Tuesday, February 20th | The Dead Sea Scrolls

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We're going to leave a couple of links in the description box so you can do just that. The first of the day today comes from Habakkuk 2, verse 19. Woe to him who says to wood, awake. To silent stone, arise, it shall teach. Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, yet in it there is no breath at all.

Ooh, wow. You know, this creation is temporary. This earth is temporary. It's not eternal. We were made for something eternal, but these things, and I think what he's saying is the wood that we rely on to build our civilizations, these stones, these precious jewels, all these things that we chase, these pretty things of life, they're temporary. They're not eternal. The only thing that's truly eternal is the Holy Spirit living within us. And so we have that hope, right? We have that hope that we are designed for something eternal.

I say that to our congregation all the time. Our worship is something that is designed for eternity. And we live this temporary life with that eternity in mind.

Yeah. So many times we can be distracted by the pretty, by the flashy, by the now. But we, I mean, just like you said, we were created for eternity. We are quick to make idols out of things. We are quick to worship and pursue other things. And unlike the Old Testament, it's rarely ever a statue. It's rarely ever a picture or an icon. It's most often good things in our lives.

Like relationships, a grade point average, a job, the amount of money in your bank account. But any of those things, any of those good things, when they become God things, that's a problem. Yeah, it's things that will elevate me in life, things that will take me to that next level. You know, it's Tuesday. And that means it's time to get all our frustrations out on the table, just kind of get it all out so we can proceed with reverence. We can proceed with this Christian talk show with, you know, the grapevine is actually our most popular segment. It's inherently negative, but people really, really love it.

There's nothing like it on Christian radio. And in the spirit of that, welcome to the grapevine, everybody. Boink. Sorry, I forgot to eat the grapevine. If you find yourself undisciplined, right, and you can't get up of a morning, especially if you've got a significant other, if you're single, you're just sleeping in a bed by yourself, hey, I think this is kind of foolish, but you do you, because it's really not affecting nobody else. Don't set 20 alarms.

Oh, no. Don't set 20 alarms. Set one alarm, maybe two, and then get your behind out of the bed and go on about your business. We don't need to do this thing where you're sleeping and then your significant other hears... Oh, my goodness. Okay. All right. Sorry. Rest in peace, headphone users.

Yeah, I know, right? And then they hear, oh, oh, goodness, let me go ahead and snooze that. Oh, let me go on back to sleep.

Now, I'm startled. I'm having a panic attack, right? Nine minutes, significant other sleeping completely perfectly. Who has an alarm like that? If you have more than three alarms, which is already a lot. If you have more than three alarms, I want you to send a screenshot of your alarms, of your morning alarms, to the Clearview Today Show.

2-5-2-5-8-2-5-0-2-8. Should I do the alarm one last time? Should I just do the alarm one last time? No, please don't. All right, I'll do it. Stay tuned.

We'll be back after this. Hello, Clearview family. I'm Nicole.

And I'm David. And we want to talk to you today about the Clearview app. You know, there are so many churches out there that put their sermons on YouTube and their announcements on Facebook and their prayer list on Periscope.

I didn't even know Periscope was still functional. Oh, it's not. And that's why nobody can find their church's prayer list and nobody's prayers be getting answered. But here at Clearview, we believe in making our content as accessible as possible. That's right. Clearview produces so much content every single week, including Dr. Shah's sermons, original music, a full online store, weekly prayer gatherings, and so much more. Not to mention the number one best selling Christian talk show of all time. I don't know if that's accurate.

Well, maybe not yet. But that's why we want people to download the app. If you're listening from the Triangle area, we encourage you to check out Clearview Church in person. But if not, you can still follow all of our content on the Clearview app.

It's 100% free on the Apple Store and Google Play Store. And best of all, all of our content is right there in one convenient spot. Make sure you download the Clearview app today, and let's get back to the show. Welcome back to Clearview Today with Dr. Abbadon Shah, a daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can visit us online at ClearviewTodayShow.com, or if you have any questions or suggestions for new topics, send us a text at 252-582-5028.

That's right. We are here once again with Dr. Abbadon Shah, who is a PhD in New Testament textual criticism that's going to come in handy for today's discussion. He's also a professor at Carolina University, author, full-time pastor, and the host of today's show.

You can find all of his work at his website. That's AbbadonShah.com. Dr. Shah, I got to say, you're looking good today. I'm liking the crisp, white, sharp, looking real good. Let me ask you this. When you get up in the morning, it's early in the morning, and the sun is just cresting over the horizon. It's peeking through the window. How many alarms do you got going on?

How many alarms do you set? That's the one, right? Yeah. Because you're a rational human being. Yes.

Nicole? Do you snooze the alarm? I don't snooze the alarm.

I'll just turn it off. Now, once in a while, I'll have two. Like let's say at five o'clock, then I'll have one more at five or five, but that's okay. Because you don't want to sleep the full nine minutes. Just give myself five, and then I'll get on up. That's just one of the things that we talked about on today's Gripvine is people who set all these alarms and then just have them go off. It's just a bad way to start the day. I am occasionally a snoozer.

I will occasionally snooze an alarm, but I am a one alarm guy. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good discipline. Speaking of disciplines, talking about textual criticism.

We are talking about textual criticism. I've been working on my segues. I'm very proud of you. Thank you, buddy.

That takes discipline. Yeah, absolutely. On today's date, February the 20th, today is the first day that the Dead Sea Scrolls were first photographed ever in history. The first photograph came from today, February 20th. Do you know the year?

What year? I believe it was 46, 47, 48. No, 47 is when they were discovered by this Bedouin shepherd boy. It's anecdotal, and I think there's a lot of truth to it. It's not anecdotal and it's all made up stuff. It's not a legend or anything.

It's not a legend. I think there was something about this little boy. He was through a rock and he heard the... oh, something is up.

I think it was a little more than that. I think people knew something was there, but this was a way to bring it out. Kind of bring it to everybody's attention with a cool story.

Somebody's intrusive thoughts finally won. See, here's the thing. You even do this with your sermons. A story will hook people in, and if it's an important discovery, if it's really that important, you want a story to go along with it. And there's not a single...I know people who don't even know what textual criticism is, but they have heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Right, right. And they're very important for the study of the Old Testament. My field is New Testament, but I did spend a lot of time studying Old Testament textual criticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls play an important role. Up until then, the latest we had in the Hebrew text was from 1000 AD. That's the Hebrew Masoretic text. And Dead Sea Scrolls turned the history back regarding the Old Testament text by a thousand years or more.

That's amazing. So they're older? The Dead Sea Scrolls texts are older, you said, or newer? There's a difference between text and the manuscripts. Okay, okay, okay.

So the manuscripts that we found are from before, even before the time of Christ, written by the Essenes, this sectarian community that was sort of withdrawn from the world and trying to live an ascetic life. Like when you go there, you've been with me to Qumran. The thing that you see, once you get off the bus, go through the museum, and you walk out, all you see are baptismal sites. Oh wow. Oh yeah. All over. They're crazy.

Yeah. And they're like, some of them are as big as this room right here. Are they... And you walk down. Are they modern or ancient? They're ancient. They're ancient. Really? They're like inlaid into the ground. They're like stone.

Dirt, baptismals. Yeah. The thing is, the Dead Sea, according to scholars, came almost up to the Qumran caves. Now, you can see it far away in the distance, maybe half a mile, maybe less. But now, it seems hard to believe that was right here. Yeah, it was. That was the same day, right, that we went to the Dead Sea and then Qumran in the same day.

Yeah, it was right there. It was crazy because I remember when I heard the Qumran caves, I was not expecting this giant gorge, because some of the caves are up in the mountain, in the wall, hundreds of feet in the air. And I'm like, how in the world are they caves?

How does this happen? How do you get up there? How do you store tens of thousands of scroll fragments in these caves? And I remember we were flying the drone, there's a funny story about the drone, we can tell it a little bit. But I was watching the drone footage and I was like, so the caves are not just on the ground.

No. The caves are up in the mountains. And then there's that one iconic cave that you see in the typical Dead Sea Scroll pictures. And we can stand there and just look at it and say, that's it right there. There it is.

I'm taking like hundreds of selfies. Wow. Yeah, Jon has to. Yeah. David has as well.

Yeah, David was there with us. It was really cool because at the time I didn't know, I knew what the Dead Sea Scrolls were and I knew that they're important. But that was in 2019, that was before I'd really started working with Dr. Shaw closely on – not that I work on textual criticism, but we talk a lot.

And for his writings, you have to have at least a basic understanding of what textual criticism is. Yeah. So before that, I was like, oh man, this is really cool. There was just a really cool discovery made here.

Now I would really love to go back with a fresh mind and do some filming there. And you also went with me to the Dead Sea Scroll Museum, right? Yes. Yes. And there's the Jerusalem model and there's an Israel museum there. And right there is a Dead Sea Scroll Museum.

And it's kept in an environment where it's a sense of humidity or temperature control to maintain the integrity of those fragments. Yeah. And many of the ones that you're looking at are not real. Yeah. They're like facsimiles. Yeah. The ones that you're looking on under the glass are not the original. They are copies. The real original ones are further in.

Way tucked away. Yeah. They're not gonna put it out there where a tourist can drop ice cream on it and be sneezing on the glass. Yeah. Please don't sneeze on the Dead Sea Scroll. But I will say they have it really, they're proud of it because the display for the, I think it was Isaiah. I can't remember.

That central one. Yeah. That's like right there. And it looks like really long and unbroken. It's really something to behold.

Yeah. It's not into like textual criticism or like manuscripts and stuff. When you see it, it's like the word of God written out before you on those scrolls. It really does something for you.

You appreciate the gravity behind it though. You know, you're looking at what it is and it dawns on you this is much more than just a parchment. It's much more than just a piece of paper.

That's right. And to emphasize the significance, you know, we talk about the Masoretic text. Then we also have talked about the Septuagint. This is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. But then you also have the Dead Sea Scrolls, 800 to 900 some scrolls or fragments going to the thousands. They carry a text in places which may be superior. Not everywhere, but in places it is. Some places I think the Septuagint might be superior.

Some people may disagree with me on that and that's fine. But the text definitely helps and it verifies the truth or the integrity of the Old Testament text. Because when you see these different texts from different periods, compare them and you go, wow, the scribes did not just alter them willy-nilly, just did whatever they wanted to. They were very careful in how they copied these texts. Yes, there are differences, but they're not so vast that your faith is shaken.

Right. And that's one of the appealing things about textual criticism is that you are in a sense as scientists comparing other scientists' work. Even though it spans thousands and thousands of years, you're finding out the patterns of what these scribes did to preserve the Word of God, because that was a conviction that God laid on their hearts. And through that exact same conviction, you're doing a science that kind of mirrors theirs across a gap of thousands of years. When you start to think about it, it's kind of wild. It really is fascinating.

It stands as one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century. I remember when we were at the museum, we were looking at a scroll, because it's all in Hebrew, right? You're talking about the Dead Sea Scroll Museum or the Museum at Qumran? The Museum at Qumran, I believe.

Okay, those are two different ones. Yes, I can't remember. The Dead Sea Scroll is in Jerusalem. The Qumran Museum is right there at the site. I think that's the one we went to.

I can't remember which one it was, because we went to both. But I remember, I was looking at one of them, and I was like, wow, I thought it was really humbling because I was like, I just can't believe I'm actually looking at the Word of God. And you read the plaque, or you read in the Hebrew, you're like, well, actually, this is the one that's a commentary, and it was a commentary on Habakkuk.

And you were like, now granted, this is still significant. This is the oldest biblical commentary in the world, but this is the one that's not actually working out. This is the one that is not the Word of God. I was like, man, I'm looking at the Word of God right now, and you were like, the sentiment is correct. I was like, well, actually, no, but I appreciate that you appreciate it.

Yeah. And I don't know if I could understand everything I was reading in Hebrew. The Dead Sea Scrolls are not only in Hebrew, but they're also in Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Nabataean, so there's several languages. So I can't read all of those.

Greek, I can probably understand better than Hebrew, but yeah. Is it the entire Old Testament that the Dead Sea Scrolls covers? Not necessarily, but most of it. So it's a ton, it's a ton of... Ton of very valuable information.

Wow. When you, okay, so when you say that there's different manuscripts, does that mean, is each fragment of scroll a manuscript, or can several fragments belong to one manuscript? Oh yeah, several fragments can belong to, and with the research, like they're doing that in the, with regards to Greek New Testament textual criticism, where by examining and studying those manuscript fragments, they've come to the conclusion, wait, this belongs to the same person. It's based on a very intricate science regarding handwriting, regarding, I just said it, regarding handwriting.

There's so much more involved there. It's not just the style of the handwriting, but also, I mean, you literally have to be a handwriting expert to be able to tell, I think this is the same scribe. No wait, this is the same scribe, but somebody has come and, what do you call the word I'm looking for, traced it on top of that, and they've corrected this, so it's not the same scribe.

I mean, it's a very intricate science. But it's not the case that it's like, okay, I have a fragment of a big scroll here, that's one manuscript. I've got another one over here, that's another manuscript. It could be that when we determine that it was by the same scribe, both of those are of one manuscript.

They finally are doing that through the years, where they realized, and some of these are like scattered all over the world. I'm not talking about Dead Sea Scrolls right now, so I just want to clarify that for our listeners and viewers. I'm talking about Greek New Testament manuscripts.

Some of them may be in Russia, some may be in Europe, in Rome, but now we've come to the conclusion that they're one and the same. And so then we begin to number them differently, or at least clarify, and say these are the same manuscripts. So when you do, like personally, Dr. Abadan Shah, when you do text critical work, how do you access the various manuscripts? So of course, there's one way is to go to all these museums, and then there are private collectors, and it's next to impossible.

Right. So one is really studying the physical manuscript. You can, and there are places you can, I mean, you can go right up to Duke University, and they have some manuscripts there. You have to get a lot of permits to maybe go in there and do that.

One of my good friends, Peter Gurry, just did it. When he was here a couple of years ago, he made a special trip to Duke and got permits so he could go see some of those manuscripts. But you do that in two places, primarily. One is through the site at Moonster. Moonster has all of these manuscripts photocopied or put into my work. Like a database? It's a database, but it's more than that.

It's microfiche. Oh, okay. And so you can sort of study them. But they're not in very good condition, because some of these things were copied in Xerox copies. Xerox copied ancient biblical manuscripts? Sometimes you had to.

That's all you had left. Wow. You know, I mean, take a picture of it and then Xerox copied it. They didn't slap it in the Xerox. They didn't do that.

Nobody's running that through. They scan it. They send it to my email address directly. Well, when they were doing this, we're going back to the 50s, there was no scan technology. There were no Xerox copies. So what I meant is they took a picture of it, and then they printed it, and then there's Xerox copies. That's all they have is a Xerox copy. Yeah. So you're dealing with a copy of a copy. Yeah.

Wow. Of this thing. Of this manuscript.

And they tried their best to update things. But then about 10, 15 years ago, Dan Wallace at Dallas Theological Seminary, at the Center for the New Testament Study of Manuscript, which is CSNTM, he began photocopying, or not photocopying, taking photographs, high... Like ultra high resolution. Extra high resolution photographs of these manuscripts.

And they have revolutionized our understanding of those manuscripts. Now we can see, oh wait, I thought there was a mark there. It's not a mark. That's just a photograph error.

There's nothing there. But now we're able to see that. Like you can see what's a mark on the parchment or the papyrus versus what's like a scratch on the camera's lens or something like that. Or just because of a Xerox copy that some ink got spilled or emphasized from the glass. Who knows? How much of New Testament textual criticism is just doing that, is just eliminating variables?

Is that a lot? Most of it we know what the text is saying. Yes, there are places you go, the text is illegible.

And that's where we have these volumes called ECM, where some of these readings that have been chosen and discussed, they give you information where a manuscript is broken off or fragmented or illegible or the film is distorted. But that happened too. Some of these scholars back in the 50s, like Kurt Aaland and others, photographed things. But then they never had the opportunity to go back because wars are happening or there's a new bishop and he's not allowing people to come and take photographs. So you're stuck with this thing. He's stuck with this image.

And that's it. That's the only image you have of that manuscript. We all have to study.

Everybody has to use this one. And it's not like everybody who has a fragment or whatever checks in every month like a parole officer and says, hey, I still have my manuscript. Some of these manuscripts, we don't know where they are. People just wanted to keep them?

I mean, it's not, we don't know, it got passed down to a descendant or something and we don't know where it is. Oh, you're talking about like the private collectors earlier. So people just have, that's crazy to me. There are fragments of New Testament or Old Testament manuscripts and people just have them. They just have them somewhere out there in the world. Are these like really elite, like rich people who just, or it's just. Oh, they're passed down from family or they are their father. I know somebody personally whose dad was very high up in Hebrew or Old Testament studies and son has manuscripts, I mean, or not like full blown scrolls or anything, but he has pieces here and there and I'm like, wow.

But he has given that information to the right sources where we can study them. But there are others who have things. That's incredible.

That's wild. I wonder if there's anybody out there who like, this has been handed down from person to person and they just, maybe they don't realize what they have. Bro, I want to get you on the show. I want to get you, I know this is crazy.

We say stuff like this every week. But if you have a fragment of the New Testament manuscripts, please write into the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Like I'm not going to, I'm not going to steal it from you. I just want to leave. That would be amazing.

I just want to talk to you. Just to warn you, there have been a lot of forgeries too with the Dead Sea Scrolls. People have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for something that was not from 2,000 years ago. It is something that was maybe, you know, two years ago.

That's incredible. So do you, I don't know how much you want to go into this because it's still in the future. Everything's kind of hazy. But like you said at the top of the episode, you're a New Testament textual critic. New Testament textual critic, that's hard to say. In the future, maybe is there some Old Testament textual criticism coming your way in your academic field? I may. I may do some study and work in that direction. I'm working on that. I'm doing some work in New Testament right now, writing a paper or kind of updating and revising a paper to be published in a theological journal, a paper that I read recently at the Evangelical Theological Society. I'm kind of updating that and polishing it up to do that. There's another paper that I will be writing for November, and hopefully I can read that as well.

It just has to be approved. So there's several projects like that I want to do and then maybe look into Old Testament. Nice.

That'll be cool. I love listening to you talk about textual criticism because it's something that I know that you're passionate about, something you're knowledgeable about. And I want to ask this question, and I feel like this is a question maybe our listeners have sort of toyed with, maybe like a lightning round questions or something. But textual criticism is not a required field for somebody who wants to become a pastor. It's not a prerequisite for getting into the pulpit and beginning preaching. But I want to hear, how do you feel it's helped you in preaching, in being a pastor, in teaching from the Word? How do you feel like textual criticism has impacted that for you? Philosophically speaking, it is a discipline that forces you to look at the text. That was my reason for choosing New Testament textual criticism for my PhD work, because it is one discipline that forces you to look at the text.

Does that always happen? No, because most times you're reading a lot of other books on the text rather than just looking at the text. So in a sense, yes, it forces you to look at the text, but in a sense, no. But also where Christianity is today, where the world is today, this is a very critical field because the text is under attack like no other time in history because of textual criticism where the allegation is made that we don't even have the original text. We don't have the original manuscript, so we don't have the original text. Now we can preach all we want to, and we can write all we want to, but if somebody tells you whatever you're reading and writing or whatever you're writing and preaching may not even be the original text. We need to be able to give a reasonable response to people like that. I mean, of course, our case in point, Bart Ehrman who says that, we don't have the text.

The text is gone. In fact, there are more variants in the New Testament text than there are even words in the New Testament in the Greek. When he says things like that, it's misleading. Now he will always clarify and say, but this is what I mean. But the way he says those things, people only take that and they walk away going, wow, do Christians know that?

They don't even have the original text? That's his hope. He hopes that Christians will take that and walk away with it before he has to clarify. You know what I mean? He doesn't want to have to get to that point where he clarifies, and many times he won't.

It's intentionally jarring. Right. And I love what you said. I think you said this in your book and you've said it on the show before, is that if you don't have a Christian practice, a settled Christian practice, without an authoritative text. Right. That's right. If you don't have an authoritative text, something that you can come back and say, this is inerrant, it's inspired by God. If you don't have that, then ultimately you don't have a firm, settled Christian practice or faith.

That's right. That was my motivation to focus on textual criticism. And I knew there was going to be a battle on the text, like in the past there have been battles over the resurrection or the virgin birth or the miracles. But on the text itself, on the manuscripts, I knew something was coming, but I didn't realize how big it was going to get. And with Bart Ehrman's misquoting Jesus, I mean, it blew up.

This was in 2005, I believe. And since then, every armchair philosopher and theologian now talks about the Bible, you know, Bible was put together by the church. They don't even have the original text.

How do they know what's original? So we should be able to say, no, no, wait a minute. We can explain that. That's right. We may not have the original manuscripts, but we have the original text. That's correct. That's correct. And that's my reason behind sticking to New Testament textual criticism for my PhD work.

I love it. And then in turn, you know, we, as people who sit under your preaching and teaching, we get the benefit from that. Today was helpful for you, or if it sparked some questions for you.

If you have questions about textual criticism, we want to hear from you. Write in and send those questions to 252-582-5028, or you can visit us online at ClearViewTodayShow.com. Don't forget, you can partner with us financially on that same website. Scroll to the bottom, click that donate button, and let us know what's coming from our ClearView Today Show family. We also want to encourage you to visit MightyMuscadine.com. They're the sponsors of today's episode. They have a great line of products. We check out user promo code today. That's T-O-D-A-Y. It's going to give you a great discount, and a portion of those proceeds are going to come right back here to your favorite radio show, the Clear View Today Show. We love you guys. We'll see you tomorrow on Clear View Today.