Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. The school was founded in 1927 by the evangelist Dr. Bob Jones, Sr. His intent was to make a school where Christ would be the center of everything so he established daily chapel services. Today, that tradition continues with fervent biblical preaching from the University Chapel platform. Today's message will be preached by Dr. Mark Minick, pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina.
Dr. Pettit has asked that we give our attention today to the subject of translations and the preservation of God's Word. So I want to ask us to take a look at these four images. And there they all four are. What would you say that all of those have in common? Well, it's obvious that they're all written documents and you probably, at least many of you, can tell that they're in languages other than English. And because of the topic this morning, you would assume that they have something to do with the Bible. And they do because all four of those are what we call manuscripts. I don't know whether you've ever looked at an image of a manuscript, but there are four of them.
And the question is, what makes a document a manuscript for our consideration? Well, there's a little hint of it in the upper right hand corner if you stop and think about how a manuscript was produced. It is handwritten. And when we're talking about the scripture, we're talking then about a handwritten Bible. There's one other thing that we want to remember about a manuscript, and that is that it's a handwritten Bible in the original Bible language, either Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek. A handwritten document of a portion of the Bible in an original Bible language is a manuscript. Now, if it's handwritten and it's in another language, like the Latin document in the upper left, or there's a Coptic manuscript, or there's an English manuscript that's actually a page from a Wycliffe Bible of the fourteenth century.
If it's in another language, then we call it a version or a translation, and we'll come back to that in just a little bit. So, handwritten Bible in the original Bible language. Now, take a look at this third point, and I think this is one of the most important things to realize about our Bible manuscripts, and that is that every single one of them was somebody's Bible.
These were not primarily produced for academic purpose. These were held in people's hands just like we're holding copies of the scripture in ours. They were the Bibles that people read during all of those centuries. And the fact is that if you were going to have any of the Bible, all the way from when the documents were first written, 1400 years before Christ, let's say, or 1500 years before Christ, all the way up to the production of that book, the Gutenberg Bible, in 1455—that's the Library of Congress first edition of it—for that whole span of some 3,000 years, if you wanted to have any portion of the Word of God at all, it all had to be handwritten like that. You stop and think of how amazing it is that it's been less than 600 years in world history in which people have been able to have what we call printed Bibles, Bibles actually published on a press. By the way, if you happen to find a copy of that, the Gutenberg Bible, in your grandmother's attic, if you would please put that on Antiques Roadshow so the rest of us can see it, and then you just want to really be strapped down to your seat when the appraiser gets ready to talk to you because you're either going to fall over in a dead faint or they're going to have to peel you off of the ceiling when he tells you that at auction it will go for somewhere between $25 and $30 million. If your grandmother has just a page of it that's worth about $25,000. So a remarkable document. Now, I want you to look again at those four manuscripts.
A couple of them don't look like they're in very good shape. And that brings up the whole question that is right at the heart of what we want to give our attention to today, and that is the issue of the preservation of God's Word in the manuscripts during all of those thousands of years. The question is, just how well is it actually preserved? Do we actually have God's Word in our hands? And I want to give you several considerations this morning that have been very securing for me personally, and I hope that they will be for you as well. And one of them is this, some of the Bible's own statements.
For instance, take a look at that one. Now that one was written by the Apostle Paul, we assume somewhere in the 50s AD, about 20 to 25 years after Christ's ascension. And Paul is writing to those Roman Christians. And what is the implication of that statement when it comes to the issue of the preservation of God's Word? The statement is saying that our faith, this is saving faith, comes as a result of contact with the Word of God. What does that imply that Paul believed was fully accessible and available to people in his day? The implication of that statement is that when Paul wrote that, that the Word of God was preserved for people's faith. Or here's this statement, 1 Peter 1.23, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the Word of God which liveth and abideth forever.
Again, what is the implication of that statement? It is that the scripture is available. Those words are still printed in our Bibles. Those words give to us the understanding that the word that is necessary for our faith, for being born from above, born again, is available to us, that God actually has preserved His Word. There are numerous other Bible statements that I could bring to our attention this morning, but we'll just stop with those two and the implications of them.
And I want to take you to this issue now after the Bible statements. I want you to take a look at that manuscript. That is, scholars say, the oldest manuscript, the oldest part of somebody's Bible, that we have of the book of Romans. They're dating it in the late 200s after Christ.
We would say third century after Christ. And that particular scrap is very significant because it contains parts of Romans 4 and 5, and you know that Romans 5 begins with, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have what? We have peace with God. A very important statement. And there is our oldest testimony to that particular statement, alright? But that scrap is not in very good shape. So when it comes to the matter of preserving what God actually said, what assurance do we have?
Well, then take a look at this. This is one of those manuscripts that we had up on the screen earlier. This is called Codex, that's C-O-D-E-X, it's a word for an ancient book that's done in this form. Sinaiticus, it was discovered at St. Catherine's monastery in the Sinai Desert, and it contains the entirety of the New Testament. And it's dated about a century after that scrap.
Look at that. That comes from two centuries later. It also has the book of Romans in it. And there's another one from the ninth century, and there's one from the eleventh century. Now there are just five, but all of those are witnesses to the book of Romans. And those are just five of many, many, many manuscripts that are witnesses to the book of Romans. And what it does is bring up the point that I want to call our attention to next, and that is that when it comes to the matter of preservation, we not only have certain statements in the word of God itself, but we have this, the many manuscripts that can be compared. How many are there? Well, there are thousands of Hebrew manuscripts, and there are over 5,500 cataloged Greek manuscripts. So you have all of that to bring to bear on the subject.
But you also have this, folks. You have all of these versions, the many versions. There are over 20,000 manuscript versions that have been cataloged in many, many of the languages of the ancient world in that Mediterranean region. So you stop and think, if there was a word in question, and you brought to bear upon it the testimonies not only of multiple manuscripts and multiple versions, but then take into consideration that those Bibles were found in many different parts of the world, all the way from the Western Roman Empire, all the way around through Turkey, down through Israel, to North Africa. You have witnesses from many, many different parts of the ancient world as well.
It gives great assurance when it comes to this matter, has the word of God actually been preserved in those ancient Bibles? And then there's this particular issue. These three young ladies are having a trip of a lifetime. They're looking at the photographer. They can look right over the photographer's shoulder, and behind him is the lowest spot on the earth.
What is it? The Dead Sea. And what they're pointing to is a cave located at the ancient site of Qumran. Many of you may be familiar with the fact that in the 1940s, this was the site where there were many Bible manuscripts discovered hidden in caves. These are some folks from our church, and we're making our way up an escarpment to one of those caves.
In fact, the gentleman there in the orange top is Dr. Kerry McGonigal on our Bible faculty here. And what we're headed for is up there, that spot that has the red square around it, and that is called Cave One. And the importance of that is that that manuscript in the upper right-hand corner was found in that cave. What is so significant about that particular manuscript? That is the oldest complete copy of the book of Isaiah that we have in the world today, and it was discovered in that cave. It is conservatively dated over a century before the time of Christ.
Stop and think about it. It's 2100 years old now, at least. That's a conservative estimate. But what is really significant about that is that before the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, the oldest manuscripts of the book of Isaiah—to use that one illustration—the oldest manuscripts that were known to anyone were from about ten centuries after Christ. With the finding of that particular scroll—and it's a complete scroll of Isaiah, all sixty-six chapters—beautifully legible, with the finding of that scroll, they jumped back from ten centuries after Christ to a century before Christ. That's 1100 years. This is 2016.
Go back to 916. Think of everything that happens over the course of 1100 years. All of the opportunities for corruption of a biblical text. And yet what scholars have determined is that 95 percent or better of that particular scroll matches up identically with the Bible manuscripts from eleven centuries later.
Now, five percent difference sounds large, but you've got to stop and remember what a lot of those variations are, and we'll come to that in just a moment. So when it comes to the matter of preservation, here's this whole scroll. That's the whole thing. Fifty-four leaves of it. When you go to Jerusalem—and some of you will do that perhaps this May with the university's trip—and I'm sure that they will take you to the Israel Museum and to the major building there called the Shrine of the Book that's actually shaped like the lid of one of those jars in which they found those Dead Sea Scrolls. And when you come inside that, they've got a facsimile of that whole Isaiah scroll that is the centerpiece of that Shrine of the Book building. That's what they call it, the Shrine of the Book. There are over a million visitors a year that walk around and see the facsimile of that Isaiah scroll. It is on display by the providence of God for the world to see today that He has preserved His word. Now what about this business of the preservation of the Bible?
Here are helpful considerations. The Bible's own statements, many manuscripts, many versions, thousands of those, and what I was showing you those slides of that scroll, the point I wanted to make is this. The careful transmission of the text that has gone on over thousands of years that way. And that does bring us number five to the issue of the variations. Remember the five percent variation I mentioned? Now folks, in a really ironic sort of way, and this is the wisdom of God on display, the variations themselves help assure us of the preservation. And I want to try to demonstrate the way that can be the case.
Here you are. Let's say that Dr. Pettit got up in chapel and said, we're going to do an exercise for 20 minutes in chapel. Dr. Pettit said, I'm going to read the book of Romans to you word for word, and as I do it, I want all of you to carefully make your own copy.
You'll get as much of the book of Romans as we can get in in 20 minutes. When that exercise was over, do you suppose there would be some variation between you? How much variation do you suppose there would be? What if each one of you only made one mistake? That would be 3,000 variants. What if each of you made four mistakes? That's over 10,000 variants. In just 20 minutes of copying and hearing the same person reading what you're copying.
Now folks, I'm going over that to make this point. There are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of variations in those manuscripts, as you could well expect. But let's stop for just a moment and ask ourselves, what do you suppose would be the most common kinds of variants among you when we finish with that exercise? I would bet you would all come up with the right answer to that. The most common kind of variation would be a variation in what?
Anybody want to hazard a guess on that? It'd be in spelling, unquestionably. And don't you suppose that if we had just 10 of your copies and we were able to compare just 10 of them, that we'd be able to figure out what the right spelling was?
And what if we could compare hundreds of your copies? And lots of those variations are nothing more than spelling variation like that. Or the kinds of variations where someone writes the same word twice. Their brain kind of skips out on the fact that they just wrote it and they wrote it again. But there are other kinds of variations as well that I want to call our attention to. Here is the first line of Romans 1-1.
Maybe a little bit faint up there. I hope you can read that. All right. And we're going to go right through the words on this. That says Paulos. Give me the English word for that.
That's Paul. Dulos. You've heard preachers use that term. That's the Greek word for slave or servant. Paulos, Dulos, Christu. Who would that be? That's Christ and Jesu.
That's Jesus. All right. There are those four words. Paulos, Dulos, Christu, Jesu. There's the top line. But look at the second line.
Paulos, Dulos. And I expected it would say Christu, but it says Jesu, Jesu, Christu. What you've got is a reversal of those two words. That actually occurs in some of the manuscripts.
Some of those people's Bibles. Now folks, what do we call that when you're taking a quiz and you're supposed to write a verse word perfectly, but you reverse Jesus with Christ? The text is Jesus Christ and you write it Christ Jesus.
We call that what kind of a mistake? That is an inversion. And many of the variants are nothing more than those kinds of inversions.
All the words are there, but somebody switched them in his Bible. And you find some of those. Here's another kind of variation that you find. Let me just get you to count the words in the top line. How many words do you have in the top line?
Five. Count the words in the second line. How many do you have in the second line?
You've got six in the second line. You've got that one little word in red up there, which is the word for and or also. That's another kind of variation. Additions. You have inversions and you have additions like that in the text.
Let me show you a third kind. And this time, rather than letting you look actually at lines of Greek text, I'm going to take you to the 1611 King James Bible. You can buy your own copy of that.
It's published by Thomas Nelson. You can get it for less than $20, complete facsimile of the original 1611 King James Bible. Here is Matthew 26, 26. And in the column reference, the King James translators put many Greek copies have gave thanks. This is where our Lord took the bread and many Greek copies say he gave thanks, but some Greek copies don't. And the King James translators decided that when they wrote, put the verse in there, they would put it without gave thanks.
But they wanted the readers to know that there were many ancient Bibles that had it. Well, folks, what do you call that? What do you call it if something is left out of a manuscript? That's not an addition. That's a what? That's a subtraction.
All right. So those are some or substitution. In this particular case, it's a substitution for the word blessed.
Let me show you another one of these. This is also from the 1611 King James Version. This is Luke 17, 36. And you have this reference there.
Two men shall be in the field. One shall be taken and the other shall be left. And the King James translators note this.
This 36th verse is wanting. They mean missing. It's missing in most of the Greek copies.
There is an omission or a subtraction. The previous one was a substitution because the word in the text was blessed. He blessed it. And some of the Greek copies said he gave thanks. All right. So here's another kind of variation. Inversions, additions, substitutions, omissions, those kinds of things. Now, what I'm saying is knowing that actually gives me more, not less assurance about my Bible. How so? Okay.
Let me just take you through this. Isn't it something that the King James Version translators did evaluate those variations? They knew of their existence and they examined them.
Secondly, they wanted to tell their readers about them. And thirdly, that helps assure me that God actually has preserved his word. How does it assure me? Because I have my Bible and I have honest translators saying to me, now you need to be aware that some of those other ancient Bibles reversed those words or had this additional word or didn't have that particular verse.
And when I look at that, what's apparent is nobody's trying to hide anything from me. Nobody's trying to somehow inject doctrinal error into my understanding. The translators are being right up front, honest about the variations, alerting me to their existence. And the fact is God's word is preserved among those many manuscripts and in those variations, even if I'm not exactly sure what the word was, I've got all the options.
And that brings us to this. How significant are those variations? Wouldn't you say that would be a very important question? When I'm saying, well I've got the word of God, I'm just not sure which of the two it is, or the three, well then the question is how significant are they?
And let me just take you through a couple of facts about this that will help you. In the major editions of the Greek New Testament that have been put together from those manuscripts, there are somewhere between 138,000 and 141,000 words, depending on the particular Greek testament that you're using. So you've got about a 3,000 word difference there in terms of the actual words that are included.
That's about a 2% variation. Now that could sound like a lot, but actually 10% of those words are in just 21 verses. And one of those verses is Luke 17, 36 that we just looked at when it said in Luke's Gospel, that verse about two men in the field, one will be taken, one will be left. Many of the Greek manuscripts don't have that verse in Luke. It is in Matthew, but not sure if it's in Luke. About 10% of those variations in terms of total number of words are in just 21 verses of the Bible like that.
And that brings us to this question. What about those additions, omissions, inversions, substitutions? What about other kinds of variations in the remainder of the text? And scholars tell us that when you look at those, the amount of significant variation is less than 2%. In other words, you're talking about very, very little significant variation. But I want to bring you to this as the bottom line, folks. There's nobody, even the people who are the most concerned about those variants, and we're all concerned about them.
We all really want to know. But the people who are the most concerned about them and make the greatest issue about them. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that there is even a single Bible doctrine or prohibition or prescription for Christian behavior, not a single one that is affected at all by those variations. You are losing nothing when it comes to your faith and practice, regardless of what the variations are. The amount of variation is so small, when you stop and think of a book of which there are tens of thousands of ancient copies in many, many languages, copied by hand in many parts of the world. This has been going on for thousands of years, and in the end, 95 to 96% of it is identical.
The remaining few percentage points have these kinds of variations in them that don't affect the content at all. And I want to ask you, has God preserved His word or not? Does the Bible you have in your hand have the word of God? Is it the word of God?
All those translations, folks, if those translations are done accurately, you have the word of God. Let's bow for prayer. Father, we thank you for your graciousness to us in doing this miracle all of these thousands of years. And we pray that you would help us not only to read this Bible, but to have the greatest commitment possible to accepting it and living by it in this fallen world for your glory. And we ask this in Christ's precious name. Amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached at Bob Jones University by Dr. Mark Minnick. Thanks again for listening, and we look forward to the next time as we study God's word together on The Daily Platform.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-02-25 05:15:44 / 2024-02-25 05:25:03 / 9