Searching for the Original Text (ft. Dr. Maurice Robinson)

Hello, viewers. Hello, listeners. Today is Thursday, November the 17th. I'm Ryan Hill.

I'm Jon Galantis. You're listening to Clearview Today with Dr. Abidhan Shah, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can find us online at ClearviewTodayShow.com. Or if you have a question for Dr. Shah and you'd like to write in and suggest that we talk about, you can send us a text at 252-582-5028. You can also email us at contact at ClearviewTodayShow.com.

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I do know what time it is. It's time for the verse of the day. It is time for the verse of the day. We're going to read it for you, man. I feel like there needs to be some kind of sound bite there, like pages ruffling or something. Or like, here, I got you. I got you. Hang on. Hang on. Oh, we're like making this real time.

Like ASMR right here. Okay. Oh my goodness. That's my planner.

Y'all can't see it on the video, but that's my planner. So verse of the day today comes from 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 11. It says, Therefore, comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing. Amen. That's Paul's encouragement to us. And that's something that you guys have been doing for us. Leaving us those reviews, texting in on the phone number, that really uplifts us and that encourages us.

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So leaving those reviews and texting in and emailing in lets us know that there's another person out there who's listening. You're looking swole. If I can, if I'm, I know that's not a great secret, but it's the illusion of, yeah.

How are you feeling? How, what's, what's, what's the root of all these new gains, the root of all these new gains. Well, I took your advice and downloaded the workout app. Oh yeah. And I gotta tell you, it is, it is well worth it.

I knew you would like it. Did you pay for it or are you doing the trial? I did the trial first and I loved it and I paid the full price. So I mean, it's, it's worth it to me. It's, it's a, it is a personal trainer in the Palm of your hand and it does all of your thinking of the gym for you. If that's, I think the thing that I love the most, cause I go very early in the morning, so I don't really want to have to think about like this number of reps and just sleep on the mind, man, you're still trying to get that sleep out. You don't want to be thinking, you don't want to be in this. That's kind of bad cause this is a show that encourages people to think, but I love going in the gym and an app does all my thinking.

I got my headphones in, so it tells me when my rest is over and I go into my next set, get you a little behind back on the weights. I'm like, yes sir. I really love it. I'm in week two of it. I'm using it now or this is week three now and I love it. My man. I love it.

That's awesome. And it's showing off because that thing is a, are you on a beginner plan, intermediate plan? What is my plan called now? I think it's just foundations or basics.

Yeah. That's what I started with too. But man, I'm telling you it works because it's got those, it, the plans are specifically designed for like specific, um, like body growth or whatever.

I love that you can tailor it. Like I want to work on my arms or I want to work on my upper body or I don't work on my legs so you can tailor the plan to fit what you're looking for. I saw a difference after like 10 weeks on that beginner's plan.

I saw an, I saw a noticeable difference and that's something that I did not see when it was just kind of up to me. Like, okay, I guess I'll do, I'm feeling triceps or I'm feeling this and I'll just make my own plan. But having the plan that in the workout app really helped. We are not sponsored by the workout app. I feel like we should be.

Yeah. If reps from the workout app are listening and you want to talk about a sponsorship, I'll talk y'all up in a heartbeat. I really, I really do love it. I mean, I'll highly recommend it to other people. But now that you know, I will say that now that Ryan's on it, I probably won't talk about it again unless y'all are cutting us a check, which I feel like again, I feel like y'all should.

Fair enough. So, well today's a very special episode. We have a very special guest today, Dr Maurice Robinson, and if you're not sure who he is, we'll be introducing him along with Dr Shaw in just a few minutes for a very special discussion. We've been talking about, you know, New Testament textual criticism, so he's kind of a big deal. He's kind of the deal. He's kind of the deal.

Yeah, you're right. So if you have any questions or suggestions for new topics, make sure you text us at 252-582-5028 or visit us online at ClearviewTodayShow.com. We're going to go grab Dr. Shaw and Dr. Robinson and we'll be right back. Are you looking for some new worship music to go along with all these amazing shows here on The Truth Network? Today's your lucky day because Dr. Shaw and myself and a lot of the rest of the Clearview staff have been hard at work writing for the last few months and we're very excited to share Clearview's new EP with you, Together Forward. Not only do these songs sound great, but each and every single one of them were born from a place of genuine worship and prayerfully written by our team right here at Clearview Church.

It's available right now on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, anywhere digital music is sold. So make sure to pick up your copy today and let us know how these songs are helping you whether they're helping your worship band in your church or just in the car or around in your everyday life. Email us at info at ClearviewBC.org. You can also support the ministry here at Clearview Church by visiting us online.

That's ClearviewBC.org forward slash give. Thanks for listening. Now back to the show. Welcome back to Clear View Today with Dr. Abbadon Shaw, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You can send us a text at 252-582-5028 or at clearviewtodayshow.com. Dr. Shaw is with us in the studio today. Dr. Shaw, we have a very special guest in the studio today.

Do you want to introduce our guest? Sitting next to me is my mentor in textual criticism of the New Testament, Dr. Maurice Robinson. So Dr. Robinson, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Dr. Robinson, we're happy to have you with us in the studio today. Yesterday, we talked a little bit about the original text of the New Testament.

Dr. Shaw, can you briefly catch us up? When we say the original text, what are we talking about? We're talking about the text that left the pen of the authors like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John of the gospels, and then the letters of Paul and Peter and John, that first text on those documents. We're not as concerned about that first document because they're gone, they're lost forever. Now those are the autographs, is that what that means?

That's what they call them. It's kind of a word that I wish we had picked a different one because autographs may have different meanings to people. But what we mean by that is that first document on which those New Testament writers, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote the words that we call New Testament, the word of God. So how did you, Dr. Robinson, how did you get, I guess, on the field of the original text? Or was your dissertation in something else other than the original text? Or did it kind of enter into your field of study?

Well, you're going back before my dissertation to how I got into the field. I got into the field only because I originally was led to study a little bit of Greek with a Bible college professor that said, get yourself an interlinear Greek New Testament, which has the Greek on one line, and then right below the Greek they had an English translation of it. And we were just learning a little bit of Greek, but I noticed at the bottom of the page there were different readings in Greek that were listed according to certain editors that happened to prefer those.

And I started wondering, well, why do the editors want to change to a different reading from what's in the text that is printed? And so that led me, with the help of that professor, to start reading books on textual criticism. And this all started when I was 18, and it kept moving on through my four years of college through self-study of Greek and self-study of textual criticism.

And then once I got into the seminary at Southeastern Seminary as a student, my MDiv program continued my work further into textual critical research. And then I did my master's thesis on the textual criticism grouping of manuscripts in the Book of Acts. And then when I went on to the doctoral program at Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, I ended up with a dissertation on the scribal habits in the Book of Revelation, which dealt totally with the types of errors or mostly innocent expansions that the scribes might make within the text of Revelation, showing in the end that the scribal errors and minor expansions were minority readings. And the vast majority of scribes usually read with one group or another group of text, which you can call text types if you like, that tended to permeate Revelation.

And if you wanted to go for a consensus text, then you would not follow these individual idiosyncrasies, but you would look for what the bulk of the texts tended to represent. Okay, so I guess that's one thing that I kind of want to park at for a while, because you used the word errors, and you were saying that Bart Ehrman, that was one of his big things with the Bible is error-ridden. When we say, because I know there's that school of thought that you guys hold that these mistakes that scribes made, they weren't mishandlings of the text or anything, they were just simple mistakes that don't impact the meaning at all. So is there an error, is there a difference, I guess, in errors and mistakes when we're talking about this?

Or is he purposely conflating that issue? Well, he's overblowing the whole issue because he'll say, for example, there are more variant readings, hundreds of thousands of variant readings, which is more than the number of words in the entire New Testament. But what he's not telling you is what he defines as an error is not what I would define as an error. But what you have is scribes copying by hand manuscripts, make blunders to start with. Those are errors. A scribe misspells a word. If you tried to copy a page out of the Bible by hand, you may misspell a word. Does that mean you intended to do it?

No. But it does mean you could make a blunder. Some blunders are easily corrected because you look at it and say, oh, he misspelled that word. Other blunders, he may have skipped a word.

He may have skipped two or three words because one word is over here and another word that's spelled exactly the same is over here and he leaves out what's in between. So those kind of errors, yeah, they're errors, but we really don't count them because we know that they are just mistakes that scribes made. Then there's other issues where a scribe sees the word in Greek for and and instead he writes the word for but or therefore or so or something like that.

I could be giving the Greek words, but I'm keeping this simple. But he's just substituting words that are almost synonyms of each other unconsciously. Yes, you can say that's a scribal error, but it's one that he's probably making without thinking. When we get to the point of intentional alterations, they're actually not that predominant.

They're going to be few and far between. As I had said in our conference that we had, we're looking at for the entire New Testament, 94% of the text is agreed upon by virtually everybody. Now that's already the vast bulk of the text, and what's left is the 6% where the supposed errors occur. Half of those, 3% of them, will be those pure blunders that produce nonsense readings or misspellings of words or just simple changes of word order or something like that. And then only the 3% that is left affect translation, and even some of those are just going to be substitution of synonyms or changing the and to a but or something like that. And when we get down to the substantial errors that really affect meaning of a passage, you're going to be left with so few that they're only going to be about 1% of the readings where it's somewhat uncertain because they affect meaning.

And even then in your printed Greek text editions or even in your English translations, they usually will be shown in the footnotes. Well then my question would be, how can Bart Ehrman say the things he's saying and claim to be objective? Would he agree that less than 1% of the variants actually affect the text meaning?

Or would he just say that's enough to be seriously considered? What what Ehrman does is he will say the right things, but then the tone in which he he goes about the rest of the chapter or his book gives the opposite impression. So he in his orthodox corruption of scripture, his, his more scholarly work, which wasn't the focus of my dissertation, a whole chapter, he admits that most of these variants are just scribes making accidents. They are not intentional.

They're not significant. He says it, but then when you end his book and put it down, you walk away thinking, my goodness, these orthodox scribes have so corrupted scripture that we do not know what to believe anymore. It's like he gaslights you into convincing yourself that the Bible is not true. That's a very good way to say that, John, because I think he's very gifted in that way too. So he will say the right things.

There are no autographs. I agree with him. The copies have mistakes. I agree with him.

The copies are removed a couple of centuries down from the originals. I agree with him, but then he was twisted in a way that, so that's why you cannot believe in inspiration and heresy, all these things and your faith is futile. I was like, well, yeah, I agree. I agreed with you all up until now.

So I guess that's the right conclusion. It's also interesting that Ehrman in his academic work does not make it sound as extreme as he does in his popular works because his orthodox corruption of scripture is on a very academic level and he's admitting that most of the bulk of the text is secure, that we don't have issues with it. But when he turns around into his popular books, such as Misquoting Jesus, he makes it look to the average lay person in the audience that you can't trust anything the Bible says anywhere.

And that's just not the case. Not if you're talking about 94 percent of the text staying identical to the autograph, by everybody's estimation. I guarantee you, you can take that 94 percent of the text alone and from that you can get every major doctrine, every major teaching of scripture, every ethical concept and demand.

It's all there just within the 94 percent, regardless of how the last 6 percent goes. And this goes back to what Richard Bentley said back in the 1700s. He said, you can take all the variants that exist and put them in the hand of a knave or a fool. And no matter how he puts them together, you're not going to destroy one doctrine or ethical demand of scripture.

So it's true. So I want to talk for a second about your dissertation because yours is specifically centered around the original text. What does it mean when we say we're changing the goal post of New Testament textual criticism?

What does that mean? Well prior to the 60s, the goal of New Testament textual criticism was singular, which is to retrieve the original text. Of course, there were people here and there talking about, you can learn the state of the church through the variants at different stages and all of that. But overall, everybody was sort of agreed that getting back to the original text is the major task of textual criticism. But since then, the goal post has shifted where there's a sense of despair that we will ever get back to the original text. And now it is, you know, there are many different kinds of text. So the pre-authorial text or the authorial text, canonical text, post-canonical text, Elden Epp, a famous text critic in his, again, famous article, multivalence of the term original text. He talks about this, these four different predecessor text form and authorial text form and all these interpretive text. What he is doing is he's saying, oh wait, based on the conclusions of historical critical studies, there are many different stages in the production of a document. So prior to Matthew writing, what did he use?

What pericopes was he taking and oral sayings and all that? Well, let's go to that text. And then what left, supposedly left the author's desk? Let's take that text as a different one. And then what went through scribal changes and all of that. A lot of epistemological issues there, to be honest, because a lot of them have not been demonstrated.

But now the, the, the searches for any or many texts, whatever the text you want it to be. It seems like a very post-modern thing where it's like, there's no objective truth anymore. There used to be, did he say post-modern? There was a little bit of, was there a little bit of drama going on with the post-modernism?

What was the whole thing? Because if our listeners don't know, I know you were working on your, your dissertation for many years. And one of the things at the very end, it seemed that we were getting hung up on, on post-modernism. What is, what does that mean?

Well, post-modernism, the basic characteristic of it, now there are writers on post-modernism, such as Derrida and various others, but what they're really coming down to is there are no absolutes. So when you start applying this to textual criticism, this is why you get, as what David Parker said in his, one of his articles, he said, we've got the Bible as a living text. It's continually changing, it's expanding. And he says, even now we are creating the texts we need to create for the given moment.

And it's all because there are no more absolutes. We're not trying to get to, at least the scholars in this idea, are not trying to retrieve the original text or restore it or recognize it. They just want to say, let's have a text that will meet whatever need we have for the particular moment. Or we'll look at other texts and say, well, what did this text with a certain particular variant mean to the community that actually read that manuscript, as if a certain particular reading somehow changes the entire theology of a community, which it doesn't. So is there any room for post-modernism and New Testament textual criticism, or should we just keep it out?

Keep it out as far as possible, yeah. There is room for looking at historical developments, but that doesn't mean you take every variant and try to apply it to a different community. But you certainly have, as a text is being translated, say from Greek into the Coptic of Egypt or into the Syriac of northern Palestine, that yes, some of their theological views may be reflected in what comes out that way. So, for example, in the Syriac Peshitta, there are certain short epistles of the New Testament that they don't even consider part of Scripture. But that's reflecting their community. You had when Ulfilas translated the Gothic version, he left out in the Old Testament parts of the books of Kings and Chronicles because they were too warlike. And so that's reflecting, yes, that idea of that community, but that's a matter of historical issues. And it doesn't depend on a minor variant here or there in the New Testament that's going to change anything in that regard. Let me ask you this. Is there any cure for this? Dr. Shaw, you said this started happening around the 60s where people started just giving up on finding the original text.

Is there any way to get the field back on track? Oh, absolutely. Especially if you are an inerrantist or believing in the verbal plenary inspiration of the Bible, it is critical that you fight for the concept of the original text. That's true because how can you, I kind of thought that when you were talking about postmodernism, there's no absolutes, but aren't we dealing with an absolute being? Aren't we claiming that this is the absolute word of God that's inerrant? Because it comes down to authority.

Who has the authority over your life? So when you remove the original text, and there are many different texts depending on how it suits and fits your context and your needs, then authority is out the window. Now you can create whichever text makes you comfortable in whatever lifestyle you want to choose.

And you know how dangerous that is. So we need absolute truth for life, hence the original text, hence postmodernism doesn't belong in New Testament textual criticism. The whole point is that that sense of despair that we can, or the confidence, lack of confidence that we can get back to the original text. I don't understand how they can keep saying that when they know the discipline or they understand the variance and they understand the reliability of the text. How can they keep making these arguments that we don't know for sure and we don't have the text from the first couple of centuries? Oh, well, then we have to go back to the drawing board. But then we see things lining up and we see the stability, we see the macro stability happening and yet they still say, no, no, no, forget that.

We cannot get to it. So let's start with this. Do you think it's just a fear of being wrong? Just like I don't want to say for sure, like almost an authority thing. Like I don't want to say for sure that this is what it is because it might damage my credibility if I'm wrong.

So I'll just say across the board, there's no way to know. I would, I'm interested to hear what Dr. Robinson will say about this one, but I believe that if they follow the proper conclusions of the evidence, I think it will lead them towards a text that they don't want to admit. So they'd rather do this game and keep saying it doesn't work.

It doesn't work. What do you think Dr. Robinson? Well, Dan Wallace from Dallas Seminary openly called these other movements postmodern.

So just to make sure, this is not just something that we're talking about. Others are calling it postmodernism. And what you would find from just looking at the method of textual criticism, if you look at the handbooks from the 1960s, they are going to be pointing directly toward recovery, restoration, establishment of the original text. They're all saying that. But then after the needle starts shifting, that's when they start expressing doubt. And this is where we get what I quoted in the conference we had about a hermeneutics of suspicion that is going on. It seems to be now more popular to doubt that we can ever recover anything. Whereas before in the 1960s, the handbooks were saying we're doing really pretty good. We can, for the most part, recover exactly what the apostles and the other New Testament writers wrote. So the shift is there. Why is the shift there?

Because apparently it's the spirit of the age, which is related to the postmodernism, that if we can't argue for absolutes, if we can't argue for total certainty, then we've got to argue for total uncertainty, which is not a fair comparison. Amen. What a great point. If you guys enjoyed today's discussion, make sure you send us a text at 252-582-5028. Or you can email us at contact at ClearViewTodayShow.com.

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That's right. We appreciate all of the gifts. We appreciate everybody's contribution. We appreciate your support and your partnership as we continue to make this radio show possible. We just want to thank you guys not only for being obedient to God, but just for helping us keep this conversation in the air, for keeping the word of God just moving and impacting people. As it's impacting people, we're learning from the show. We just want to keep that going as long as possible. So thank you for letting us do that.

That's right. Jon, as we close, you have any last minute advice for our listeners? Drink water. Just drink. The end.

That's the end of the show. You can see I've got this, my wife got me this Venture Pal Hydrate in Style humongous water bottle. This thing is 64 fluid ounces. Wow.

2000 milliliters a day. But what I like about it is it's got encouraging stuff written on the side of it. What does it say on the side of it over there? Go. 9 a.m. Hydrate yourself. 11 a.m.

Remember your goal. 1 p.m. Keep drinking. 3 p.m. Don't give up. 5 p.m. Almost there. And 7 p.m. You did it.

Wow. It's a little water bottle that just makes me feel good throughout the day. It's like a little like an encourager every step of the way. Drink water, but also have your water bottle encourage you. That's my advice.

That is the best of both worlds. Be near a bathroom because if you drink 64 fluid ounces of water a day, you are going to be up and down. I use the bathroom like 10 times a day now.

I couldn't believe it. You have to spend some time at the bathroom. You will really have to spend some time at the value, but your kidneys will thank you. That's right. All right. Well, there's your advice. That's my advice.

Drink water and get a water bottle that encourages you. Says nice things to you. In doing so. Yeah.

I'd love for my water bottle to say nice things. That's right. We love you guys. We'll see you tomorrow. Clear read today.