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Andrew
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Tom Kjeldgaard
What is The Bible in 3D?
Join host Andrew, known from Biblical Reflections, on "The Bible in 3D," where we delve into the depths of Scripture through captivating stories and narratives, blending scholarly insights with conversational warmth to illuminate what God's Word truly teaches believers at every stage of their faith journey. Produced by Cogworks Creative Media Company, this non-profit series invites you to discover transformative understanding—explore more at cogworksmedia.org.
Greetings. Welcome to the Bible in three d. This is your host, Andrew. We are in a series entitled Hot Topics. And I've been going through several episodes on is the Bible reliable.
Speaker 1:That is one of the issues in Hot Topics. It's been a bit of a long subseries. Hopefully, you found it entertaining. Last time, we talked about text types. The Bible was talk about the New Testament now.
Speaker 1:It was written in the common Greek somewhere between '50 and about ninety eight AD. We have full complete copies of the New Testament dating from around March. And we have partial fragments as old as maybe a hundred and twenty five AD and that is part of the gospel of John and the Gospel of John was written probably in the nineties. We are talking only thirty years difference between this partial fragment that we have, which was found in Egypt, to the original autograph that was written only twenty five, thirty years earlier in
Speaker 2:in what is now modern day Turkey. Since that time,
Speaker 1:the Bible has been copied. The original autographs are no longer extant, as they say. They don't exist. They're apart. And so they are copied.
Speaker 1:And copying seems to run-in traditions of the earliest grouping is called the Alexandrian text or the next group was the western text or the people that lived in the western half of the Roman Empire that just didn't read Greek anymore, so they had the Greek text that was called the western text type. But there was a lot of parentheses and footnotes to try to help you help them who did not know Greek very well. Normally spoke Latin. Alright. We don't use that one at all today just because of all the extra stuff.
Speaker 1:And then later after Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the empire to Constantinople, what is present day Istanbul. This came after a period of persecution where many of the manuscripts that were in what was called the Alexandrian text type were burnt by the emperor depletion as he was persecuting the church. And so when Constantine had his apparent conversion, he certainly endorsed Christianity whether he believed in Orthodox Christianity is is highly debated. But the churchmen in Constantinople began copying the Bible, and so the copies of the Bible for centuries were in the Byzantine or later, if you will, younger text types. Now we're going to bring us kind of into the modern age here.
Speaker 1:One of the interesting events in history is the conquering of Constantinople in 1453 by the murderous jihadis. They're called the Ottomans. And they did not want this wonderful beautiful city to be Christian, and so they attacked it many times. And finally, in 1453, it fell.
Speaker 2:Now we think of that
Speaker 1:as a bad thing, and
Speaker 2:it was. And yet there
Speaker 1:was many good things that came out of that. So, I will now tell you the story. There was this guy, and his family were wealthy cloth merchants.
Speaker 2:And his name was Cosimo. And this was during
Speaker 1:the time of the Renaissance. And merchants became wealthy and Cosimo, although his family knows pretty wealthy as a boss merchant, he realized that he could make more money loaning money to other people and charging them interest. Well, if you don't already figure it out, this is Cosimo Medici. Alright? And he builds this one of the early banks, I mean other other than Templars, which was the earliest probably bank in Europe, Cosmo Medici put together this banking family that lasted for about two hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 1:It was only only supplement or superseded when basically all the family died off and then of course the Rothschilds came in and the rest is history and they still run banking all over the world today.
Speaker 2:But go let's go back
Speaker 1:to Cozumel Medici. So this is in Florence, what we call Tuscany, and he was a patron of the arts, of the sciences. So not only was he a wealthy merchant and banker, extremely wealthy, he commissioned a lot of art. The renaissance art Will Durant actually writes one of his volumes on Western history there, the civilization. And one of them is just on the renaissance.
Speaker 1:And I always said if I had a lot of money, I would just go to Italy for months and months and months and get somebody to take me to see all of the great paintings and sculpture. I I've read that book two or three times. It's just anyway, Cosimo Modisi was one of those guys that commissioned all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And one of the things Cosimo Medici did was
Speaker 1:he and a bunch of other wealthy merchant, you know, middle class yeah, I know. Capitalist. Anyway, they had a lot of money and some were into art like Cosimo, but some said, you know, the Roman Catholic church split up November. And the eastern part became the Greek Orthodox Church, and the western part became the Roman Catholic Church. So now here we are.
Speaker 1:We're gonna fast forward to fourteen fifties, late maybe fourteen forties. And many of these men with money had had some good ideas. And so they said, let's let us, we're not going let the church do it, let us fund a conference and it was over months and years to try to bring the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church back together. And I'm gonna use the word, you know, Anschluss, you know? Bringing two peoples who should be together back together.
Speaker 1:That's a German word by the way. So one of the patrons was Cosimo Medici and he put a lot of money out and he was hosting many many of the folks from the Byzantine Empire, from Constantinople, the churchmen from there. And so, you know, they came to his villa, they stayed there, he wined and dined them and and he he treated them so graciously and and they, you know, appreciated it. Well, I don't know. Neither neither of the two churches could, you know, each church wanted to to be able to dictate the the full terms.
Speaker 1:And that didn't happen. So eventually after, I don't know, many many months, they finally just said, hey, we're gonna call it for rain, you know, and we're done for the day. Well, in 1453, these murderous Muslim jihadis, they were called the Ottomans, invaded and took down, as I said, Constantinople.
Speaker 2:Many many of these churchmen are seeing what's happening and they flee.
Speaker 1:And they take with them all kinds of manuscripts and books and scrolls. And many many many many of them, where did they go? Looking for safety, for a place to go. Well, they remembered Cosimo Medici. And so they went to Italy.
Speaker 1:They go knocking on the door. Hey, Cosimo. Remember us? Yeah. Hey, could could we stay with you?
Speaker 1:Oh, and we brought a gift for you.
Speaker 2:And it was all these manuscripts. It was incredible.
Speaker 1:And Cosmo Medici created this library and you can go visit it today and it has just amazing stuff that these Byzantine churchmen brought with them as a gift be given sanctuary.
Speaker 2:That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:now, here is where you say, oh, this is terrible. It was terrible. Yet,
Speaker 1:in many ways, this led up to the reformation. So Cosimo of DC comes and goes, his grandson is Lorenzo the Magnificent, and you ought to read about this guy. If ever wanna be anybody in history, Lorenzo was the guy. I mean, he he was Lorenzo the Magnificent. Well, he had a son, so this would be the great grandson of Cosimo and I don't know.
Speaker 1:He was like Giovanni Medici and he was one of the younger kids and so, you know, Lorenzo is going, yeah, we need a we need a family member in the clergy. You know, poor Giovanni, he gets volunteered to become a priest. But because, you know, the family's got money, he suddenly is a bishop at, you know, 28 or 30.
Speaker 2:And he gets elevated and he becomes Pope Leo the tenth. Now, Leo the tenth is the guy that excommunicated Martin Luther. Alright.
Speaker 1:You know, maybe Leo the tenth, you know, could have, you know, stopped the reformation if, you know, he had done something other than excommunicated Martin Luther and and send out, you know, the the secular authorities that try to kill him. But something he did, he appears to have no. This is of some debate, but but I'm convinced of it. He took many of the religious manuscripts that were in his great grandfather's library and he took them to Rome. Now there was a Vatican Library, but you know, it was just a couple of bookshelves in the pope's bedroom.
Speaker 1:At some point, the Vatican Library got really organized to be what it is today and, you know,
Speaker 2:you can can read all kinds of books on, you know, how incredibly incredible the Vatican Library is today. Most of which you can't see or anybody else,
Speaker 1:but it's this incredible library and many of the books that came from Constantinople into Italy, The scholars began to translate them. Oh, what they found. Up until now they hadn't heard the name Socrates or Aristotle or Herodotus. Many of the ancient documents that I've mentioned here in the series had been forgotten in the West, but they were remembered in the East.
Speaker 2:And most everything was
Speaker 1:in Greek, course. And as the western churchmen and scholars began to translate, everything changed.
Speaker 2:And, you know, this went
Speaker 1:a long way to bringing old wisdom and knowledge that was forgotten back into Western civilization. And the folks in Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire,
Speaker 2:had copies and copies in Arabic. You see, the Arab Arabic
Speaker 1:the Muslim civilization had their own flowering, their own renaissance. And it was, you know, like August and then the jihadis came along and said, nope, nope. We're gonna read the Koran and nothing else and everything else gets burnt. But many of these, like, many of the Greek philosophers, there are stuff that we have, the oldest copies we have are actually in Arabic. So all of this stuff came to the West and they start translating and this fueled the humanism movement.
Speaker 1:In the Vatican library, sometime after 1450, after Leo got there, They decided the library need to be systematized, you know. We need a library cards, you know. We need to put them in, you know, some kind of order where we can find all this stuff and know what it is. So we don't know how long some of these manuscripts were laying in the quote unquote early Vatican library, but at some point they were all catalogued
Speaker 2:and all dated, and one
Speaker 1:of them is this massive manuscript which is the Codex Vaticanicus, the oldest Greek manuscript that we have of the New Testament, complete, and, of course, it's in Greek.
Speaker 2:And it sat there because nobody was paying any attention to it, but
Speaker 1:it was there. I personally think that the fleeing churchmen from the Byzantine Empire brought that manuscript to Khosimon with DC and that his great grandson who Giovanni, who became Leo the tenth, I think he brought that with him when he, you know, he took on the white hat. Now having said that, they had it, but they didn't read it because they were using Byzantine text types. They were using the, you know, some old Latin like the Latin Vulgate. Again, the Catholic church isn't really too worried about what the Bible says because at the end of the day, they'll look at scripture, scriptura primo.
Speaker 1:We'll look at it first and then we'll go to see what the church fathers say that they call it the magisterium and then we'll go with what they say. But it was there. We've identified it. As these documents and, you know, logic from Aristotle, which I've mentioned before, Plato's Republic, I mean, there are so many stories and books that have copied Plato's Republic. I actually wrote a science fiction.
Speaker 1:I've written three books and not to anybody reads them and it was called the Elders of Penbar and it's my version of Plato's Republic. So all of which to say these were important things and they opened the eyes to the scholars in the West. And one of those scholars was a priest, a Catholic priest named Erasmus. And he was a humanist and he really really got into the Renaissance and all of the flowering of knowledge and they had a saying back then, back to the sources. So during the Renaissance, more and more scholars are saying, why are we reading the new stuff?
Speaker 1:Let's go back to the oldest copies of whatever, whether it's Aristotle or whether it's, you know, Gospel of John. What are the old so so there's this stuff that's going on. Erasmus is a very interesting guy. He got very close, but in the end he did not break from the Roman Catholic church. Now back in those days, Roman Catholic church had like 39 flavors.
Speaker 1:It wasn't until the Catholic Counter Reformation that everybody got in line and said, hey, we gotta come up with one script, not not a lot of different scripts. So you could be kind of all over the map before the Reformation. After the Reformation, they said, no, no. Okay. We've got to have one party line.
Speaker 1:Anyway, as they're looking through all this stuff, it was clear that whatever text people were using, it was based on the Byzantine or maybe the more corrupted Latin Vulgate. I know we look at
Speaker 2:these earlier texts or the earliest ones we can find. And there was a lot of
Speaker 1:pressure, and Erasmus was asked or volunteered to write a Greek text of the New Testament based on manuscripts. And he had, like, I don't know, six or seven, seven or eight, and they were all Byzantine, and he worked as hard as he could. So he comes up with, for them, a modern day, I mean, fifteen hundred fifteen hundred and sixteen. That that's when he he finally came up with a Greek text that tried to bring together some Byzantine texts that or the only ones
Speaker 2:they had. Again, I think there was only maybe seven or eight,
Speaker 1:and it was hurried and was rushed.
Speaker 2:So Erasmus actually writes this New Testament in Greek. Okay. So he is trying to bring all
Speaker 1:the Greek together kind of in one place in a in a new document. Almost from the beginning, other scholars noticed that there were problems. Erasmus himself revised this text three times and he he does this very well. At some point, after his three revisions, some other people took it and they tried to revise it to improve the Greek text, the translation. Martin Luther had the second revision of Erasmus Greek New Testament, and that is the document that he used to translate the New Testament into German.
Speaker 1:So the German New Testament is based on the second revision of Erasmus.
Speaker 2:Alright. So Erasmus goes through all of this stuff and
Speaker 1:and then as he's aging out, some other people try to revise it a couple times. And so the story goes, we we've got now kind of a later revision and it's being sent. And it's all wrapped up and they call FedEx and they, you know, write on the FedEx package. Okay. What's in there?
Speaker 1:And they write it in Latin and it's a sentence. And the first word in this sentence is textus. Blah blah blah blah blah. And the last word in this sentence is receptus. Seed text.
Speaker 1:Again, it's part of a longer sentence. From then on, this original work of Erasmus, which was edited several times, is called the Textus Receptus. This is what the translators of the King James version that's published a hundred years later in 1611. This is the translation of the New Testament that they use. The textus receptus.
Speaker 1:Now, there's a few other documents they have, but, you know, the 90 whatever percent of the New Testament in the King James comes from the Textus Receptus, which is almost entire actually, it's entirely from the Byzantine text types. Well, That was incredible. The common person, certainly English speaking person in England under like King James and then later English monarchs, they can now read the Bible. So for the first time in almost what? Fifteen hundred years, the average person is allowed to read the Bible.
Speaker 1:This is an amazing thing. And King James is still there today, and you can still read it today. You can read it as it was written sixteenth century Elizabethan English published in 1611. You can read that or you can read the New King James where they scrub out all the Elizabethan English and put in kind of modern twenty first century words and language. You know, this is an extremely literal translation but it's a literal translation of the Byzantine text types, which are the youngest, latest text types.
Speaker 2:Okay. This is good. But can there be better?
Speaker 1:Well, in 1881, two prominent scholars, Westcott and Hort discovered back in the Vatican, the Codex Vaticanicus. And they're going, I mean, okay, I'm a geek. These were like super geeks. Okay. You know, they could just sit down and read seven languages.
Speaker 1:They they got permission to go in and to look at Vatican, the Codex Vaticanicus. The Vatican didn't think it was a big deal, but they realized that they had an extremely old, old copy, a manuscript, which turns out to be the oldest. This is the one that was dated to about three twenty five, two hundred years after the after the original autographs were written. And they sat down and they used this Codex Baticanicus and then there was another Codex found. Again, this is the three fifty one, the Codex Codex Sinti Atticus.
Speaker 1:And they got some found some other Greek manuscripts and and they just focused on. And so they they came up with now I've called it the eclectic and that's true. It is called the eclectic. It's also called the critical critical text because they took everything they had and tried to come up with the best interpretations of of the of the copies. Not that there was a whole lot but when it came out 1881, everybody went, oh my.
Speaker 1:Now with the exception of the King James only cult oh, sorry. Most genuine Bible scholars would say this was a much more exacting and accurate translation of the original New Testament than maybe the Byzantine. Not by a lot. Okay? But it was enough.
Speaker 1:And so from that point on, after 1881, modern scholars, biblical scholars, adopted the techniques and the theories of translation that West and Hort came up with. And I am just gonna give you a few of the rules that they came up with. So you have all of these documents,
Speaker 2:all these manuscripts, And again, these are super geeks and they've written them all. The reading is less likely to be
Speaker 1:original if it shows a disposition to smooth away difficulty. So, the hardest text to read is more likely to be the original one and the easier one to read is a later one because somebody was trying to make it easy so everyone could understand it. Here's another one: Readings are approved or rejected by reason of the quality, not the number of supporting witnesses. So, let's us say we have a series of verses, let's say John, from a Alexandrian text that goes back three, four hundred, whatever AD. Maybe there's only one or two, maybe a three, whatever.
Speaker 1:Or maybe all seven. But it's different than the Byzantine text types. And let's say we've got hundreds of Byzantine text types, but most of them were dated about 1,000 AD. These guys would say it's not the majority that wins, it's the quality. And the older it is, typically the quality is better.
Speaker 1:So let's say we have different readings. The preferred reading is the one that best explains the existence of the other readings. So you have the other readings, they change the word here or there, and you can see why they did it because they're trying to fix some perceived thing in the earliest one.
Speaker 2:The preferred reading makes the best sense. That
Speaker 1:is, it best conforms to the grammar and is the most congruent with the rest of the sentence or the larger context. If you're reading along and all of a sudden there's like something pops out at you, it's probably something some monk put in there. Again, there's not too many of these but the thought here is the preferred reading is the one that makes sense. It doesn't have something pop out. With this discovery of this these
Speaker 2:Alexandrian texts and this whole different way to interpret
Speaker 1:I mean, not to interpret, but to figure out what is the most original, again, eclectic or critical text method As we revise many times, there was currently it's actually in German. Way back. Late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds was a guy named Nestle. And he's a German, and he began this incredible he he just took what Westcott and Hort did, and he just took it like like three levels higher. And now later, the guy joined him named Alan and then Alan's wife joined.
Speaker 1:And so they have a Greek New Testament. All of the notes, all the footnotes, all the explanations are in German. And I believe they are on their twenty ninth edition. Somewhere along the line, some English speakers stood up and they formed what's called the United Bible Society. And they have basically taken the Nestle Alon text of Greek of the New Testament and they have published it.
Speaker 1:And the only thing that's different is that all the the footnotes and all the little things in it
Speaker 2:are all in English. And it is called the Greek New Testament. I have a
Speaker 1:copy sitting on my shelf and I'm looking at it. It is incredible. I mean, you read this, you know, every word has a footnote.
Speaker 2:Every verse will tell you where it came from. And how do we know that? This is incredible. They gotta have a computer to keep track of all this.
Speaker 1:Every document, every manuscript, and we're
Speaker 2:talking thousands and thousands, has a symbol.
Speaker 1:Could be a number, it could be a funny little symbol, but the people who do this, the super geeks, they know all these symbols, or most of them. And so, you're reading along and you read something and then you can check the footnotes and you can
Speaker 2:say, oh, this comes straight from the
Speaker 1:Codex Vaticanicus or or they chose, you know, some other text type or version and and, you know, obviously they have reasons. This is the ultimate Greek New Testament and it's from this document. So here in English, right, our Bibles, k, all the Bible translations we have in English, with the exception of the King James and the New King James, they all come from the Greek New Testament that's put out by the United Bible Society. And again, if anything is discovered, then the process starts over and over. These guys are incredible.
Speaker 2:Now there is also a German
Speaker 1:text, but it's in Hebrew. It's a Hebrew text, but it's done by the Germans. And so, you know, there's the Germans have done that for the Old Testament as well. And I've United Bible Society has put out an English translation of that, and I I got that sitting on myself just next to the other one.
Speaker 2:I have to go back to the King James. New King James
Speaker 1:either. Again, they were based on the textus
Speaker 2:sceptus which is
Speaker 1:a translation or rather a Greek text that was put together by initially Erasmus, modified several times. And they were based on the Byzantine text types, the youngest or newest text types. Really, I mean, the King James sixteen eleven, I mean, you know, that's around that was that was the only translation we had in English and so many people, you know, that is the Bible they grew up with. I would say that maybe the King James is aging out finally for four hundred years. I think it's maybe just the baby boomers and older.
Speaker 1:Is there anybody older than baby boomers? I don't know. Along with the King James, especially in North America, the first ever study bible came out. That was the Schofield study bible. And, yeah, I know.
Speaker 1:That's very controversial right now because supposedly that fuels Christian Zionism. The truth of it is nobody younger than a baby boomer reads the Scofield Study Bible, but for generation after generation, starting with the baby boomers and going back, that was the only study bible you can get. So you had the King James, you had the study bible, and you know,
Speaker 2:that was it. Today, because of
Speaker 1:the critical text, also called eclectic text,
Speaker 2:we have much better,
Speaker 1:I think, Bibles. And the study Bibles today, and I I don't have the NASP, but but I have the ESV and the NIV. They're just wonderful, and I think they're so much better. But the point simply is there are people who are just, especially older people, homers, they're just wedded to to, you know,
Speaker 2:King James. Why?
Speaker 1:Well, when you think of the other copies, I mean, the other translations are built on older in in a much better, more scientific way of putting things together. Why would they go up to King James?
Speaker 2:Well, there are King James only churches. I mean, that's that's the
Speaker 1:only reason go there. It's because it's only King James, you know. And you probably have a Scofield study by Bible. I don't know. But these people would say that the King James translation so back in the sixteen hundreds, alright, when these Church of England guys sat down, their work was, catch this, divinely inspired.
Speaker 2:In fact, it is said by many of them
Speaker 1:that the King James supersedes the original Greek. The Greek translation was preserved over the original Greek because it's better and it was fixed. I don't know. It's not blasphemy but it sure is hubris to say that. I mean, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:There's this one guy Edward Hills, he says King James is not merely a translation of the Greek text, it's an independent edition of the Texas Receptus in its own right. It is faithfully rendered in English and represents the most accurate expression of the Texas
Speaker 2:Receptus tradition. Well, back in his day
Speaker 1:the churchmen knew the Texas Receptus was flawed. Okay. I mean it needed some help, which we've done. Alright. I'll leave that alone.
Speaker 1:I just throw all these things out to you to kinda understand what you're getting into. Friends, if you're King James only, kinda think you ought to get new King James at least. But okay, it's a good Bible. You'll get saved. There's no doctrinal problems.
Speaker 1:Now, King James only people you can go online and they'll find heresy and anybody else's translation. You know, nobody attacks the King James these days, but the King James attacks everybody else. So it's like, well, maybe it's because, you know, you don't have the best translation. Don't know. This is why it's a hot topic.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you know, where I come down on this.
Speaker 2:I hope you found this interesting,
Speaker 1:entertaining. Again, I'm not teaching a college class. I'm not preaching a sermon. I'm not teaching you Sunday school. I'm a man who studied.
Speaker 1:Found these things fascinating and I want to share them with you in a way that you can say, gee, I understand better now. I think I'm gonna look into this. It is a fascinating story and at first you think, oh my gosh, is the Bible reliable? Friends, is the most attested and reliable translation copy of any ancient document in human history. I haven't said it.
Speaker 1:I don't know that I will. Maybe in a different venue. The Bible is inspired word of God and of itself it says, it is from God, Holy Spirit, enabled the men to write these things down. I pray that that the translations we have are accurate. I believe they are.
Speaker 1:And I hope that you believe they are as well. Gracious father, we thank you for your word. We understand a little bit how Satan works and yet your work is greater and you you have preserved this beautiful thing that we can say yes. This is the word of God. Thank you, Lord.
Speaker 1:I praise you in Jesus' name. Thank
Speaker 3:you for tuning in to this episode of The Bible in three d. We're so grateful for listeners like you. Your encouragement helps us create and share more transformative content that strengthens communities worldwide. If this episode inspired you, consider supporting our nonprofit mission with a donation at cogworksmedia.org. Also, be sure to check out our other podcast, Biblical Reflections, for more faith insights.
Speaker 3:God bless.