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Hot Topics: Is the Bible Reliable, Part 5 · The Bible in 3D

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Greetings. Welcome to the Bible in three d. This is your host, Andrew. We are in a series entitled Hot Topics. And presently, we are going through a series of episodes asking, is the Bible reliable?
• 0:24
  We've looked at a lot of issues. I think especially our last episode, the bibliographic evidence, and before that the internal and external evidence is very persuasive. Now we're gonna turn and look at how the Bible was translated, how it was propagated, and so that you understand some of the issues that we have today. I mentioned earlier that the King James or New King James version of the Bible is based on a later text type. And that most of the other translations other than the paraphrases of course, but the other translations of the Bible are actually based on what's called the the eclectic method and they use older manuscripts.
• 1:20
  So that's a different text type. So this can be a very complicated type of study and you know, you go to seminary and you listen to somebody talk for hours on this stuff. Again, I'm going to try to present this in a way that's understandable, entertaining and hopefully educational. What are biblical text types? So a text type is a thing, it's a title.
• 1:44
  We think, and let's look at the last two thousand years, okay, and particularly focusing on the New Testament. There are copies of the Old Testament, there are manuscripts, I mean, ones were on papyrus, you know, that we went to scrolls, went to books and paper and all kinds of different things, but for two thousand years people have been copying the books of the Bible, especially the New Testament. These ancient manuscripts, that's what I'm gonna call them, but it includes papyrus, you know, that's reeds, you know, lambskin, you know, and then later paper and all kinds of things. But these, and again, I'm gonna call them manuscripts, you can group them together and the groups are called text types. Now the groupings are typically by age and thereby what we call variants.
• 2:53
  So a particular set of manuscripts would have been copied over, you know, several 100 and there would be a variant. What is a variant? Well, it could be a misspelling. It could be transposed letters. So instead of having the word I'm gonna use English now.
• 3:17
  Instead of having the word, you know, or the sentence, Jesus led them to the father, l e a d. Well, maybe some early monk, instead of writing l e a d, he wrote l a e d. Well, it's clear that he simply transposed two letters and that the word is, you know, lead, alright? Your lead. Traditionally, there were three text types in recent decades.
• 3:50
  We've come up with, okay, three major and maybe one minor text types. These would be groupings of copies or manuscripts of the Bible, and in particular in the New Testament, and they're characterized because they have some oddity in them. We call it a variant. And these four text types are called the Alexandrian, the Western, the Byzantine, and the Cesarean. So if you think of the entire Bible, okay, there is about 400,000 textual variants.
• 4:33
  Oh, well that sounds like a lot. Well, but it isn't. Because in order for a textual variant to have any meaning, well, to be important I should say, it has to have two things. The variant needs to be meaningful and it needs to be viable. So if somebody just simply transport transposed E and A instead of A and E or vice versa, That's not a meaningful variant.
• 5:10
  If somebody, for instance, in Rome Romans eight two, in different text types we see different pronouns. So the same verse in different text types might say me, you or us. In one John one four, some variants, some transcripts say our joy and others say your joy. Well, you know, that's an interesting discussion among scholars who have nothing better to do, but doesn't change anything. So out of these 400,000 textual variances, most of which are misspellings or transposed letters, less than 1% are viable or meaningful.
• 6:01
  Alright. So if you just transpose letters, that's not a meaningful thing. Now what is viable? Okay. Let's say some words are added.
• 6:11
  Oh. So maybe the words are meaningful. But if the words were late added in a very very late copying, a late manuscript, so let's say they were added in the thirteen hundreds but there is no manuscript before the thirteen hundreds that include those added words, then they're not viable. Were added and so, you know, we don't consider them. So the entire text of the Bible, there's about 2% of the passages that are subject to meaningful debate, but in every case they are really small and don't change anything in doctrine.
• 7:00
  There are spelling differences, are word changes, there are grammatical variations. None of these 2% of the the debated things alter the passage of the Bible at all. So their impact on the Bible content as far as theology is concerned is negligible. It is said that if you could put the Greek New Testament on 500 pages, the meaningful viable manuscript variations represent half of one page. So there you go.
• 7:35
  And yet that half of one page doesn't change anything really in doctrine. Now, let's go back to I should start by saying that's a basis of what text types are based on and I'm gonna concentrate on the three major text types. Alexandrian, Western and Byzantine. The Alexandrian text type are the oldest manuscripts we have. So we have things like the Codex Vaticanicus, the Codex Sintiaticus, we have the Codex Alexandrinus, and they are the oldest Greek that we have, the earliest.
• 8:22
  And they are all before the fourth century A. D. You would think that the truest form of a copy would be in the earliest. Now today we have fragments and all kinds of things, so as far as complete copies that go back to before the fourth century, we have seven or eight in the Alexandrian text type. Now the next text type that came along was what is called the western text type.
• 8:55
  So western in the sense that after three hundred four hundred years, the Western part of the Roman Empire has split from the Eastern part and they have gone to created Constantinople. This is the Byzantine Empire. And they're still speaking Greek, but the people in the West, you know, we're talking Europe and Egypt and North Africa. Right? They are really focusing on Latin and so it's harder and harder for them to deal with Greek because they're not using the Greek three four hundred years after the resurrection like the Roman Empire did earlier.
• 9:35
  So there are manuscripts where little details are added or paraphrases are put in to try to help people understand what's being said. So they're trying to help the Western Roman Empire, the Latin speakers understand what is in there. Today, there are no Bibles that use the the Western text type because there are obvious paraphrases and different things that are put in there simply to help you, you know, probably should have been in footnotes. And the Bise Codex is kinda the big one for the western text types. The Alexandrian text type, all of their writing is in uppercase as in capital letters.
• 10:30
  So that is one of the distinctions about the Alexandrian text types. It is the oldest and everything is written in a capital letter. Now, they didn't have periods, they didn't have commas, so, you know, it it takes a little bit of a lot of time to, you know, go through this stuff and say, where's the sentence stop, where's the new one start? The western text types uses miniscules. And so these are all the lower case letters.
• 11:01
  Why did they do that? I don't know. And then the third text type, the third major text type, which I'm gonna talk about, is the Byzantine. Well, what happened? The last, and I'm I understand now, the greatest persecution of Christians happened during the early three hundred, during the 04/1956 something like that, under the emperor Diocletian.
• 11:28
  And one of the things that Diocletian did was he suddenly outlawed Christianity and he ordered the burning of all of the all of the manuscripts. He created this total crisis in the Roman Empire And there was like four different generals that came forward. One of them of course was Constantine and of course Constantine won and he became the emperor and in the process he embraced Christianity. Now, was he a Christian? Many people say he was.
• 12:06
  I personally think that he adopted Christianity because so many people in Rome were Christian, and so he was trying to create sympathy and people in the capital city. Realized Constantine had been an emperor out in Great Britain. And he was called back with his army and anyway ended up winning and became emperor. So now we go into 03/13 or something like that where Constantine becomes emperor Constantine. Now his mother is a Christian and she actually goes to The Holy Land and identifies all of the sites today that we go to, so like the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre, the church of this, the church of that.
• 12:58
  Every one of those places was identified in March. By Constantine's mother who went to establish, you know, whatever she said. Whether she was right or wrong, don't know. But there you go. Now, how does that bring in the Byzantine?
• 13:15
  At some point, Constantine realized Rome is an absolute gutter. You know, everybody's homeless, nobody's working, everybody's on welfare, it's just a mess. And they needed to get out of Rome because it had degenerated so badly. And Constantine decided to move the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome and he built a new city in the East, okay, near the Dardanelles and so today, you know, we have Istanbul, but originally that city was planted there as Constantinople, the city of Constantine. And this was the capital of the Byzantine Empire.
• 14:11
  So the strength, the energy, the wisdom, the education, everything moved with Constantine to this new city. Rome just continued to degenerate into a, you know, I don't know, Baltimore or something like that. You know, just a place which was totally run down and meaningless. So in they finally get there and they build up this city, Constantinople, and the best church fathers are there and, you know, church leaders. And they go, you know, when the bookletian burned all of our transcripts, you know, what we would say bibles, we lost a lot.
• 14:54
  And of course, what did he burn? He he burned the the Alexandrian text types. So there was a bishop there and so he started this effort to start writing new copies, you know, in Greek, you know, of the text that they had. And this new set of copies is called the Byzantine. And the Alexandrian, you know, nobody was copying that anymore.
• 15:27
  The western really wasn't all a good start with. And so the Byzantine, you know, it was it was very organized, very structured, and so after that time, almost everything was copied in the Byzantine text type. Byzantine text type is longer than all the others because it adds things. Well, you have to ask yourself, if the original copies, original text types did not include a story, what what authority did these Byzantine people have to add new things? Well, they did.
• 16:08
  Now by the time we get to medieval times, nobody's really paying any attention in dark ages. They're not paying attention to the Bible. They're just the Roman Catholic religion during the Dark Ages was simply whatever the Pope and the bishops came up with and they just kinda made up their own stuff, which may or may not be like related to the Bible. And I'm sorry boys, that's true. So it was clear that especially after 300 or so AD, Christians in the West, Western part of the Empire, Europe, they couldn't read Greek, they weren't reading Greek anymore.
• 16:49
  Now the people in Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, you know, the Eastern half of the old Roman Empire, yeah, they were still reading Greek but not the guys in the West. And so at some point, the Pope got ahold of, you know, one of these priests, monks and said okay, we need a Bible in Latin. And so this was so this Pope commissioned this guy named Jerome, we call him Saint Jerome, to translate the Bible, especially New Testament into Latin. Well, he ends up going to the Middle East, he goes to Israel, Bethlehem to learn all the language and he does. Now it's a pretty fast hurried translation.
• 17:43
  He comes up with a Latin translation of the Bible in the March called the Latin Vulgate. It's really not a good translation. It's it's just not that good. But, you know, this is a time where people are really not given access to the Bible. The Latin Vulgate, the average person was not allowed to read it.
• 18:09
  I mean, you know, that was a sin. Only the priest could read it and interpret it and what they said, there was no way you could check. It's not like you took your bible to church and checked. So that that's the kind of stuff that was going on. But the point simply is, the earliest manuscripts, and I would argue the most correct, the Alexandrian, were just no longer being copied.
• 18:32
  Now we have them. I can tell you where they are. But the Byzantine became very important and they did add some stuff here and there. So this goes on, Middle Ages, we have the Latin ballgame, which everybody knows isn't all that good. And then we have the Reformation, and I will talk about that in my next episode, but the Byzantine translation was used during the time of the reformation which gave us some Bibles in other languages, other than Greek.
• 19:11
  Alright. Where are we today? I'm gonna talk about this much more, not the next episode, but maybe the following one. The Bibles today other than the King James and New King James, and the paraphrase, who knows what they're based on. But the the the really good, you know, middle of the road translations are and actually some of the literal translations too, are based on what's called the eclectic text, which is based almost entirely on the Alexandrian text type.
• 19:46
  And I will show you the history of that, and it's fascinating. It's really quite interesting. The point simply is the Bible that you have, if you you have an NIV, NASB, ESV, you you have any of those and they're solid, solid translations. They use this eclectic translation, which goes all the way back to the very earliest transcripts, which is the Alexandrian text type. Now, if you are a King James only person, then you base everything on the Byzantine text type.
• 20:22
  And so, you know, I'm gonna talk about that. I think that's a cult, by the way. I'll just say that up front. The reassuring thing for us is that we can go through hundreds and thousands of manuscripts and there are people that do. That's all their life is.
• 20:39
  They go through thousands of these manuscripts. If something new comes up, then they'll compare it. And we have, I'm gonna argue the most, the closest translation copy of of the original autographs of anybody in the last two years because of the science behind interpretation. Alright, so with that in mind, there are at least three major text types. Yeah, there's four or five, but the three main, Alexandrian, Western and Byzantine.
• 21:13
  New King James, King James, they go with the youngest translations and everybody else goes with the oldest translations which is the Alexandrian. I hope I haven't confused you all. I hope you will see that there is very, very deep scholarship and that you can be assured in the next two episodes, I think are are gonna cement your thought that yes, I I can rely on translation that I have because I understand what's behind it. Gracious Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for all the many scholars who put in so much work.
• 22:05
  Oh, father, help us as we read, understand. We pray that your Holy Spirit would illuminate your word to us. In Jesus name, amen.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Bible in three d. We're so grateful for listeners like you. Your encouragement helps us create and share more transformative content that strengthens communities worldwide. If this episode inspired you, consider supporting our nonprofit mission with a donation at cogworksmedia.org. Also, be sure to check out our other podcast, Biblical Reflections, for more faith insights.
• 22:46
  God bless.