Defending the Reliability of the Bible CA103

 LESSON 02 of 04

The Textual Transmission of the Bible

David Frees
Experience: Director of online learning at
Our Daily Bread University

David: It’s good to be back with everyone, and see everyone

logging back in.

Tony: Yeah, so I just asked everyone how much they know about
biblical manuscripts and the transmission of Scripture through
the centuries. We still have some votes coming in. I’m going to
show you where those are at, at the moment. It looks like most
people are, “a little bit” or “basically nothing.” Eighty percent are
“a little bit” or “basically nothing.” So, it’s 50 and 40%, so I think
they’re in the right place.

David: Hopefully so.

Tony: Yeah. So last week we asked a question, what is the Bible?

And you gave us an overview of the grand story of the Bible and
how people view it today. So, what are we going to be looking at
in tonight’s lesson?

David: Well, tonight, we’re going to examine the first of three

lines of evidence that we spoke about last week, that support
really the reliability of the biblical text. And our first topic is going
to be the textual transmission. How do we get the Bible from the
first century of when it was written and the Old Testament, even
before that, to the Bibles that we have published today, whether
it’s in English, Spanish, or whatever language that may be.

Now, one criticism that has been aimed at the Bible over the
years is that the original autographs, that is the original writings
of the Old or New Testament, are missing—we don’t have them.
It doesn’t mean that they’re not in existence, it just means that
we haven’t found them or whoever stowed them away, or maybe
they have gone by the wayside over the years. The point is we just
do not have access to them, and because we don’t have access to
the original writings, it has been suggested that the translations
that we have today are not accurate. How can we know what they

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

actually said? You know, we really cannot say, this is what the
original writing said because we can’t compare it to them. And
it’s almost like, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a party and a
game, they play a game called “Telephone,” where one person has
a message and they whisper it to the person next to them, and it
keeps whispering onto the next person, and no one’s hearing the
transmission, but you go around about ten or maybe even twenty
people, if it’s a bigger party, and the last person tells what they
actually heard. And you find out compared to the original, very,
very different usually, I mean, it’s a completely different story
almost, a lot of things are missing. Or some would say that it’s
like the Bible’s kind of like making a copy of a copy of a copy
of a copy. If you’ve ever had an older copy machine, they don’t
do them too much now because they’re pretty good. But if you
take an older first generation copy machine and you would take
a copy of an original and you make a copy of that, and you could
go about five different copies in, you would find that you had, the
degradation of the print or what was on it, was quite evident. So
many have kind of said that the Bible is like that. It’s either like
the “Telephone” game of whispering down the centuries or it’s
making copies of copies and they just simply deteriorate, and we
find that people are making mistakes and you know, we just don’t
have what was actually said in the beginning.

The challenge with these two positions is that the translations

that we have are not based on oral hand-me-downs. It’s not about
content that has been downloaded from one person to another;
we actually have manuscripts. And the problem with the question
or the statement that these are copies of copies of copies, that’s
not true either because the translations that we have today are
not translations of things that were copied last year and then
copied from some before it, they actually go back to some of the
earliest documents or some of the most prevalent documents,
and we’ll see there are two different theories on how that should
actually happen.

So, the question may be, why don’t we have these copies or
at least the original versions? Well, let me show you a little
piece here of a paper. This is a sheet of papyrus and papyri was
originally created or prepared in Egypt, and it was from the stem
of a plant; they would combine it together to create sheets like
this, and people in the ancient world would use it for writing,
for painting, sometimes they’d use it for making ropes, sandals,
even boats, you could interweave and you could create different
things. Well, this was kind of what paper was at that time, and you

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

would write your letters and things of that nature on them. Well,
this type of material actually is known to disintegrate after about
one hundred years, and unless it’s kept in optimal conditions, the
paper in which things were written on in the first century would’ve
disintegrated in about one hundred years. The challenge we have
is, as the church, is that the church repeatedly copied the original
manuscripts. Whenever Paul says, write to the Colossians, and
then have this letter read to the people who were at Laodicea. Well,
the people at Laodicea would’ve probably copied this and we read
about how copies were made of the original manuscripts, and so
they were very well worn and that would’ve even shortened the
life that they had. And again, I’m not saying that we don’t have
the copies, we don’t have the originals that are not in existence,
we just haven’t found them yet. And there probably is a good
chance that maybe some of these did go by the wayside because
they were copied so much that they just kind of were destroyed in
the process.

So today we’re going to look at how the manuscripts of the Old and
the New Testaments have been transmitted through history, and
to see if we possess an accurate representation of these original
manuscripts, and because the Old and New Testaments have
taken kind of different pathways, we’re going to tell two different
stories, two different lineages, of what comes down to us as the
Old Testament and what comes down to us as the New Testament.
So, we’re going to take the Old Testament first, as we kind of look
at this path. I think maybe Tony, you may have another poll you
want to give them before we get into this.

Tony: Yes, so we’re curious to know, you mentioned “Telephone”

and I have played “Telephone” with many people, and the final
result is not encouraging if that’s how the Bible was transmitted.
So, I just want to get a feel for everyone in the audience. What’s
their feeling about examining the reliability of biblical texts?
Because not only do I not like the idea of the Bible being like a
“Telephone” game, I also, it feels a little weird to be saying, are
we questioning whether the Bible is reliable? Should we be doing
that? Is it okay for us to question the Bible like this? And is this
something that we really need to know as believers?

David: Well, I think it’s something we need to know. If what

we believe is true and we believe that the Bible is God’s Word,
then God has kept the transmission through history. And the
original autographs were, in fact, inspired when Peter wrote or
Paul wrote or Matthew or whoever was writing, or even in the Old

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

Testament, those documents were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and

the Bible tells that is the inspiration. We talked about 2 Timothy
3:16 last week. “All Scripture is inspired by God, and profitable
for teaching.” So, the Scripture, we do believe is inspired, but
the transmission of that, we need to examine it. And when we’re
examining it, we’re not questioning the original autographs,
we’re not questioning whether the Bible is inspired or whether
it’s the Word of God. We’re just trying to say, how has this text
come to us, and is it still accurate? And again, as I just mentioned,
as believers, because what we believe is true, we shouldn’t be
fearing looking at history, we shouldn’t fear looking at the textual
transmission, we shouldn’t fear looking at science. I mean, what
God has created is going to be true, and we just need to look back
and say, hey, we can be able to give answers to the people who
would say, you know, maybe it was a “Telephone” game or copies
of copies, so we can say, well, that’s not really the way in which the
Bible was transmitted, and here’s the way it was transmitted, and
we are able to give them the answers and fulfill what Peter says
in 1 Peter 3:15, sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts, and always
being able to give an answer to those who ask us for a reason for
the hope that we have in Christ. So, we’re not questioning the
Bible, we’re just simply saying, let’s look at how we got the Bible
today, and I think that’s a very important question to do.

Tony: So, the results of that poll, just so you know, 61% said
they were excited, 33% said curious, and another 4% said either
uncomfortable or they gave us a different reason in the chat. So,
most people here are ready to learn and looking forward to that.

David: Well, hopefully we can move the uncomfortable to curious

and others on up the line there. So, let’s get started with the
transmission of the Old Testament manuscripts. Now, if you think
back in your mind to the Old Testament period, there was a time
when Israel was put into exile into Babylon. They were there for
seventy years, they came back in three different waves, actually
went in three different times and they came back in three different
waves. But under the return of Ezra in around 458 BC, Ezra did
something Israel had not done before. He actually collected the
Torah, which are the first five books of the Bible. And he collected
other manuscripts, the different prophets and other things that
were circulated and created in a sense, kind of a proto-canon, if
you will, a proto-list of here’s the books that Israel had said, these
are inspired by God, these are the ones that are being used. And
these books were kind of identified as Scripture at the beginning of
the first century, and these are the books that the New Testament

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

church adopted. This is what Israel had embraced, so the church

had embraced them as well, and of course the church comes out
of Israel. And the same thirty-nine books that you have in the Old
Testament today, were the books that were identified at that time
and were used by the church in the first century.

Now some hold that the canon of the Hebrew Bible was officially
closed around the mid or late first century, and that was at the
Council of Jamnia. Now historians are not exactly sure, but many
believe that’s probably the time when the Hebrews said, yes, we
have these books, and these are the official books and nothing
else will be added to it.

Now, following Ezra’s collection of these manuscripts, there

were various scribes and groups of scribes that kind of oversaw
the Hebrew Scriptures and their transmission through history.
In the earliest years, you can see, we’ll just kind of look at the
timeline there between about 400 BC, just after Ezra’s time, to
200 BC, there was a group known as the Sopherim, this is a word
meaning “scribes”; they oversaw the transmission. During 200
[BC] to about 200 AD, from another four hundred years there, it
was the Zugot, and that means “pairs of scribes;” the Tannaim was
between 200 BC and about 500 BC, and the word Tannaim means
“teachers.” And the last group, as you see highlighted there, was
the Masoretes, the Masoretic text that they produced, Masoretes
means “traditions,” and that goes from about 500 to around 1000
AD. So that’s closer to our particular time.

Now, the Masoretes standardized the Hebrew texts, and in

the process of doing this, they did destroy some of the older
manuscripts that didn’t agree with what they had said, “This is
what we go back to,” as far as the oldest manuscripts, but they did
standardize the text. Moving forward from about 500, they started
this process. They even introduced, as you can see there, a vowel
system. The letters at the top were consonants, you have Alef,
Lamed, Pe, Bet, Yod and Tav, and then underneath that, you’ll
see the word that is kind of an “a” and a Sigel, a Patak, a Sigel;
these are the vowels that they put in the text to make sure that
everyone was not only pronouncing Hebrew but getting the same
words. Hebrew typically has three different basic consonants, and
depending on the vowels you put with it, it can have a different
meaning. So, this right here is actually the word Aleph-Bet, which
we get the word alphabet from. So, it’s without the vowels and
there’s with the vowels, and the Masoretes are the ones that came
up with the vowels that you find in the text today.

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

Now as they moved forward, about 1000 BC, around a little bit
before that, around 920, I think it was, they developed what
was called the Masoretic Text. They were putting all this stuff
together, and we have that in the form of, what is known as the
Leningrad Codex, and you can even buy a copy of this today. It’s
probably $400-$500, it’s a very thick volume, probably twelve
inches by twelve inches or so, but it will show the original text
that dates back to about 1000 BC. And this became the standard
and common text, moving forward for any translations of the Old
Testament, especially in the English-speaking world in Europe,
and then later in America.

But the question was, well, do we know that this Masoretic Text
that goes back that far is actually true? I mean, it’s a thousand
years separated from the earliest texts that go back to the time
when Ezra was there, in fact, almost 1,400 years from Ezra. And
the question is, how do we know that this has survived, and that
the text that they developed is actually accurate?

Well, we can point to another Scripture, and that is the Scripture

that is called the Septuagint, that goes back to 250 [BC]. Now we’ve
always had the Septuagint with us since 250 [BC], and the story
about the development of this is actually quite interesting. We’re
probably all familiar with Alexander the Great; you had, Plato
was one of the great philosophers in Greek, in the Greek culture,
or Socrates was, and his greatest student was Plato, his greatest
student was Aristotle, and his student was Alexander the Great.
He comes from the area of Macedonia and around 333 BC or 332,
he decided to go on a campaign. He was an amazing general and
he started in Macedonia, took over the area of Greece, took over
Asia Minor, came down into the area of Israel, into Egypt, and
within eleven years had gone all the way across the Middle East
and had conquered most of India, and he did this again in a very
short time.

Before he did this campaign, he established a city that was known

as Alexandria in Egypt, still there today. He made that a center
of learning. Alexandria was a place where scrolls were brought
together; some say that this place had as many as 400,000, some
estimate as much as 700,000 scrolls. They would copy scrolls;
they would take scrolls from ships that would come in. It was a
center of learning, they had a lot of smart people that would come
there, and they were trying to get people to continue to come to
that area and do their studies and write books.

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

Well, one of the books they didn’t have was the Hebrew
Scriptures. So, the legend goes is that seventy-two scholars, and
that’s supposedly six from the twelve Tribes of Israel, came to
Alexandria and they translated or at least started translating the
Hebrew Scriptures. They got through with the first five books,
the Torah, and it was said that the translations that every one of
them had was identical. Now we know that probably is not true;
it’s hard to have that kind of accuracy. But we do know that the
translations that they created, that these people coming together,
did create what was known as the Septuagint around 250 [BC]. In
fact, it would be about another hundred years before they would
get all the rest of the books of the Bible of the Hebrew Scriptures
translated into Hebrew, and that would become books that would
serve the New Testament church.

Now, once they had these things together, you find that Jesus and
His disciples, many of the quotations in the New Testament of
Old Testament passages, were, in fact, from the Septuagint. This
is not an inspired book, we wouldn’t say, but it is a good historical
book, and it gives credence to what we find in the Masoretic Text.
In fact, there have been different versions of this over the years.
Around [AD] 140, there was the Aquila Septuagint, this is Aquila
of Ponticus, and around [AD] 140, he developed a collection of the
Septuagint, he was collecting the different copies that had been
made. There wasn’t just one in Alexandria, they had many that
had been made by that time. In [AD] 185, you had the Theodotian
version of the Septuagint, and then you had Symmachus, which
was in [AD] 200, right at the turn of the third century.

Now in the early church, there was a man by the name of Origen,
you may have heard of, and Origen lived around [AD] 235,
he moved to Caesarea Philippi, and we are familiar with that
place from the Scriptures in the New Testament. And he was at
a library, and he actually did a favor for the church, he created
what was known as the Hexapla. Now this was a document that
would take the Hebrew Old Testament Scriptures that he had
at that time, all the way back to that time, that would date back
to the time when they were being translated in the early first
century AD or first century BC. And he took that in one column,
he took the Greek transliteration of that in another column, and
then he took the original Septuagint that was translated in 250
[BC], he took Aquila’s translation, Symmachus and Theodotian,
he had them all together (of course hexa means “five”), and it
was a twelve-volume set that represented about seven thousand
pages, and it would show us exactly what the originals were. Now,

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

the unfortunate thing is that, around the fifth century or so, this
particular place of Caesarea was destroyed, and those twelve
volumes have kind of gone somewhere in history. We don’t know
if they’re still around or if they’re gone, but they were a testimony
to what exactly happened or what was being translated as the
Septuagint, and as the Hebrew Scriptures.

Now today, there are about two thousand Greek manuscripts that
are of the Septuagint, some in different stages, and they range
anywhere from the second century BC to the sixteenth century
AD, around the 1500s. And the Septuagint as we have it today, an
academic version of it, is, as you can see the kind of the blue copy
there, that’s one you can buy today. It’s an amalgamation of all
of those different two thousand Scriptures that are saying, okay,
what is the oldest, what is the reading, through textual criticism,
they say, they have put it back together to say, this is as close as
what we can find. In fact, the Septuagint continues to be the Old
Testament for the Orthodox Church. You have the Roman, the
Protestant, and the Orthodox; they have always used, since their
inception, they’ve used the Septuagint.

Now the important thing about the Septuagint is that it parallels

the Masoretic Text from about 1000 AD, but it predates it by
almost 1,200 years. And you will find that most of the Septuagint,
the majority of it, does in fact parallel with what you find in the
Hebrew Scriptures. There are a couple of words or a couple of
statements here and there that are a little bit different, but it
parallels what we have in the Masoretic Text, and that was a great
witness to testify to what that was being done in 1000 AD.

But before that, we find that there was another place that was
called. . . In 1947, there was a Bedouin boy who was throwing
rocks in caves, you can see there at Qumran, and he found some
jars as he heard jars breaking when he threw a rock in one of the
caves. And he found what was known as the Dead Sea Scrolls,
and they’re called the Dead Sea Scrolls because Qumran is on
the edge of the Dead Sea. Now these particular documents are
mainly of papyrus, they’re parchment, and in fact there is one of
the scrolls that is made of copper. They have opened it up, and
if you like Indiana Jones, this Copper Scroll that was included
in these manuscripts, and there were many of them that came,
there’s almost a thousand documents that were found. This one
Copper Scroll actually tells the location of temple treasure from
the Second Temple, that Solomon had made, back around 950 or
1000 BC. Now, you can get a copy of that online, you can find it;

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

the problem is that the Copper Scroll is rather vague. It will say,
go to the sharp rock, walk twenty paces, and you will find a round
rock, or you’ll find a tree. Well, a lot of rocks are sharp, and there
are probably not any trees left that were back in that time. But
there are, in fact, people that are trying to find this. If you go on
YouTube, you will type in the Copper Scroll, you’ll find all kinds of
people that are trying to find this particular treasure.

But as I said, in 1947, a thousand documents were found and 20

percent of those documents were of Old Testament books, and
they contained scrolls that dated back before the Septuagint. In
fact, they could have been some of the same scrolls that were used
to translate the Septuagint. So, they go back to about 300 BC. A
lot of the other ones are non-biblical documents, they are kind of
documents about the Qumran Community, what they called the
Rule of the Community. Some of them are commentaries on the
Old Testament books, and those are very interesting to read.

But we do have text of the Old Testament. One of the most

prominent ones was the Book of Isaiah. And we know that in the
first century that was a pretty prolific book to, if you had means,
you could probably find the Scroll of Isaiah. We’re probably familiar
with Acts with the Ethiopian eunuch; he was reading the Scroll of
Isaiah because that was one that was well published at that time.
And what we find is we look in these scrolls, these two hundred or
so scrolls that are of books of the Bible—nothing discovered calls
into question the teachings of the later Masoretic Text that dates
to about 1000 AD. In fact, there’s so much similarity between
what they have. The text that they had maintained to about 1000
AD was almost identical to what we find in these 1,300-year-old
scrolls, and they also match what you find in the Septuagint.

Now this, the Old Testament, really what you find here is that some
say that the Old Testament was created in around 450 BC, and that
Ezra kind of created the Old Testament. With the Septuagint and
with the Dead Sea Scrolls, we couldn’t deny that because they go
back to 250 [BC] and 300 [BC]. But in 1979, we were able to say, no,
we actually have scrolls that go beyond the Septuagint and that
go beyond the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, and that was what
was known as the Silver Scrolls. Now in 1979, some archeologists
in Southern Israel or Jerusalem, who were digging around; they
found two objects that were made of silver. And you can see the
Silver Scrolls here, they may not mean much to us. They’re kind of
written in what is known as Proto-Hebrew. And these are a part of
a scroll that contain an excerpt from Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

5, and on the other side was an excerpt from Numbers 6:24-25.

And I think we’re probably familiar with that, and that is the
Aaronic blessing, “May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the
Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you.” And
this was found to be dated to 600 BC, right at the time when the
first exile into Babylon was going on.

So those who said, well, Ezra just wrote all these scrolls, he wrote
Daniel, he wrote this, he wrote that, that doesn’t hold true now
because we have part of the Pentateuch, the earliest part of the
Hebrew Scriptures, it goes back to 600 BC, almost two hundred
years before Ezra even lived. And this was a huge find. For those
who denied the veracity of the Hebrew Scriptures, this was a blow
to their particular side. And we find that these scrolls, in fact,
they contain the earliest—at that time—known recorded mention
of the word Yahweh. And when you’re reading your Bible in the
Old Testament, if you find the word L-O-R-D, Lord, and it’s all
in capital letters or in small caps, that means it is actually the
word Yahweh, what’s known as the Tetragrammaton, the four
sacred letters. There are no vowels that are put with it, it’s simply
YHWH. They call it unpronounceable, and it’s unpronounceable
because you can’t pronounce four consonants without some
type of a vowel. So that is the earliest known mention, and the
word Yahweh was specifically assigned to Israel. We don’t find
that that name is used in any other culture—that is the God of
Israel. So, this pushed the writing of the Old Testament and of the
Pentateuch, the Torah, before 600 BC because these scrolls, these
Silver Scrolls, would have to be based on even earlier traditions
and manuscripts.

Now we have one of the last discoveries that, just simply the
highlight here, and that is what is known as the YHWH Curse
Inscription. You probably have seen this on YouTube. In 2019,
there was a discovery that was made, and it was on Mount Ebal.
It was a tablet that was created during the time of Joshua. This
particular inscription goes back right to the time of 1400 BC,
this is the time when the events actually occurred. Joshua was
bringing Israel out of the land of Egypt, the conquest of Canaan
was occurring, and we find that this particular scroll, or not scroll,
but this tablet, it’s a very small tablet, but it was written in what
is known as Proto-Paleo-Hebrew, an older form of the older form
of Hebrew that we have. What we have today is actually Aramaic
script that the Hebrew is written in, but this was a very, very early
form, and it was found on Mount Ebal, where the people of Israel
were to be. And it is the pronouncement to Israel about the curses

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

that were related in the event of Joshua 8, and I would encourage

you to read that, Joshua 8:30-35. This is where, very similar
to what Moses had done, Joshua was called to get the people
together. Half the people stood in one area, half the people in
another, and they read the blessings. If you keep the covenant of
Yahweh, as said in Deuteronomy, God will be faithful to you, and
He will bless you. But if you do not keep them, He will curse you.
And this particular tablet when transcribed, and again, it’s very
difficult to read, but if you know, Proto-Paleo-Hebrew, you can
read it. It actually says, “Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the
God YHW. You will die cursed.” That’s a pretty straightforward
sermon there. But someone had written this down on a tablet
based on those particular events, and this has now become the
earliest mention of Yahweh in history, all the way back to the time
when these events occurred.

So when you look at these different manuscripts, whether it is

this Curse Inscription or the Silver Scrolls, the plethora of Dead
Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint and the copies we have, or even the
Masoretic Text that is embraced and backed up by these much
older scrolls, we find that these findings testify to the validity of
the Old Testament writings. And the Old Testament manuscripts,
we can see that the events that are written about, were not written
hundreds of years after their timeframes necessarily, but they
were written during the times, many times, of when these events
were occurring. And as we’ll see next week, there are some rather
remarkable archeological discoveries that support the historical
events that are described in the Old Testament.

Now that’s a lot of information to go through there, but I think

before we move on, maybe we could just see if there’s any
questions about the Old Testament and how it kind of came to be.

Tony: Yeah, I have about a thousand questions, but I’ll just take
one for me. So, it looks like for a very long time, like a thousand
years or so, the Septuagint was the oldest text that we were aware
of?

David: The oldest translation.

Tony: After the events—the oldest translation—and it was way

after the events, so it was kind of on faith that this is accurate to
the few hundred years before that. But now we have the Dead Sea
Scrolls, the Silver Scrolls, which were, you said in the 1970s. So,
we’re like privileged to actually have something beyond that now,

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

that’s very cool. And 2019 was for the Yahweh Curse, so there are
still things being discovered about all this too.

David: And the Dead Sea Scrolls, they’ve actually discovered new
Dead Sea Scrolls, not too long ago. I think it was like ten, fifteen
years ago, I believe it was, but they haven’t been published. I
mean, they’re still in the process of trying to figure out what they
have. So, once they’re translated, they’ll come into the scholarly
community and people will have access to them. You can actually
buy a copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls translated into English, I don’t
know if people know that, but Eerdmans makes one. You can just
go to Amazon, and you can find a copy and you can actually read.
Now, there are some places where the text has been deleted, you
don’t have all of the texts there, but you can kind of compare it
to what we have in, you know, Hebrew manuscripts and things of
that nature.

Tony: Is it fairly close to what we currently have?

David: The Dead Sea Scrolls, they do fine. They compared Isaiah,
one of the most prevalent scrolls, it was most of those that were in
the Dead Sea Scrolls, there’s a lot of those in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And they found that it was almost word for word. I mean, it’s not
exactly word for word, but what was there is, the message was
the same, the people and the events and all that, I mean, it was
right there. So, it pushed that doubt in a one-thousand-year-old
scroll from the events, or at least from the collection of it, back
all the way, 1,300 years. And again, the Septuagint, though not
inspired, it is a translation and that translation does back up, what
you have in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. So today, when
people are translating the [Old] Testament in modern English
versions, they would use the Masoretic Text—King James only
uses the Masoretic Text, is what I understand—but other different
translations, like the ESV and the NAS and stuff, they will use
the Masoretic Text, but also compare it to the Septuagint and to
the Dead Sea Scrolls. And they’ll look and say, what is the oldest
testimony to this particular event of what we find, and usually
you’ll find a marginal note that says, in the Septuagint, it has this
word or it says this. So that you will have usually a note in more
of your modern translations.

Tony: Cool. I see a couple questions about the Scripture reference

in Joshua. Can you say that again so that we can put it in the chat?

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David: The Scripture reference is Joshua 8:30-35. And this is

about Joshua gathering the people of Israel together, and they are
being called to kind of, in a sense, re-establish the law. But they’re
about to go into Canaan, and he says, you know, we want to make
sure you understand, that you need to keep this law and not go
against what God has said. And you’ll read there that at this time,
Joshua had built altar and it was on Mount Ebal. This is where the
tablet was discovered, and it’s discovered right at the time when
Joshua would’ve been there. So again, Joshua 8:30-35, read that,
and you can go online to YouTube, type in the Yahweh inscription
curse tablet, and you will find all kinds of videos showing this and
really detailed information about what was discovered there.

Tony: That is very cool. Ramon asked, “Was it mainly oral tradition
until Ezra compiled proto-orthodoxy (6 Centuries)?”

David: Well, a lot of people said it was oral or oral transmission

up to the time of Ezra. The problem is that we have writings of the
Silver Scrolls in 600 BC. So, there was obviously a written version
200 years before Ezra. And now that you have the Yahweh Curse
Inscription, there’s at least something at that time that was written
down that relates to this particular time of the conquest, all the
way back to 1400 BC. In fact, critics of the Old Testament, which
would say we had nothing before Ezra, and he kind of created the
Old Testament, they didn’t even think that Israel had a language
back at the time of 600 or much less 1400. And there’s a couple of
documentaries that have been put out that actually show, there’s
evidence that Moses actually wrote those first five books of the
Bible. There was a language, we can see that Proto-Paleo-Hebrew,
and there’s a lot of evidence that they’ve discovered, you know,
that you can do some more searching and kind of look at. So, I
would say when you go back, it’s not the fact that there was a.
. . we’re relying on the “Telephone” game of just oral tradition,
but we’re seeing that there are actual written documents, written
examples of Scripture and they must have been either based on
oral before them or they were right there at the time of the events.

Tony: Very interesting. All right, there are a couple questions we’ll
save till the end. Let’s move on.

David: Okay, I know our time is going here, but let’s look at
the New Testament translation. This one’s an interesting topic
for sure. Again, we do not have the autographs of the New
Testament documents, and some have called into question,
again, the accuracy of the translations we have today. However, in

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comparison to classical works, that people have said, you know,

these are valid works, that when they look at, for example, Homer’s
Iliad or Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the works of Tacitus, Herodotus, they
would say these are historical documents and we can trust them.
But the textual evidence for them versus what we have is very,
very different. In fact, if we look at the testimony of the Iliad, we
have existing manuscripts today—what they would call extant
manuscripts, extant means “existing”—is 1,758. The earliest copies
we have are made about 350 years after their origins, and that’s as
far back as we can go. The New Testament is much different than
that. And I think you want to maybe give a test to the people to
see where they think they’re at.

Tony: Yes, they’re answering the questions now, still some votes
coming in. I’m going to end it now, so we can see those results.
Looks like we got 39% said more than five thousand, 27% said
more than five hundred, 13% said more than fifty, 18% said more
than fifty thousand. So.

David: Okay.

Tony: What is it really?

David: Well, we have existing manuscripts of the Iliad, 1,758, as

I said, 350 years after the original, and historians would say that
is very good evidence that what we have for the Iliad is in fact,
what the Iliad was when it was written. With the New Testament,
we have over sixty thousand manuscripts of various lengths
and proportions, very much like with the Iliad, and the earliest
copies can go, dated as far as thirty to fifty years after the original.
Now we don’t have many way back there, but we do have several
manuscripts that date from the second century and third century
and on. So, let’s look at what scholars have actually found, I mean,
in this treasure trove of manuscripts and how we can trust it.

So, we look at a timeline and we’re going to move a little bit to

the AD side here because we’re looking at the New Testament
now. There are basically four categories of manuscripts that we
look at. There is Greek manuscripts, which we have over 5,500
Greek manuscripts, that date from around the time of the church,
right after the apostles have probably died, just after 100 AD to
the time of around 400. And these particular manuscripts and
manuscript traditions will come in different types. There is the
Papyri—copies that are made on papyrus—there’s the Uncials and
what is called the Minuscules. Now the 5,500—the oldest would

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be around Papyri 52, and that dates somewhere in the early part
of the second century, around 100 to 150, and this would’ve
been within about thirty years, or at least fifty years of when the
apostles would have lived. John wrote Revelation many believe
around 95, some push it earlier than that, but at least by 95, and
John would still be around, he would’ve seen some of these things
that are being written. So, we have Papyrus 52, now this is part of
the Chester Beatty and there’s another collection of Papyri called
the Bodmer Collections. These are the two biggest collections of
Papyri, and they date to around the area of 100 to 250 AD. So,
they’re really close to the original source; they could have been
maybe a copy of a copy or even copies of some of the originals,
since some of these Papyri can last about a hundred years.

Now, there are four notable. . . And that is a picture of what Papyri
52 has, again, it’s a small section, but it’s a portion of John’s Gospel
and taking that, we can kind of go back to say, here’s what John
would’ve written. Now there are four big manuscripts; these are
called Codices. They’re called Uncials because they’re all written
in upper case Greek letters. Once you get into about 1200 or past
1000 AD at least, you start getting to the Minuscules, which is small
lettering that you’ll find in modern day Greek New Testaments.
So, you have of these, you have Codex Sinaiticus, which is from
St. Catherine’s Monastery. It was found around the fourteenth
century, thirteenth century, and it contains the Septuagint, what
is known as the LXX. Septuagint is a Latin word for “seventy”
because there were about seventy people who translated it. And
the Sinaiticus is a testament to not only the Septuagint, but also
the Hebrew Scriptures, but it has almost all of the New Testament
in it. There are a few pieces that are maybe missing a page or
two here, over the years it’s gotten kind of tattered, but in fact,
it is located in four different parts of the globe; no one owns the
entire thing.

The Codex Alexandrinus is another one that goes around the

400s. It’s in Alexandria, Egypt, and it contains the Old Testament
as well as the New Testament, missing a few parts of the New
Testament, Matthew and John. But it is another testimony to the
history of the New Testament documents we have.

Vaticanus and Bezae, those are two other ones that again, contain
the Old Testament. Bezae is actually what’s called a diglot, so it is
the Greek text and the Latin text. Around 400, Rome created the
Latin text, and that became the Bible for the Church for almost a

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thousand years, and it shows the difference between these two, a

comparison from what the church was using, to what the church
kind of moved to.

Now, in addition to these particular manuscripts, and again, we

have about 5,500 manuscripts from other areas and copies and
things of that sort, so we can compare back and forth. There are
also the Church Fathers and the Church Fathers who have about
36,000 quotations from the New Testament. These would’ve
been the disciples of the Disciples (capital “D”), and this would
be the earliest leaders after the disciples were starting to go on.
They were discipled by them, they became leaders in the church,
and they began to quote the manuscripts and the teachings that
they had heard from Peter and from Paul, from others that had
known Jesus personally. And the Church Fathers, it’s actually
said that we could reproduce the New Testament simply by using
the quotations of the Church Fathers, so I think that’s rather a
remarkable achievement that we could be able to do that. But we
still have all the other Greek manuscripts, some that go beyond,
you know, around this early time as well into the first few centuries
of the church.

And then there are the Latin manuscripts, again, that kind of
started around 400, when Latin was a major language of Rome.
Rome was the predominant, it was the only nation there that was
kind of over the Christian empire, and we got manuscripts that
started going more and more toward Latin as Latin became the
official language, and Greek started moving to the side. And there
are other languages. We have ten thousand, as you can see there,
Latin manuscripts, and of other languages we have about nine
thousand copies, and some of these languages go all the way back
to the time of the Papyri 52 and maybe even earlier. And that is in
areas of the Coptic and Armenian. And throughout this particular
history of transmission, we have many different other languages
that are copying these particular Greek manuscripts, the early
Church Fathers, and putting them into their languages and we
can make comparisons back and forth for them as well.

So, total we have sixty thousand manuscripts, and if you think

about the history of these manuscripts, you’ve got Church
Fathers and Greek manuscripts in the first few centuries, first
four centuries, you kind of move from Jerome who creates the
Latin Vulgate in 400, and that brings us all the way to about 1500.
The church, in fact, many of the church during that medieval
period, the Latin Vulgate is the only version that the church

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ever saw. Only in libraries, would you find the Greek versions.
And then after 1500, you find that during the Renaissance and
the Reformation people began, even before the Reformation, to
make translations; many people like John Huss and others, they
gave their life for making a translation, because it was considered
illegal. But after the Reformation and after the printing press, we
find that translation to English and other places were being done
on a regular scale. So that’s kind of the, you know, with the King
James, you have that official printing of the English Testament
and from there other different English translations are kind of
made.

So that’s an overview of what we have in Greek manuscripts, and

as I said, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches. In fact, we have
so many manuscripts that sometimes that can cause us a problem
as hopefully we’ll have a chance to look at here in just a second.
But before we move on, let’s see if we have any questions about
the New Testament’s development of the text.

Tony: Yes. First of all, could you distinguish between a full

manuscript and fragments?

David: Okay, a fragment could be like the Gospel of John or the

Gospel of Matthew. In fact, the church was on the cutting edge
of technology. It was the first one to kind of use books instead of
scrolls, which you can only, Isaiah wrote a 35-foot scroll, so you’d
only get one book in that, and if you had the Old Testament, you
would have thirty-nine different scrolls. The church began to use
papyri and they would put them in layers, and you would have
these books and they eventually became known as the Codices or
Books of the Early Church.

So, we do have from these old manuscripts, and again because

of the wear and tear and the copy on the different papyri, some
of these are small pieces, some of these are entire sections of
books with maybe a chapter missing or torn out or something. In
fact, when Codex Sinaiticus was actually found at St Catherine’s
Monastery, again, this goes back to about 1400s. The person who
found it—I believe his name was Theodore Beza—he found it,
and he found part of it, of the Septuagint, was actually in a waste
basket, in the trash. And he started looking, and he said, what are
you doing? And they said, well, we use that to light the fires. And
they had copies of what became known as Sinaiticus, and they
were using it simply to light fires and to burn things with. So, he
said, don’t do that. So, he tried to copy and he was successful to

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be able to get this in the hands of scholarship and be able to get it

saved as much as possible. But there are multiple versions. Some
believe that Sinaiticus as a full book was one of the fifty copies
that was requested by Constantine. Whenever he kind of set the
church up at the first council, he said he wanted fifty copies to be
able to distribute throughout the empire. And some believe that
this may have been one that was prepared, but they think it may
have been rejected as one of the fifty, but it was one that dates
back to that particular time.

So, a fragment is a portion. A full book is, you know, the whole
book that we have, or part of the books that make up the New
Testament or the Old Testament.

Tony: Okay, so the sixty thousand manuscripts that we have,

they’re not all full manuscripts, but they’re at least fragments
that sort of confirm.

David: They are fragments, and they are partial pieces, they
are sometimes full gospels or they will be a collection. Some of
the Papyri can be as much as 120 pages, so you’re going to get
a lot of the New Testament in that. But as you can see here with
Papyri 52, that is a very small text, but we can still take that and
compare that to other manuscripts and say, this is one of the
oldest manuscripts. How does it relate to Sinaiticus or Vaticanus
or other different manuscripts? And we can begin through textual
criticism, to piece backwards, this is what the original documents
are saying.

In fact, New Testament scholars, and you can go, whether it’s
Bruce Metzger, there’s Daniel Wallace, I mean, these are some
of the leading individuals. They will say what we have today in
the Greek New Testament that has been published, is what was in
the original languages. I mean, there may be a line here or a line
there, I mean, more like a letter here and there to say, okay, was
this word before this word or whatever. But what we have is the
same as those inspired original autographs that were made, both
Old and New Testament.

Tony: Okay, well, we’re getting close to the end of our time. I
actually made a poll so that we can find out the audience’s interest
in moving to Q&A time or keep teaching, because you teased a
little bit of there’s more to come. So, if we keep teaching, we’ll
probably push Q&A time back a few minutes, we might go a little
bit past eight. But of course, this lecture will be available after

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the fact also. And as they’re coming in, people want you to keep
going.

David: Okay, not a long section. Give me maybe seven minutes

or so here, and I think we can go through it. Because the question
that critics would say, okay, yes, I mean, compared to the classical
writings, the New Testament is far superior in the testimony to
what the original was, the original books, Old and New Testament.
I mean, it far outshines anything we have in antiquity, but the
critics would say, okay, you have what’s there, but you have all
these different manuscripts, and you need to acknowledge that the
manuscripts you have are not always agreeing with one another.
In fact, there are around, and brace yourself, there are around
500,000 variant readings among the sixty thousand manuscripts
that we have. And some may say, well, that sounds like a huge
problem. And a critic would say, yeah, you can’t trust the New
Testament. But we have to look at this and say, well, what do we
mean by a textual variant? And what exactly are we looking at?

So, if we have 500,000 variants, there are three questions we need

to ask. What is a textual variant? Why do we have so many of
them, 500,000? And then, what is the nature of these variants?
The last one really is kind of one of the most important there.

So, let’s just start with, what is a textual variant? Simply put, a
textual variant is any place in the manuscripts where there is a
difference in word order, spelling, or the omission or addition
of a word. So, if someone is copying and they get a word out of
order, that is considered a variant. It may still be there in the same
sentence, or there’s a different word, they may misspell a word
or whatever it may be. Now this is what produces most of these
different variants.

Now, the second question is, why do we have so many of them?

Has God not superintendedly kept His Word? Well, as I said, what
we have is accurate to the original writings and how can we say
that? Well, the reason we have so many variants is because we
have so many manuscripts. During the early years of the church,
there was no control over who could copy a manuscript. When
a letter of Paul would maybe go to Laodicea, you may have a
person who says, you know, I’m a brick layer, but I want to copy
this manuscript. And they didn’t really know how to do it, or they
may not have copied all of it. They started and said, I can’t do
all this, so they put it away, and you’ve got part of a manuscript
here and they may have missed a word here or there. So, there

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was no real control over what was being done, and that made a
lot of the manuscripts that were kind of put into the stream of
manuscripts saying, okay, we do have these variants because they
weren’t copied correctly by scribes.

Now, as I said, not everyone did a good job. In fact, Augustine,

if you remember Augustine from around 400, he was a leader in
Alexandria, one of the bishops there, this is one of the complaints
he had. He said too many people that don’t know what they’re
doing are copying manuscripts. I also have a suspicion, I haven’t
read this, but I have a suspicion that if the enemy of the church
is there and they want to somehow discredit the church, what
better way than discredit their book to create manuscripts maybe
on purpose that have variant readings? And we find this really a
lot of times in the Gnostic Gospels. There are some things in there
that are not in congruence with what we find in the manuscripts
that relate to the New Testament. So, there could be a lot of these
different areas going on, and when you have a lot of manuscripts,
you have a lot of room for people doing things that maybe they
should not have done. So, we have so many manuscripts and no
transmission control.

But here’s the question, what is the nature of these variants?

Are these important? Do we need to worry about them? Well, it
turns out those individuals who spent their life studying this, said
99.8 percent of the variants have no effect on the meaning of the
text, absolutely no effect. These may be spelling differences. You
may have, John is spelled this way or another way, or a particular
location is spelled one way and this region another way, and you
find that, you know, even today, there are people that have little
bit of differences in spelling. So as manuscripts get spread across
the Mediterranean, people may do things a little bit differently
and they may say, well, this place is spelled this way, or they may
just not know how to spell.

There’s the practice of what is called nomina sacra in certain areas.

You would take the name of Jesus, which is Christos—they may
just simply use the X, which was the chi in Christos. Or the name
of God, Theos, or the name of Jesus, which is Iésous. Sometimes
they would simply write just the first letter or maybe the first
letter and one other smaller letter to say, that represents God,
Jesus Christ. There are different types of words that were known
as nomina sacra, sacred letters, and they would abbreviate them.

There’s also word order. Some people may have certain things

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out of order, but it’s interesting to know that unlike English, the
Greek language it was written in—and many believe that God gave
these letters at a certain time because the Greek language was
so prevalent—it actually doesn’t matter what the word order is;
those sentences will still say the same. I mean, unlike in English,
if we say, “John threw the ball to Mary,” we know who threw the
ball, we know what was thrown, the ball, and we know who it was
thrown to. But if I reverse that, I say, Mary threw the ball to John,
that sentence has a totally different meaning. However, in Greek,
you can say it any way you want, and you’ll always come up with
the same result, the same meaning. In fact, there are 384 ways to
say, “John loves Mary.” Daniel Wallace, a New Testament scholar
and a person who works with manuscripts all the time, actually
wrote these things out and said 384 ways to say, “John loves
Mary.” And he said, there’s more, but he just stopped. He thought,
you know, I’ve proven my point. So the word order, there may be a
variant in one manuscript over another but it doesn’t change the
meaning of what we have.

Or even the use of the definite article, the. There’s about twenty-
four of those or so, and sometimes people will use a definite
article, “the John,” or they will just say “John,” and you’ll find
that even in John’s Gospel, you’ll find that sometimes he uses it,
sometimes he doesn’t, in front of different names. And depending
on whether they included the definite article, that doesn’t change
the meaning, but it is technically a variant or the use, and that’s
in names, places, even pronouns, or just common scribal errors
that can result.

So, what are the 0.2 percent of the variants? Some will say, well,
these do have somewhat of a meaning and there are, we say about
a thousand of them, that they would classify in this area. Now
these come in one of two areas: missing words in a text or the use
of a different word, and then secondly, the inclusion of additional
words in a text. And let me just give you, you know, some of the
reasons for missing words, it’s just poor practices. Manuscripts by
the fourth century were actually created in scriptoriums. You’d
have a person in front, they would read a manuscript and you
would have maybe ten or twelve people or maybe more copying
down and that was a way to kind of really get the copying going,
making multiple copies there. But just like today, certain Greek
words had similar sounds and some people could put the wrong
word into place. If I said, “The knight traveled at night to the
castle,”—knight and night—we can know by context what they are,
but they have a very similar sound to them. So, some words sound

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alike, and those were some of the issues that were introduced.
But by looking at other manuscripts and older manuscripts and
seeing the context, we know that word was not the right word;
this is the word that was supposed to be used.

Now, as far as additional words, this is probably the more

important one. Let me give you an example of what this would
include. In Mark 9:29: “And he said to them, ‘This kind cannot
be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.’” This is Jesus’s
words. Now the oldest manuscripts we have do not include the
words “and fasting.” All other manuscripts do include them. Now
that just doesn’t mean that it wasn’t said, but whenever you look
at that, you don’t really need that passage to say, well, if you don’t
have “and fasting,” we don’t need to, you know, that changes the
entire meaning there. Now fasting is very important and fasting
is included in other different passages. But that’s one of the
examples and most of your modern versions would say, the oldest
manuscripts do not include this, but it is here, so you understand
that there are a lot of manuscripts that will include the phrase
“and fasting” with this. Another example would be Mark 16, the
very ending of Mark. We have an ending there, several verses, 9
through 20—a lot of your modern versions would say, this is not in
the older manuscripts, and this is what they’re going by. The older
manuscripts usually trump the more majority manuscripts. The
closer to the source, they would say that’s probably closer to what
was actually written. So, the ending of Mark’s Gospel that talks
about Jesus’ farewell, it talks about handling snakes—somewhat
of a controversial type of a verse that wasn’t in the oldest ones,
but we do have it in our English versions—it’s just noted that it
wasn’t in our older versions.

Other ones would include 1 Timothy 3:16. This one reads, “Great
indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness.” And then we
have one of three different choices. Some manuscripts say “who
was manifested in the flesh,” some say “God was manifested,” and
sometimes they simply say “he was manifested.” Now the meaning
is still the same, we just have three different words from different
manuscript traditions saying which one is correct. And scholars
will kind of look at that and say, well, let’s see what evidence there
is to support from the different manuscript traditions.

And then of course, in John 7 through 8:11, there’s a passage there

about Jesus, a woman who’s caught in adultery and the people
bring her to stone her. Jesus begins to write on the ground. A lot
of sermons have been given as to what that was, but in the older

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manuscripts, that’s not there. Now, again, I’m not saying that the
older manuscripts, that these are not to be in there. It’s just the
manuscripts that we have found—and they’re always finding new
manuscripts—don’t include these different passages.

But those are the types of things that relate to this. And the main
person, Bart Ehrman, if you’ve ever read, Misquoting Jesus, he
wrote a book that kind of ignited a lot of people to say, we can’t
trust the New Testament because it has all these different variants.
When he was asked a question about this issue—and he’s the
main proponent against the Bible. They asked him the question,
why do you believe these core tenants of Christian orthodoxy
to be in jeopardy based on scribal errors you discovered in the
manuscripts? And you can see that the question is actually kind
of leaned to one side. His response was this, “Essential Christian
beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript
tradition of the New Testament.” None of them relate to the
Virgin birth, to the death of Christ on the cross, to the bodily
resurrection, to the second coming, His sinlessness, His deity,
even about salvation—none of the variants relate to any of those
doctrines. It may be something that we say casting out a demon
is by prayer and fasting or just by prayer—that’s not a major
doctrine for the church. And we find, again as I said, that the idea
of fasting is taught in other different places. In fact, today, there’s
a greater difference in denominational beliefs than there are
in these variants. In fact, the reason we have so many different
beliefs is the way in which we interpret the Bible, not because of
any of these small variations to say, oh, that changes the meaning,
when it actually doesn’t. So, in the end, we don’t need to worry
about the doctrinal beliefs of the church, the doctrinal beliefs of
the church having been carried through history or distorted by
the transmission of the text, because what we have is there for us
to read, and it is accurate to these original texts.

Now, any questions? I know that was kind of a quick overview

there, but I think that it’s important to kind of see the reality of
what we do have, but it’s nothing that we need to worry about. So
any questions now, Tony?

Tony: Well, that is reassuring to me, that the person who is finding
these errors is also saying they don’t actually really matter all that
much to what Christians believe. That’s very reassuring.

I’m going to make a couple of closing comments because we’re at

eight o’clock and then maybe I’ll toss you a couple of questions.

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

So, this lesson will be in this same place tomorrow, so that you
can rewatch it again or if you have to leave now, then you can
catch whatever you missed. And as with last week, there will also
be for Premium subscribers, there will be discussion questions,
quizzes you can take, and you can earn a certificate of completion,
if you’re interested in doing that. And we also have a coupon code
for 10% off a subscription. That is ODBULIVE, and we’ll put that
in the chat for you. And yeah, we’ll be back again next Thursday
for lesson three at seven o’clock. David, you ready for a question?

David: Well, let me say, if people are, I don’t want people to be

worried about the text itself. I mean, the Bible is the inspired Word
of God. And these are realities that we have here, but the next
two lessons, I hope people will be able to join in for because what
we see here is that what we have in our hands as a translation is
accurate to what was originally written. The question that we’re
going to be answering in the next two lessons is, how do we know
that those things actually happened and are true? And that’s
where archeology and that’s actually where prophecy—which
many people may not think of too often—that’s where prophetic
statements are going to come in to support these particular
stories, the events and the people of what we see. So, let’s answer
some questions as long as we need to.

Tony: Yes, so you had mentioned the documentaries that talk

about Moses. Do you happen to know what those are that you
could give the name of them or maybe that’s something we can
find afterwards? Kim was curious about that.

David: The documentaries, what was the question again?

Tony: You had mentioned there’s a documentary that was created

related to Moses writing the Old Torah.

David: It is put out by the thinker; I’m trying to think of what his
name is. If you type in “the Moses controversy,” you will find that
video; it’s on YouTube. I’m not sure if you have to pay for it on
YouTube, but it is on Amazon Prime, you can find it there. But the
thinker, I’m trying to think of what the name of this person, maybe
someone on the chat can look that up for me. But he did one on the
Exodus. It’s a fascinating portrayal of how do we understand the
Exodus, did it actually occur as we see? He goes to the holy land,
and he looks at the evidence of that. He’s got a two-part series
on that one—very well done. But the one he did on Moses was
amazing. And he just, he keeps bringing back archeological find

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

after find, pushing it back to say, Moses would more likely have
written these documents. And yeah, I’ll have to look that up, but
maybe someone in the chat can type in “the Moses controversy”
and see if they can put that in there for them.

Tony: Cool. Yeah, they’re on it. Okay, related to the tablets

found by Mount Ebal, the Yahweh Curse, I believe it was—so two
questions: “Is it possible the old tablets found by Mt. Ebal were
written by the Hebrews back in Old Testament times?” That’s
from Julie. And related to that, “How do they know the date of its
origin?” That’s from T-bone.

David: Well, again, I would encourage you to go to YouTube and

look this up; you’ll find lots of information. But they date that
based on just the dating they used, the script, of how the script
is, it’s Proto-Paleo-Hebrew. I mean, so this would be an ancient
script that they’re using. That dates it. Some of the way in which
the words were done, but even the location. So, location, dating
of the script itself, and some of the words, all of that, pushed
this thing back to 1400 and it’s currently in review with other
different individuals, but this is seen to be an authentic, you
know, inscription that does date back to the time of Joshua.

Tony: Okay, another one, an Old Testament one again. “Are all of
the texts that Ezra collected now in the Bible or were some of the
collected texts later excluded?” That’s from Kristy.

David: Well, many believe that Ezra would’ve written some

of the texts, so he was collecting at least the Pentateuch—the
books that they would’ve had, the Book of the Law. And as you
come forward, Ezra would’ve probably written some of those, we
believe, he was a scribe. But when we come to the New Testament,
there is a list of Scriptures that have already been transcribed into
the Septuagint. So somewhere between Ezra’s time and the first
century, well actually by 250 BC—which is not too far removed
within that, a hundred or so years—we’ve got about 150 years, we
have the list of thirty-nine books. Now, the Hebrews combined
some books where they don’t have 1 and 2 Kings, they don’t have
1 and 2 Samuel; those are considered as just two different books:
Kings and Samuel. But we do have them, at least by the time of the
translation in 250 [BC]. Even in the Dead Sea Scrolls by 300 BC,
pushing even further back, we find the testimony of these books
in the Old Testament that have been written and been collected at
Qumran. So, they would be based on even older scrolls, probably
even back to the time of Ezra. So, what he’s collecting probably

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Lesson 02 of 04 The Textual Transmission of the Bible

would’ve been most, if not all of the books that we currently

have in our Old Testament today, and that was used in the early
church’s Old Testament.

Tony: That’s very interesting. Well, I want to be respectful of

these people’s time and there are a couple other questions. But
I think we’ll try to put something together where I’ll ask them to
you off camera and you can answer them, and maybe we can post
that somewhere. So, we can get to those as well. Would you mind
closing us in prayer, David?

David: Certainly, let’s pray.

Lord, we do thank you for the day that you’ve given us, and we
thank you for this study. We do pray as we look at history and
we sort through all that’s happened, we don’t know everything,
but what we have learned is encouraging of how you have
kept your Word through the centuries. You inspired those to
write the original documents and we see that they have gone
through history, and what we have today is—through the work
of scholars that you’ve given certain skills to—has provided for
us the basis of the translations we have. So, we do thank you,
that you are the God of history, the God of our lives, and that
you give us salvation in Christ. And also, Lord, that you have
preserved even the archeological evidence that we’ll be looking
at next week, and that you’ve created a book that is prophetic in
nature. So, Lord, we pray that we continue to dig down, continue
to just seek your will and to know you. And we just pray that you
help us to be encouraged to follow you and to read your Word
and to serve you. We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Tony: Amen. Thank you, David.

David: Well, goodnight, everyone.

Tony: Thank you all for being here.

David: Take care.

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