 324, probably a little earlier. Earlier, Eusebius wrote a book called the Life of Constantine. And it's very hard to get a hold of. But in that book, Eusebius was vain enough to list all of the documents that he ever got from Constantine, the letters. There's not one that ever talks about what is in the scripture. In 332, Constantine says, I want you to have 50 Bibles made up for the new capital city, Constantinople, or New Rome is what they also called it. But he didn't dictate what the books were. Eusebius has in book three, I think it's chapter 15 or 25. It doesn't matter. I mean, it does if you really look at material. But he talks about this was his fetish. The canon was his side project for his whole life. And he talks about books that fit into four different categories. Homologumina, antilagomena, pseudepigrapha and apocrypha. Now, of those four categories, two were definitely out Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. And this is an attitude that the early Church had. I think it's a very important point. Point. If the Church detected that something, a pseudepigraphon means written by somebody under a false attribution, wrong name. So if the Church detected that something was a forgery or a pseudepigraphon, they immediately said, there's no way that that is part of our canon. And What Eusebius did, he looked through the church annals of the five major Cs, these five major churches, tracing it back to the first century to the original recipients of these books. And those who really, I don't want to use the word, decided what was Scripture. Those churches that discovered what was scripture is far better. And. And it was the whole ancient church, but it wasn't any one particular council. The term homologumina for Eusebius meant that this is a book which has been attested from the primitive church that received it right up until our time. Unanimously, all the bishops of these churches affirmed, yes, this is by Paul, something like that. So. So that was an important point. And there was a liberal scholar who did. He wrote a book called Constantine's Bible, and he said, that's what this term homologumina means. It's a specific term. Constantine or Eusebius used to say, these are the books that are unequivocally part of the New Testament. They are absolutely certain, we're absolutely certain these were not written by forgers. And they have a tradition of going back to the earliest times. It's interesting that some of these skeptics who write about forgeries and Bart Ehrman has, I think, done the Evangelical Church a great service in his book Forgery, God Lied. I forgot what it is. He makes sensational titles too, but he is talking about the internal evidence about whether a manuscript is from such and such an alternate. I don't think he has a word about the Church Fathers. That's every bit as important as what we see internally. And the fathers unanimously said, this book is by so and so. This by so and so. Now, Hebrews was different. The Greek Church said, oh, yeah, this is by Paul, therefore it's Scripture. The Latin Church said, no, it's not by Paul, therefore it's not scripture. So they had these debates that went on for a long time time. But by the time that Eusebius wrote his Ecclesiastical History, they were included in Scripture. Hebrews was included. And the east and Western Church decided whether this is by Paul or not, it still is Scripture. So it's interesting. In the manuscripts, Hebrews floats in the Pauline corpus from beginning to end. In our oldest manuscript to Paul, P46, it comes right after Romans. In most of our earlier manuscripts, it comes right after the letters to the churches after two Thessalonians. And in the later manuscripts, it comes after all of Paul's 13 letters. The standard Greek New Testament that is used today has just come out with a different order for the Books of the New Testament, and I think translations will have this too. They are putting Hebrews after 2 Thessalonians, because it's a letter to churches. And after the Gospels in Acts, they have the Catholic epistles before they get to Paul, because we have a number of early main scripts that have it in that order. So we go, wait a minute, how does this work? And so some English translations will probably follow suit, but I think it might take them a time. It's still the same books. Okay, so in terms of the canon, then we have the homologumina and we have the antilagomena. Those are books that Eusebius said were accepted by most of the churches, but not by all. And it seems that there were three criteria for discovering what the canon was that the early Church used. The first would be apostolicity. Was it written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle? If so, then it's in. The second canon would be catholicity, as accepted by most of the churches. All of the churches would be preferred. And the vast majority of the New Testament books that Eusebius calls homologumina, I think it's something like 22, 23 of the new Testament books. So you get the smaller ones that he questions. So catholicity accepted by most of the churches, and for most of these books accepted by all the churches and Orthodoxy, does it agree with what we already know to be Scripture? The Gospels were accepted very, very early on, and consequently that became their standard of what Jesus said. And the hymns that were sung, that go back to the earliest period too. So apostolicity, orthodoxy, catholicity, those are the criteria that they used, and they never stated it. But if you say that the Church determined the canon, the problem that creates is then you have an authority over the canon that determines the canon, and that's the Catholic view of the canon. The Church determines the canon. The Protestant view is the church discovery heard what's what the Holy Spirit had inspired. And that's why there's no universal council that declares this is canon. It's something that emerged naturally from a recognition and from very early on. Have you heard of the Muratorian fragment?

[B]

I have. I wrote a blog post on it, yeah.

[C]

Oh, did you really?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

So you know more than I do. You're probably fresher on it. But it's got at least 22 of the books, right? Is it 22? 21.

[B]

I'm looking. I wrote this back in. Let me see. This would have been in 2017. So it's been a while, but confirms 22 out of the 27.

[C]

Yeah. That's remarkable.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And it was written in the second half of the second century. So already we've got this canon. And it's just so silly to say that Constantine invented it when Eusebius already knew what the 27 books were. Between the Homilagumina and the Antelagomena, Constantine's letters never said anything about, about. Here's what's going to go in these books. The Nicene Council never had a word on the canon. And in 332 when Constantine said make 50 Bibles for the churches in Constantinople, Eusebius already knew what they were because that was his big side project of his whole life.

[B]

Yeah. You know, it's fascinating as I'm hearing you talk, how somebody can just go on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube and make a video like you said, that just makes a bunch of claims that are basically been very much debunked by now. And it's such a different world. I remember in fact, just looking at this blog post I wrote in 2017 on the Muratorian Canon, I remember in 2017 you couldn't just say stuff. You had to have all of your facts in order, you had to have all of your citations double checked, triple checked because people would call you out on it. But we're living in a time now, sadly, where a lot of the stuff that's just already been debunked over and over again can just find a fresh face on TikTok. Like this young lady making all of these claims and she doesn't have to give any evidence for any of it. It's just, here's all these claims. You can literally just go on TikTok now and just say stuff and people will buy into it. It's like the death of reason or the death of logic or something. But it's kind of depressing when you think about it. But that's why a of lot love having people like you on the show to help us untangle some of these things and help unpack it. Now I know that you have some special stuff that's just for my audience and this is. I just, I am so excited about this because you shared a bit about this before what you're offering for, for my audience and I just really want to encourage all of my listeners to take advantage of these resources. And I'll also add this that Dr. Wallace is available to come speak at your church. This is such a great opportunity. So Dan, is there a link on the CSNTM website where they can invite you to speak. Is that available there?

[C]

You write to informationsntm.org okay. And then that gets passed on to me. You can well understand that my emails and phone numbers and address are private because of.

[B]

Oh, yeah, a lot of things.

[C]

Yeah, we won't deal on those.

[B]

Sure, sure. Yeah. So they can find a link there on csntm.org informationsntm.org to invite you to speak. Now tell us about the special offers you have for our audience today.

[C]

What we're doing on this show, and I have not offered this before, is we have a thing called Scribal Fellowship for csntm and it's a program where you sign up and if you commit to giving at least $25 a month and it's auto deducted from your credit card or your bank account, however you want to do it, then you are on the inside of a number of things. One of those things is any events of ours that you want to come to, you come from free. And our. Well, we're having a text and manuscript conference coming the last Thursday and Friday of May and we are charging $100 for people to come. But if you're in Scribal Fellowship, you can come for free. It's highbrow scholars from different views. Not all are Christian. It's just some of the best scholars in the world dealing with details of the text that most laypeople would find. Oh, I just don't want to say through all this stuff. It's too, too, too boring in some respects. But then we have a snapshot April 25th. If you live in the Dallas area, come to the Hope center in Plano and we are having our annual friend raiser. We give Texas size hors d' oeuvres and it's a free evening for anybody in Scribal Fellowship. Otherwise you have to pay the entrance fee.

[B]

Real quick. Just jumping in here to let you know that the snapshot that was just mentioned has now passed. But there is a snapshot every April in Dallas.

[C]

Also, twice or sometimes three times a year, I get together with a live Q and A with any members of Scribal Fellowship who want to sign up for that. And it usually goes about 90 minutes. So I just got done with one recently. So that's a fun thing just to you get to ask. Oh, these are the very questions I want to ask. Turn them in, then we'll have a chat about it. Now what I want to offer here, the basic thing that Scribal Fellowship does for CS and TM is it tells us we have a base of people who are supporting us so that we know we have X amount of dollars that are coming in every month. And because our work primarily is aimed at going on expeditions, discovering manuscripts and digitizing them with state of the art equipment, in order to do that, we need to be funded. So what we're offering on this show is a free book. When you sign up for scribal fellowship, all you need to do is mention, I saw this on Alyssa Childers. And we will send you an autographed copy of Reinventing Jesus. That's a book that three authors wrote. I wrote large sections of it. Ed Komashevsky, who also is at the center, wrote large sections and another guy named Jim Sawyer. But Jim is not local. So Ed and I would both sign these copies. It's been out for 20 years. It's become a standard for you in seminary classes. But it's meant for somebody who is a motivated college level student and it deals with major issues. How do we know the gospel writers got the story of Jesus right? How do we know the scribes copied it carefully, faithfully, and we know what they said originally? How do we know that Christianity didn't rip off mythical gods and you know, the Council of Nicaea, things like this? It was. How do we know which books are in the, in the Testament? It's, it's a fun read, actually, I think, and it'll be really helpful. So if you say Alyssa Childers, that's all you need to say when you send in your donation and we will make sure to get you a copy of the book. Of course, we need to have your address for that too, so.

[B]

Great. And I just want to really encourage everybody to support the work that you're doing there. I want to thank my guest, Dr. Dan Wallace for joining us today. Definitely. Check out the center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, that's csntm.org where you can sign up for the scribal fellowship, invite Dan to speak, and also get that free book, which is an amazing resource. And let's remember as we pursue Christ, to keep a sharp mind, a soft heart and a thick skin. We'll see you next. I will pray for you. No turning right or left will make it through the road that's narrow and the gate that small. Don't give up. It's going to be worth it. All.