WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:14.400 The text of Scripture is absolutely the message of Scripture, the ideas of Scripture are absolutely there. Even in the worst possible manuscript, still the core gospel is there. 00:00:19.695 --> 00:01:06.480 New edition fixes 5,000 errors in Ulysses. An international team of scholars has produced a three volume edition of James Joyce's Ulysses that corrects almost 5,000 omissions, transpositions, and other errors included in previous editions of the seminal twentieth century novel. Scholars predict that the new edition, subtitled a critical and synoptic edition, will shed new light not only on particular passages, but also on the interpretation of entire episodes and characters. They say also that the new edition will prompt a fresh round of studies of what is already one of the most thoroughly analyzed novels ever written. 00:01:08.235 --> 00:01:55.440 That's from The New York Times back in 1984, announcing a new edition of Ulysses, a classic work by one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, James Joyce. Ulysses was first published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. The publication was notoriously chaotic. Joyce had poor eyesight, and he wrote in very bad longhand, and he apparently added another 100,000 words during the publication process. And the French printers setting the type by hand weren't exactly expert in English. 00:01:56.080 --> 00:02:40.955 Joyce's drafts and revisions were scattered across private collections and libraries, So producing the definitive edition took more than fifty years to put all the bits together. And even then, scholars argued that this wasn't the purified text that some people claimed it was. American literary scholar John Kidd wrote, This version is not a purified text, but a different version from what Joyce conceived, authorised and saw into print. It was a huge controversy in the literary world. Ulysses is what textual critics might call an unstable text. 00:02:41.595 --> 00:03:17.670 And that text is from just like a hundred years ago, yesterday in historical terms. So here's the question: What hope do we have for the New Testament text, a collection of writings copied multiple times almost two thousand years ago. How do we know that what we read today is actually what was penned all those centuries ago? What are the textual critics saying about this crucial work? Well, I have the perfect guest to ask. 00:03:17.670 --> 00:03:53.010 So let's look deeper. I'm John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions. Dirk, you didn't begin your life as a scholar. You were a flower grower in The Netherlands. And we all can instantly think of the beautiful flowers of The Netherlands. 00:03:53.490 --> 00:03:55.170 Do you miss flowers? 00:03:56.645 --> 00:04:15.540 Sometimes I do miss the whole flower business. You know throughout the year what you're going to do, which week, etcetera. To be honest, the money was much better than academia will ever give you, So that's another reason. But I'm really doing now what I love doing. 00:04:15.540 --> 00:04:20.500 Of course. Do you still find yourself looking at flowers and wondering about them? 00:04:20.500 --> 00:04:24.820 Oh yes. Especially, I enjoy flowers, especially in somebody else's garden. 00:04:25.495 --> 00:05:02.755 That's Dirk Jongkins. He's an expert in the transmission of the New Testament text. He's a fellow of St Edmunds College, Cambridge University, vice president of Tyndale House in Cambridge, and the editor of the Tyndale House Greek New Testament. Some people listening into this will have never heard the expression textual criticism as a whole subdiscipline of ancient history and particularly of New Testament studies. So can you just describe briefly what is textual criticism? 00:05:02.995 --> 00:05:49.920 Let me start with the word criticism, because that's the one that evokes most sort of emotional responses. But criticism here just means that we are using our critical faculties to think about something. So we're really holding something against the light and see what is happening. And we do that in this case with texts. And any text that comes to us from antiquity is normally transmitted by manuscripts, though the originals are by definition almost always lost, So we're working with copies, and the copies of that original text will differ from one another in the wording of the text. 00:05:49.920 --> 00:06:35.180 We know it's the same text, it's not a completely different text, but there are differences in the wording of it. And textual criticism tries to map out the whole journey from the original up to now, so that we, to the best of our ability, can reconstruct the original wording, but also, for example, what sort of text was available to a church father in the year 800, or what was the text used in the Christian reformation, was that really the same as the original? So we'll try to reconstruct the whole history, because that's relevant for all sorts of historical questions you might ask. 00:06:35.180 --> 00:06:48.300 Yes, it's not specifically a New Testament discipline. You have to do textual criticism just to begin with what was the text of Suetonius or Pliny's letters and so on. 00:06:48.300 --> 00:07:14.920 That's right. Textual criticism actually started with scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, in the centuries before Christ, when they were working on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. And that is actually where we see the first systematic approach to textual criticism, in order to reconstruct what Homer really said and what were later additions to the text. 00:07:14.985 --> 00:07:23.145 And there were some ancient Christians that did it with the New Testament, weren't there? People like Origen, didn't he line up texts and see what differences there were? 00:07:23.145 --> 00:08:15.095 Very early on, he worked a lot in the Old Testament, or in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, but from the end of the second century, so let's say one hundred, one hundred and fifty years after New Testament was written. We already have one church father, Irenaeus, commenting on a specific textual variant, and he says, some manuscripts say this, some manuscripts say that, but I think it really should be this particular reading. Were they not troubled by the differences back then? I think they were much less troubled than we are often. Because if you live in a world where there are no photocopiers, where there is no printing press, Differences in text, it's just a fact of life. 00:08:15.495 --> 00:08:51.935 And even when you read a text, would do so knowing that there is a certain sort of grey area around the edges, because that's the nature of the reality in which they lived. Now, of course, people knew that the exact wording of things could be very, very important, especially in law things, etc. But still, it was a fact of life that where people copy, they are bound to mess things up one way or the other, willingly or most of the time 00:08:51.935 --> 00:09:34.770 unwillingly. Back in one of the very first episodes, in fact it might have been our very first episode, I visited the papyrology department at the University of Michigan where I got to play with the oldest discovered copy of Paul's letters. They call it Papyrus 46 and it dates to somewhere around the year 200, plus or minus a couple of decades. It preserves Paul's letters to the Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians and so on. P 46 was copied not by an expert monk somewhere in a candlelit room, but by a paid scribe, but not a super professional expert scribe. 00:09:34.770 --> 00:10:07.625 The handwriting is actually a little messy, You can see the marks in this New Testament text where the scribe calculates how many lines he's copied out, so how much the Christians have to pay him for copying out these texts. It's a really interesting, phenomenon. In Romans sixteen twenty, a page I got to play with, there's a difference from modern Bibles. It says, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen. 00:10:07.785 --> 00:10:37.905 But in this earliest copy of Paul's letters, p 46, it says, the grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. So no Christ. That's a difference. And in Romans 12, which is a really famous pivot point in the letter, you normally get, therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, do x, y, and z. But a funny thing happened in p 46. 00:10:38.065 --> 00:11:16.730 The scribe just wrote, therefore, I urge brothers and sisters, and then went, oh, I forgot the word you. So what he does is he scribbles above the line, in between lines, the word you, and We get to see both his mistake and his correction. It's kind of cool. Tell me about the kinds of texts we're talking about when we're talking about New Testament manuscripts. It's not necessarily a bound ancient copy of the whole New Testament. 00:11:17.130 --> 00:11:22.250 So tell me what we mean when we talk about the manuscripts of the New Testament. 00:11:22.250 --> 00:12:43.450 The manuscripts of the New Testament, it is an interesting story in itself, because almost all our New Testament manuscripts are actually in book form, or in technical term codex form. So you take a couple of leaves of papyri or cut out parchment, you put them on top of one another, and you fold them together so that you have a little bit of a small booklet. And Christians adopted that format very early on. Now the first literary reference to that codex form, as distinguished from rolls or from scrolls, comes from the 70s, 80s of first century, and in Rome, where Marshall in his Epigrams talk about those handy little codices that you can easily pick up when you're travelling, and you can hold them in one hand and read some of the ancient authors, and then he tells you where you can buy them in Rome behind a certain temple from that and that bookseller. So we have there the first mention of a new technology. 00:12:44.010 --> 00:12:58.225 And apparently Christians were early adopters here. They picked on the quite handiness of having a little codex instead of having to roll up, kind of, yobo, and they started using them almost Do you 00:12:58.225 --> 00:12:59.985 think that's out because Christianity was a 00:12:59.985 --> 00:13:47.400 transportable faith or a faith that wanted to be transported everywhere, so they adopted that innovation? There is a little bit of that, but also the difference between a scroll and a book is, in a book every part of the book is almost instantly accessible, because you can open it at specific places. While a role, that is very, you have to read it in succession, because it is one long story, you go along. While in a codex you have much more direct access to the different parts that make up one book. Okay so we have books but the manuscripts we have now in our possession 00:13:48.920 --> 00:14:05.270 aren't all discrete books. Like scraps or there might be 80 pages of the book. We don't know where the other 30 are. They might be single pieces of paper. Just give us a sense of how different these so called manuscripts are? 00:14:05.430 --> 00:14:48.430 Yeah, manuscripts is a bit of a catchall term, and especially when we have those little fragments. I mean, you need an awful lot of those tiny fragments before you have even a single book of the New Testament. So if you look at the number of manuscripts that give us a complete book of the Bible, well, there aren't that many before the eighth, ninth century or so. Most of them give us only a section or a fragment of a section. Now we have to keep in mind that bookbinding technology was a technology that was developing. 00:14:49.445 --> 00:15:59.955 So before the third century, it would have been almost impossible to have the whole of the New Testament in one physical volume, because people were not able yet to produce books that were big enough to contain the whole New Testament. So that became possible only probably by the end of the third century. I mean, there is a parchment leaf from a codex of Homer, which is kept in Manchester in John Ryland's library, which seems to be a part of a book that contained most of the Odyssey, I believe, or the Iliad, one of the two. So there we have the first evidence of a major book, and then in the fourth century we get our first complete Greek New Testaments, but once you have a book big enough to produce the New Testament, then you know how to produce a book that's big enough to contain the whole Bible, kind of the Greek Old Testament including the New Testament. And that is something that really jumps up in the fourth century. 00:16:00.910 --> 00:16:45.575 Codex Sinaiticus is one of those complete New Testaments that shows up in the fourth century. It's the earliest complete copy, and it's handwritten in Koine or Common Greek, the most popular language across the Mediterranean at the time. It's considered one of the most important books in the history of the world. The British Library, where it's stored, describes it not only as of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible, but the oldest substantial book to survive antiquity and of supreme importance for the history of the book. Dirk is one of the leading authorities in the world on this very manuscript. 00:16:45.575 --> 00:17:19.975 The British Library, in fact, employed him to help with the complete digitization of Codex Sinaiticus. And we'll link to the Library's amazing portal where you can inspect every page of Codex Sinaiticus. And we only have a few complete New Testaments, am I right, in this ancient period. One that you've worked on endlessly, Sinaiticus. Tell us, I mean, if you can, roughly, how many complete New Testaments do we have that are part of this textual criticism discipline? 00:17:20.695 --> 00:18:11.635 When it comes to the New Testament, we have one complete New Testament plus Old Testament from the fourth century, one manuscript that has everything up to Hebrews nine, and the order of the books is slightly different, so the rest of Hebrews and Revelation and whatever else is missing then. So that's not even complete. From the fifth century, we have another manuscript that's kept in the British library, Codex Alexandrinus. But that misses some groups of pages, so it starts only at Matthew 27 or thereabouts, so quite late, and in Corinthians there's something missing. But it is only Sinaiticus from that early period that gives us a complete one. 00:18:12.035 --> 00:19:00.320 Now there is something about the Greek tradition that made it possible to have complete Greek New Testaments or complete Greek Bibles in the fourth and the fifth century, but for one or the other reason, in later centuries the church was, the Greek church was never so much interested in having complete New Testament. They were much more interested in having just a book with the four Gospels, or just a book with Acts and the letters. So they were basically transmitted as separate volumes. It is only then in the sort of Middle Ages, ninth, tenth, eleventh century, that you get a fair number of complete New Testament, but they never form the majority in any century of the number of manuscripts. 00:19:00.485 --> 00:19:11.445 So, I mean, it's quite possible that sixth century churches had a complete New Testament, but they had them as the book of the Gospels, the book of Paul's letters, and so on. 00:19:11.445 --> 00:19:28.650 That's right. And there's an interesting contrast with the Latin speaking church, where there is a very big emphasis on having complete Bibles, and we have many more complete Latin Bibles from the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth century, etc, compared to the Greek tradition. 00:19:29.385 --> 00:19:55.320 We have over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and even more Latin manuscripts, because Latin became the main language of Western monasteries where all these texts were copied. Now, to be clear, these are not complete copies of the New Testament. Some manuscripts contain like 100 pages. P46, the collection of Paul's letters, is a good example of that. But others are just a single page written back and front. 00:19:55.560 --> 00:20:30.615 Others are just a scrap with a few verses on it. Still, we've got a lot of material, more than for any other ancient text, so there's no need to inflate the numbers, as sometimes Christian apologists do. We sometimes hear exaggerated claims from Christian apologists about how many manuscripts we have. And you'll sometimes hear people say, We have 20,000 manuscripts. Now I know you wince as soon as I say that. 00:20:30.615 --> 00:20:53.860 So here I have Dirk Jongkin on my couch. Can you tell me like thinking of the substantial manuscripts, you know, maybe just collection of the Gospels or collection of Paul's letters or whatever, how many do we have that are relevant roughly? I'm not asking you to give me an exact number. Roughly, how many do you have to play with in order to 00:20:53.860 --> 00:21:25.500 do textual criticism? In order to do textual criticism, in a sense you don't need many. It's very difficult to do textual criticism with only one manuscript, because then you have almost kind of to fill in the gaps yourself by using your imagination. It works better if you have more. And it very much is a thing, we don't have a printing press till, at least of Greek New Testament, till 1516. 00:21:25.875 --> 00:22:06.465 So, we have quite a few manuscripts from the fifteenth century, and 14, and 13, and 12, but it is a sort of gliding scale, and it gets less and less the further back you go. The first, the oldest substantial manuscript, where we have now a good part of the letters of Paul, is normally dated to the third century, and in our jargon it is called P46. It is a codex of the letters of Paul, and that is sort of the oldest, more or less, not complete, but substantial collection of text we have. 00:22:07.150 --> 00:22:16.030 And then we do have some roughly contemporaneous Gospels, don't we? The famous P75 for Tell 00:22:17.310 --> 00:22:49.480 me about that. P75 is again something written on papyrus, or our oldest manuscripts are written on papyrus. As opposed to animal skin, am And the thing with papyrus, of course, in most of the world, with the climates that are going around, it will just disintegrate after a couple of hundred years. It's only in the dry sands of Egypt that it survives. So all our papyrus evidence comes from a limited geographical area. 00:22:49.815 --> 00:23:49.715 It's mainly the rubbish heaps of Egypt, or the remains of some monastery here and there. P75 is a gospel codex, at least a substantial part of two Gospels being preserved there, and it is a very careful copy of a very good text. Not perfect, it has some very strange thing in it, but when it comes on tiny philological details as the spelling of names and all that, it preserves a lot of very ancient features. It's clearly part of a tradition that had in mind to preserve that what is old. Because we need to keep in mind that most copies are made not in order to preserve that what is old, but you need a text to use in church. 00:23:50.515 --> 00:24:32.730 And that is quite a different purpose. Some of the modern English Bible translations actually state as their explicit goal that the text should be very readable in what they call public worship. So if you listen to it when it is read out in English, it must be pleasing to the ear, the sentences must flow well, Even if they don't flow well in the original Greek or Hebrew, they are translated in such a way that it is good for public reading. So in that sense, the reason why you copy a text can differ quite a bit from context to context. 00:24:33.610 --> 00:25:15.080 P75 is an early Greek New Testament papyrus containing bits of John's Gospel and Luke's Gospel. It dates to around the year 200. It's one of our earliest and most important witnesses to those gospels. And this manuscript contains something pretty cool, an early Christian symbol, arguably the earliest Christian symbol. It's a clever ligature of playing around with letters, combining the Greek letters t or tau and r or row and placing them over each other to produce the image of a man on a cross. 00:25:15.655 --> 00:25:52.305 The scribe placed this symbol within the Greek word for cross, which is stauros, which of course has a t and an r in it. But if you move the letters around, it actually, within the word cross, gives you a picture of a man on a cross like this. We see this in Luke fourteen twenty seven, where Jesus says, Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. I think it's so fun. We've made it into a limited edition Undeceptions T shirt. 00:25:52.385 --> 00:26:04.960 Head to undeceptions.com merch to get yours like this. It's so crass. It's so commercial, but just a little bit cool. We'll be back after the break. 00:26:09.120 --> 00:26:54.755 Researchers enlisted help of AI along with radiocarbon dating, to produce new insights into ancient texts. Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls could be older than previously thought, with some biblical texts dating from the time of their original authors, researchers say. The first of the ancient scrolls were discovered in the Caves of Qumran in the Judean Desert by Bedouin shepherds in the mid-twentieth century. The manuscripts range from legal documents to parts of the Hebrew Bible, and are thought to date from around the third century BCE to the second century CE. Now, researchers have used artificial intelligence to glean fresh insights into the dates of individual scrolls. 00:26:55.440 --> 00:27:01.680 Findings, experts suggest, could challenge ideas about when, where, and by whom they were produced. 00:27:03.120 --> 00:27:46.805 Just last year, news broke that researchers had developed a new way to date the famous Dead Sea Scrolls using AI alongside radiocarbon dating. That clip was from The Guardian. The research suggested some manuscripts could be up to one hundred years earlier than we actually thought. One example is the manuscript called 4Q114 containing verses from the Old Testament book of Daniel. The new dating is particularly significant because it could place this manuscript remarkably close to when scholars actually reckon the book was finally edited and completed. 00:27:47.205 --> 00:28:02.710 Dating techniques are crucial to this field of textual criticism. How do we date the texts? And how confident are we that we know the dates of these things? Well, 00:28:04.630 --> 00:29:03.685 dating is done by comparing the handwriting that you find the font, basically, that you find in a manuscript with other dateable kind of manuscripts around it. The earliest dated Greek New Testament or book comes from the ninth century, so that's not particularly helpful for everything that's gone before. The dating of manuscripts has a tendency to date something to a century, which is sort of funny, because centuries are sort of random divisions within the text. Because, now, is it more likely that something has to be dated between one hundred and two hundred, or one hundred and fifty two fifty? But paleographers have a tendency to date towards centuries, so that's distortion number one. 00:29:04.165 --> 00:29:52.960 The second bit is: My parents learned to write in a certain way. Then forty years later I came along and I was taught to write in a slightly different way. Then my children came along and they were taught to write in clearly a different way than I or my parents were taught. Now there was a time of around twenty years that my parents, me and my children, were all writing stuff at the same time. Now if you had a paleographer who had to date what my parents wrote, or me, or one of my children, they would neatly put them in successive stages of handwriting, even though all of them may have come from exactly the same date. 00:29:53.120 --> 00:30:13.490 So that's another uncertainty. Some scripts were used for a few centuries, others were clear developments, and you can date them in a much narrower gap. So it depends from the script to script, and whatever else we can learn. 00:30:13.490 --> 00:30:31.065 So some might be listening to you and going, well, this great expert doesn't think we can date these things at all. I mean it sounds like you don't have any confidence, but when you pick up P75 or P46, how confident are you? You've got something from the 200s AD. 00:30:31.065 --> 00:31:10.340 With a P-forty six, I am reasonable confident that it is most likely the third century, but I cannot exclude a tale into the sort of early fourth century. But for what's most likely, yes. With P75, which was traditionally dated to the third century, I have by now seen enough other kind of papyri manuscripts which have a very similar manuscript for the fourth. So to say it's third or fourth century, absolutely fine. It's not fifth, it's not sixth century. 00:31:10.420 --> 00:31:22.745 And it is very unlikely to be second or first either. So it is that sort of confidence. You think in date ranges rather than something more specific. 00:31:22.745 --> 00:31:27.785 What do you think is the earliest even scrap that we have of the New Testament? 00:31:28.105 --> 00:32:05.230 There are two that are actually, I think both could be are very early. So P52, it's a tiny fragment of the Gospel of John, discovered in Manchester, UK of all places, of course in a box of papieri coming from Egypt, but still it was discovered in Manchester, giving them something to be proud of. They... It is clearly an old script. Again, though some examples of the script, not many, but some examples also come from the third century. 00:32:05.470 --> 00:32:17.905 So again, it is a sort of statistical chart where you have a peak at the beginning and then a sort of long tail that goes further into the third century. P52 is one. 00:32:18.305 --> 00:32:44.265 P52, also known as the John Rylands fragment, contains just a few lines from John 18. It dates to around the year 125, maybe up to 150. If John's gospel was written in the 90s A. D, as most scholars reckon. Personally, I think it was earlier than that, but let's just go with the mainstream dating. 00:32:44.585 --> 00:33:08.045 That means this copy of John is just one generation after the original. Some years ago, I got to view this amazing fragment, and so did you, Director Mark. Yes, you remember it well. I had to do lines in sort of ominous tomes. This is P52. 00:33:08.685 --> 00:33:10.925 Don't know how you directed me to P52. It sounded good to 00:33:10.925 --> 00:33:11.645 me at the time. 00:33:11.645 --> 00:33:18.205 Yeah. Okay. We've grown together, haven't we, mate? Anyway, check out the show notes for more. 00:33:19.610 --> 00:33:54.640 Then there is another manuscript, not in jargon called p one zero four, not twice 52, which is a fragment from Matthew. A very fascinating fragment because it has some form of punctuation, etcetera. It's clearly part of a scribal tradition, so those things were copied with thought. It was not just some amateur working on it. And that could as well be from a second century or small tale into the third century. 00:33:54.640 --> 00:34:03.895 So either of those could be one of the first ones. But then, we're talking about tiny credit card sized manuscripts. 00:34:03.895 --> 00:34:15.895 Yes, yes. There are thousands upon thousands of differences in our manuscripts. Let me ask the first 00:34:15.895 --> 00:35:02.065 question: Methodologically how do you even begin to work out what was there originally when you're faced with a paragraph that has differences between the manuscripts? So how do you start thinking about it? Well, the first thing you can do is: what are standard spelling errors people make? We have the advantage of autocorrect when we're typing emails, but still, we have a fairly wide spelling if we had to write everything by hand, Especially people like me for who English is a second language. So we make all sorts of interesting spelling errors. 00:35:02.545 --> 00:35:32.465 So that's the first thing. Now if you just weed out the spelling errors, you have a big chunk of those thousands and thousands already dismissed. Then there are the things where people genuinely had conscious differences. For example in names. A name such as David in the New Testament was often written out, but in later manuscript it was abbreviated. 00:35:32.465 --> 00:36:19.260 You just write the first letter and then one of the vowels in the middle, and then a final D again, just to make it stand out a little bit, and the same happens with quite a few other words. So those are differences and are very explainable difference. And then you're going to look at the language itself, because language does change over time. Now Shakespeare wrote a different English than we do, and if you go back to the Domesday book, that was even worse English, in my view almost unreadable. So language develops, and some of that language development shines through in changes that are introduced in the text. 00:36:19.260 --> 00:36:57.945 So there you have another big source changes you can explain. And then slowly you go further. When you are copying, there is a fair chance that your eyes jump from the same to the same. So you jump either forward and then you're missing out on something, or you jump backward and then you write the same thing twice. Those are much easier to find than when you jump forward, because especially if the text continues to make sense, then it's very difficult to spot those jump forwards. 00:36:58.185 --> 00:37:54.715 So there you have another one. Then you get that when people are copying, it starts with reading. Now reading is a funny psychological process because there is a combination of the image of the word, and then what it does in your brain where it activates the mental lexicon, then you have to remember that word for a little while, and then write it slowly down with your hand while your brain raises on and thinking all sorts of other things. So there's plenty of just normal error to be introduced there. There's one example that comes from the Old Testament, where the scribe was supposed to write about the birds that dwell in the rocks. 00:37:56.315 --> 00:38:17.085 And rocks would be there the word petron from petra rock and then in the plural. Instead of birds dwelling on the rocks, he wrote birds dwelling in their feathers. Now, it's not as strange saying birds have feathers, so that the word feather was activated. 00:38:17.085 --> 00:38:20.365 And it's spelled similarly, aren't they? Those two words. 00:38:20.605 --> 00:38:43.805 The only difference is petron and petaron. Yes. It's one letter that changes. So it is so easy to make that sort of error. So that dwindles it down to fewer and fewer errors that are actually substantial and important in the text. 00:38:43.805 --> 00:38:58.100 Yes, but we sometimes hear from highly sceptical people that lots of political and theological changes were made by these scribes in these texts. How much evidence do we have 00:38:58.100 --> 00:39:56.440 of that? Now if a change is best explained as the deliberate introduction of a new wording for political or theological reasons, then it follows that if that was introduced in verse one, you would also expect it to be introduced in verse five and in verse 11, etc. You would at least expect some attempt at being systematic or comprehensive in those things. And that is where this sort of approach normally falls flat, because there is no evidence of any systematic approach to it. Which is interesting, even if you to... 00:39:58.040 --> 00:40:56.010 Even if you pick and choose your manuscript and you combine what one manuscript does, then what you find in another manuscript, and you try to construct a sort of archetype of a deliberate recension, it simply doesn't work. Now, having said this, you know with DNA copying, sometimes copying errors are made. Most of those copying errors result in the DNA functioning less than perfectly, and therefore that genetic mutation dies a swift death. If the mutation happens to make sense, there is a chance that it is then transmitted to next generations. So the same with manuscript copying. 00:40:56.490 --> 00:41:42.445 If a copying error happens to make sense, whether intended or not, but if it makes sense, then it is more likely to be copied to the next generation. Normally a nonsense reading is not copied because a scribe pays attention. Now then we have that the scribe sees that there is a change in his manuscript, and he also knows about another reading of the same thing. For example, when it comes to the parents of Jesus. Every Christian scribe will know that Joseph is not really the father of Jesus, because it would be God in heaven who was the father of Jesus. 00:41:42.980 --> 00:42:20.080 So there a scribe sees a text that says the parents of Jesus. And he has another version where it says Joseph and Mary. Which of the two will the scribe choose to copy? Well, probably the one with Joseph and Mary, because it poses less of a question than the other one. So here you have one of those examples where a theological context may affect how a text is copied. 00:42:20.320 --> 00:42:50.120 I don't think the change will have been made for theological reasons or in order to edit Joseph as a parent out, but that's not happening on a systematic scale. But when a scribe has the choice, he may sort of skip to safety and go for the text that leaves the reader with fewest questions. Let me ask you, what is the biggest or two biggest 00:42:51.925 --> 00:42:55.925 manuscript discrepancies across our New Testament especially? 00:42:55.925 --> 00:42:57.045 I'm going with three. 00:42:57.605 --> 00:42:59.765 Excellent. The 00:43:00.965 --> 00:43:25.475 best known textual variant is a story that's normally found in the Gospel of John, about the story of a woman caught in adultery. And the story in itself is just beautiful. Kind of a woman caught in adultery is brought to Jesus by the Pharisees and the scribes. 00:43:26.755 --> 00:43:51.675 Jesus returned to the Mount Of Olives, but early the next morning, he was back again at the temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd. Teacher, they said to Jesus, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 00:43:51.995 --> 00:44:18.595 The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say? They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, alright, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone. Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust. 00:44:20.115 --> 00:44:44.180 When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, Where are your accusers? Didn't even one of them condemn you? No, Lord, she said. And Jesus said, Neither do I. 00:44:44.805 --> 00:44:47.205 Go and sin no more. 00:44:47.685 --> 00:45:51.745 It's a beautiful story which seems to combine the Jesus in his wisdom as we know them from all the stories elsewhere in the Gospels with something that seems to fit the character of Jesus so well. Now this story is only found in one manuscript from the fifth century, and then from then on in later centuries you see it in more and more manuscript, but well into the middle ages there are manuscripts that leave this story out. And just based on the external evidence, the evidence from the manuscripts, but also if you look at the language used in this story, it's actually very unlikely that the original author of the Gospel of John put this story at the particular place where we found it. 00:45:52.145 --> 00:45:55.825 But it also appears in Luke in another manuscript. 00:45:55.825 --> 00:46:47.395 Some some manuscripts have it in Luke. What could account for that? Clearly, it was a well known story, and this story was almost too good not to give it a place somewhere in the New Testament. So normally we find it around John seven fifty three, but sometimes earlier in John seven and in Luke it is, or we find it at the very end of the Gospel of Luke, so Gospel of John, sort of when everything is finished. Now we know that there was an early church father, the beginning of the second century, so that was when Christianity was still very fresh, who wrote a commentary on the sayings of Jesus. 00:46:47.395 --> 00:47:28.010 He did not write a commentary on one of the Gospels, but on the things that Jesus has said. And this was in the time when still a lot of the teaching of Jesus would have been transmitted orally as well as in writing. And this man Papias is described as having a story about a woman caught in sin. That's all we know. It might very well be that Papias has this particular story there, which needed a home according to the people who were copying somewhere in the New Testament. 00:47:28.410 --> 00:47:57.420 Now, the Gospel of John, is more or less asking for trouble when it says at the end of the Gospel, there are many other things that Jesus has done which are not written in book. So John has a category of things Jesus has done, but are not written in the book. So if you have one of those stories of that particular category, where are you going to put it? Perhaps somewhere in John then. 00:47:57.420 --> 00:48:01.660 And it would make sense in Luke because of Luke's emphasis on Jesus the friend of sinners. 00:48:01.660 --> 00:48:17.435 Yeah, that's right. Oh yeah, it makes perfect sense. And then of course you get the thing, the lectionary of the church became almost more important for the contents of the New Testament than the actual text of the Gospels itself. 00:48:18.315 --> 00:48:46.825 The lectionary is just an ancient catalog listing which bits of the Bible to read in church and when. Unlike many churches today, for most of church history, public Bible reading was systematic and comprehensive. So these lectionaries actually tell us which bits of the New Testament were being read out loud at the time. 00:48:47.590 --> 00:49:03.805 So was this text to be used in the lectionary? Yes or no. And in the standard lectionary it is indeed not found, but later it was included in some of the lectionary readings for special days. 00:49:03.805 --> 00:49:23.210 I can't resist asking you, do you think there's a good chance that is a genuine early oral tradition of the life of Jesus? Someone like Bruce Metzger said this is likely a genuine oral tradition. Do you think the same, or do you not even deal with those categories? 00:49:23.690 --> 00:49:53.600 I have a very scientific test for this, and it is: What would my mom say? My mom, you know, being a Christian her whole life, never had much education, what would she say about this story? And she says, of course, this is Jesus. She recognizes Jesus immediately. Well, if normal Christians recognize this as the real Jesus, then I accept it as well. 00:49:53.600 --> 00:50:09.775 So I don't think this was part of the apostolic teaching about Jesus, but that it was a genuine memory of Jesus. Now deep down when you you ask, then I would probably say yes, it is. 00:50:10.655 --> 00:51:03.925 Hey, Dirk is being a little bit cute here with his so called scientific test, what his mom would reckon, but is actually echoing the sentiment of a lot of scholars, even quite skeptical ones. One of the criteria for historical study of Jesus is what's called the criterion of coherence. Once historians have established some basic facts about Jesus that seem pretty immovable, they look at other material in the Gospels that really looks like that established stuff, even though it might not be as well attested. The story of the woman caught in adultery likely wasn't part of the original text of John, but lots of experts regard it as a genuine early historical remembrance. It fits in so many different ways with the historical figure we have in the Gospels. 00:51:04.245 --> 00:51:25.100 There's another great example of a textual difference. It's the end of Mark's gospel, which in most Bibles ends weirdly abruptly, not with the appearance of the risen Jesus, but with the women running away from the tomb saying nothing to anyone. 00:51:27.525 --> 00:51:48.600 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. Don't be alarmed, he said. You are looking for Jesus, the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen. 00:51:48.920 --> 00:52:10.620 He is not here. See the place where they laid him? But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him just as he told you.' Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid. 00:52:11.580 --> 00:52:13.420 The second is Mark 16. 00:52:13.420 --> 00:52:49.660 The second is Mark 16. Mark 16... Did Mark really finish his gospel with the sentence, for they were afraid? And that has kept scholars busy for the last sixteen seventeen hundred years. So already early in the fourth century, this was a well known problem where we have an abrupt ending of the Gospel of Mark, and we have a long ending, and then there is also a shorter ending. 00:52:49.660 --> 00:53:17.190 So there are basically three options at that point. So I'll leave that for what it is. It is interesting, if you put a knife on my throat, I will probably say that it is the abrupt ending is what we have. But then some people have argued that the abrupt ending is there because an original ending of Mark was lost. It's very well possible 00:53:17.190 --> 00:53:52.535 since Bruce we don't Metzger in his commentary suggests that, does he not? Renowned twentieth century scholar Bruce Metzger from Princeton Theological Seminary was the chairman of the committee that published the Greek New Testament text. Important committee. He reports that the committee was overwhelmingly confident that the longer ending of Mark was added by an ancient scribe in the next century or maybe the century after. Now, this wasn't a deceit on the part of the scribe who added it. 00:53:52.535 --> 00:54:31.440 It seems like an addendum to explain to readers pretty much what the other Gospels say happened after the tomb incident. But Metzger himself adds that the final page of Mark, which might have narrated what happened after the women ran away from the tomb, was somehow broken off and lost. It really once existed, but now it's gone. Plenty of other scholars reckon Marx's ending is intentionally cryptic, like inviting us into the story to wonder what our response to an empty tomb might be. But actually, I'm with Metzger on this. 00:54:31.760 --> 00:55:01.020 Twice earlier in Mark's gospel, the text forecasts that after the crucifixion of Jesus, Jesus would rise again and see them in Galilee. That seems to me like Mark's narrative clue that he was going to narrate an appearance in Galilee, but it's now gone. Happily, both Matthew and John report Jesus appearing in Galilee. But there are other views. 00:55:01.820 --> 00:56:19.075 Then there is one other option that might defend the long reading as original, and that would run something like this, is that throughout the Gospel of Mark we are listening to someone for who Greek is clearly a second language, it's very simple Greek with simple sentences all combined with and, and, and There's nothing too sophisticated going on. And then we go to the ending of the Gospel of Mark where we hear a different voice. Now I cannot exclude that by the end there, we have the voice of the real author who was for the remainder of those 16 chapters simply giving, say, the preaching of Peter, for who Greek would be a second language as well. I cannot exclude that logically, and therefore I am a bit reluctant to give final verdict there. The great thing about this variant is we don't have this same amount of smoke in the manuscript tradition for any other beginning or ending of a book. 00:56:20.060 --> 00:57:00.210 So I am quite happy to relinquish some certainty and leave the question open for the end of Mark, but if you would ask yes, but what would happen if there had been an extra chapter in Matthew or an extra chapter in John? Then I would point you to the end of Mark and say, well, then I would expect this amount of trouble in the manuscript tradition. And since we don't have that amount of trouble, there is no smoke for those other places. It increases my confidence that nothing like that has been going on. 00:57:01.005 --> 00:57:05.645 And is there a third example that's as big as those two you've just mentioned? 00:57:06.205 --> 00:57:45.190 The third example is not as big, but it may be more important to Christians. That has to do with when Jesus was on the cross. It says in Luke, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. Here we have Jesus on the cross praying for forgiveness for those who have crucified Him. That phrase is absent in about half of the early manuscripts, And that is a fascinating one. 00:57:45.190 --> 00:58:42.090 Did Jesus say this and pray for forgiveness? Which would have been, in the eyes of some Christians, a prayer that would not have been answered by God because Jerusalem was destroyed in the year '70. So let's take it out therefore. Or was it added to the story because Jesus, according to Isaiah 53, would pray for the ungodly and therefore Jesus had to pray for the ungodly at some stage in it. And then perhaps it is the internal structure of the second book of Luke where I think that it demonstrates, so in Acts, there is quite a bit of support to say that these words are actually known already in the life of Jesus, that Jesus really said, Father, forgive them. 00:58:42.090 --> 00:58:47.290 And is that because Stephen says similar words in the book of Acts? Is that what you're saying? 00:58:47.290 --> 00:59:18.760 That's one. Stephen says similar words, but using different words, but he says the same context. And then Peter in Acts three tells the Israelites in the temple very confidently that you crucified the righteous one, I know that you did this in ignorance. Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. And Peter could say that confidently because Jesus had announced that was the case. 00:59:19.800 --> 00:59:36.675 So these are the big ones. It's interesting that these have been known for centuries. Why haven't we found any new big ones given all the manuscripts that we've uncovered over the last couple of centuries? 00:59:37.075 --> 01:00:30.745 It's a fascinating thing that all the big ones are the big ones of the last known for centuries, and we don't have any new ones. We have many new tiny ones, and we have discovered a ton of extra spelling variants, and jumps from the same to the same, etcetera, But no new substantial thing. The only thing we have learned with getting more and more manuscripts is that we are now able to discern the patterns of copying much better than ever before. So we have more material to work with, so we learn more about the things that go wrong, but also in the proportion that they go wrong. And the things that are more likely to go wrong than the opposite thing. 01:00:30.745 --> 01:00:38.025 So we learn more about the intricacies of what goes wrong when a scribe copies a text. 01:00:40.830 --> 01:00:56.235 To make a general judgment, how well attested is the New Testament text? Compared to Virgil's Aeneid, Tacitus' Annals, Caesar's wars, Plutarch's Moralia. 01:00:57.035 --> 01:01:55.425 The advantage of the New Testament text tradition, kind of over against many of the other works from antiquity, is that we can trace its history much better. We can almost reconstruct what happens from period to period, from ages to ages, in sort of things that were influencing the transmission of the text. And quite often we cannot do that for other works from antiquity. Still, if we have a number of ninth or tenth century manuscripts from any Greek historian, we are still pretty confident that we have good access to what that old historian said. So, I am not too desperate that the whole discipline of classics is built on thin air or some sort of scent. 01:01:55.425 --> 01:02:29.515 No, they have good access to the text. Now, in the New Testament, we are in a situation where we are in a better situation than some of the classics are. So that gives me no reason to doubt that we have good access to the original of the New Testament as well, even though I wished that sometimes we could zoom in further on the details of the text. Because sometimes details matter. When the overall picture is clear enough, the flow of the text is clear enough. 01:02:29.700 --> 01:02:51.585 Okay. There's the occasional hiccup, but the communication, the communicative purposes are there, and they don't... It doesn't matter if a word falls out here and there. The purpose is clear. Sometimes I want to zoom in on the details and see, okay, Paul, but why did you spell this particular word this way and not that way? 01:02:51.585 --> 01:03:02.670 Or why can't I reconstruct it because there's too much kind of noise in the manuscript? So the further you zoom in, sometimes the picture gets a bit grainier. 01:03:03.390 --> 01:03:39.030 We have to be careful here. Yes, the New Testament is well attested. You'll often see graphs floating around social media that list the number of manuscripts that we have for the New Testament versus Virgil's Aeneid or one of the works of Homer or Caesar's Wars or whatever. But that's never really the full picture. I've often had to respond to lovely Christian people who have come up to me after things I've spoken at, and they've asked, is it true that there's more evidence for Jesus Christ than Julius Caesar? 01:03:39.645 --> 01:04:22.480 They ask me this because they read in some book that there are more manuscript copies of the New Testament than there are manuscript copies of Caesar's wars, and that's absolutely true. We have just a handful, literally a handful, of copies of Caesar's wars, but we have a truckload of New Testament manuscripts. But all that means is that we have loads of copies of evidence, and copies of evidence isn't extra evidence it's just copies of the evidence. Julius Caesar has way more evidence than Jesus Christ. He has coins, inscriptions, multiple authors that refer to him. 01:04:22.480 --> 01:05:16.005 Now to be clear, I think there's more than enough evidence to establish the general course of Jesus' life, but it's not on par with Julius Caesar. The simple advantage that the historian has in respect to Jesus compared to other figures is the sheer number of manuscripts. The way to put this would be not that we can be more certain of Jesus than we can Julius Caesar, but that we can be more confident of what the original text of, say, Luke or John actually said back in the first century than we can for any comparable text from the ancient world. Do you think there are any Christian ideas that are not well enough attested to in the New Testament? Are any Christian ideas threatened by these many differences in the wording? 01:05:16.005 --> 01:05:17.045 That's really what I'm going 01:05:17.045 --> 01:05:34.820 for. Absolutely not, no. The text of Scripture is absolutely, the message of Scripture, the ideas of Scripture are absolutely there. Even in the worst possible manuscript, still the core gospel is there. 01:05:35.585 --> 01:05:55.360 Has your mastery of the manuscripts of the New Testament ever taken away from your appreciation of the content of the New Testament? I can just imagine an academic sometimes accidentally feeling like you're above these texts. 01:05:57.360 --> 01:06:29.560 Okay. What being a text critic has done to me is that I've started to appreciate the details that have been preserved more and more. I think every Christian should have their favorite detail of the New Testament. So so mine is this. The Gospel of John has that story towards the end of the Gospel where after the resurrection, the disciples go fishing. 01:06:29.560 --> 01:07:22.760 And then Jesus appears on on the shore of the lake and calls them, now have have you found there or caught anything? And they bring him lots of fish, and and Peter jumps in the water, and this time he has to swim rather than walk on it, and comes to Jesus, and he... On the beach, he sees that there is a coal fire with some fish on it. And we all know, now we get a very difficult conversation between Peter, who has denied Jesus three times, and Jesus himself, and Jesus asked three times, do you love me?' Now we all know that the three times do you love me?' is a reflection of the three times that Jesus says, 'I do not know this man.' But then, why that coal fire? John uses that word coal fire only twice in his Gospel. 01:07:22.760 --> 01:08:06.645 One is when Jesus is having this conversation with Peter. The other time is when Peter is warming himself around a coal fire and he is in the process of denying Jesus. And it is that tiny detail that John has put in his Gospel where the obvious connection between the story is also supported by tiny detailed connections between the two stories that makes me think, wow, those details have survived unscathed all those centuries of manuscript copying. There are no textual variants here, and they just give me that wow factor of this is going on in the New Testament. 01:08:07.420 --> 01:08:28.595 Let's press pause. I've got a five minute Jesus for you. Earlier in the show, our voice actor, Dakota Love, read one of the most famous stories about Jesus, that famous one about the woman caught in adultery from John chapter eight. And as we've said, the text is disputed. Almost certainly, John himself didn't write that. 01:08:28.995 --> 01:09:04.770 But the cool thing is, if you pick up a modern bible, you'll notice that the passage is marked off from the surrounding text, and there's usually a little note that says, this story is not in the earliest manuscripts. Good on them. Everything's really open for us. See, we have about 50 ancient manuscripts of John's Gospel, and this story of the woman caught in adultery appears in about 15 of them. So it's missing from 35 or more, including from the earliest of our copies of John's Gospel. 01:09:04.770 --> 01:09:25.285 And the story sometimes turns up in different places. It's at the end of John in one manuscript. It's in Luke's Gospel in another manuscript. Now that tells you there was confusion about this particular story from the very beginning. It's pretty clear John didn't narrate it himself. 01:09:25.765 --> 01:10:37.510 The chairman of the committee that puts the Greek New Testament together, Bruce Metzger, reports, quote, the committee was unanimous that the pericope, the section, was originally no part of the fourth gospel. But that's not the end of it because many scholars reckon it's a genuine historical remembrance that was told in oral tradition. As Metzger himself reports, at the same time, the account has all the earmarks of historical veracity. It is obviously a piece of oral tradition which circulated in certain parts of the Western church and which was subsequently incorporated into various manuscripts at various places. And I, for one, am glad that some scribe decided to write it out and stick it somewhere in the New Testament, because it certainly offers a perfect illustration of themes we find in Jesus' life right across the Gospels disputes about the Jewish law, the status of sinners, Christ's generosity of spirit, and so on. 01:10:38.055 --> 01:10:58.610 Now in the story, these religious leaders are just using this poor woman to trap Jesus. They wanna see if he'll contradict the law of Moses. The Old Testament said that the punishment for adultery was stoning to death for both the man and the woman, by the way. So what's Jesus going to say? That's the setup. 01:10:59.410 --> 01:11:22.790 If he simply says, nah, Moses was wrong, he's giving authorities a reason to arrest him or at least sideline him. So Jesus takes his time, and he scribbles in the dirt, we're told. Now there's a lot of speculation about what he was scribbling. Is he stalling to think up a good answer? Because He certainly comes up with a cracking answer. 01:11:23.430 --> 01:12:00.320 Is he writing in the dirt the words he's about to say? But the most ancient interpretation that's even written in some of our manuscripts is that Jesus was writing down the sins of the men in the audience. You know, Eliezer ripped off a merchant last week or Yaakov himself committed adultery. Whatever the reason for Jesus' doodling, his final answer is marvelous and famous. Let any of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her. 01:12:01.200 --> 01:12:49.680 Jesus' point is that no one there or anywhere has the moral purity required to carry out God's judgment with true understanding and so without hypocrisy. By the way, this ended up becoming the Jewish view recorded in the Mishnah and the Talmud. If we're all sinners, who is fit to cast the first stone? Jesus' answer actually proves pretty effective because one by one, all these accusers disappears, and eventually this guilty woman, and remember, she is guilty, is standing before the only one who might have had a right morally to cast the first stone, Jesus. But instead Jesus says, has no one condemned you? 01:12:50.240 --> 01:13:08.935 And she says, no one, sir. Then neither do I condemn you, Jesus said. It's amazing. The only one with the right to condemn her doesn't. But then he adds words that are sometimes overlooked. 01:13:09.575 --> 01:13:41.855 Now go and leave your life of sin. Here's the thing, his message wasn't, We're all sinners, so let's just live and let live. That would be mere permissivism. Grace, which is what Jesus brought, is something completely different. Grace is the ability to love people you hold to be in the wrong, and it involves loving them enough to want to move them toward the right. 01:13:43.040 --> 01:14:22.880 Christianity, at least in theory, flexes the muscle of conviction and the muscle of compassion at the same time. It's true that there have been Christians throughout history and today who are all conviction and no compassion. It's ugly, and if you come across that kind of Christian community, run. Run. But sometimes, and maybe especially nowadays, you can meet Christians who are all compassion and no conviction. 01:14:23.805 --> 01:14:50.970 Jesus loves you just the way you are, so stay just the way you are. I'd say run from them as well. They might be more pleasant to hang around with, but they don't represent Jesus any more than the judgy Christians do. The genius of Jesus was his ability to flex both muscles at the same time. Conviction and compassion. 01:14:51.210 --> 01:15:11.830 Compassion and conviction. He said to this woman, and he said similar things to plenty of others in the Gospels, I don't condemn you. Now, leave your life of sin. You can press play now. Final question, Dirk. 01:15:12.150 --> 01:15:31.135 What would you say to the thoughtful doubter who's listening to us who hesitates even to pick up a New Testament because they're just not sure they'll really be reading what was written in the first century. What advice or encouragement do you have for such a person? 01:15:32.095 --> 01:16:10.450 Okay, first I would tell them that Christians are aware of the difficulties of manuscript copying, and they have been aware all those centuries. Actually, it's quite likely that the Bible you are going to pick up will have footnotes here and there saying some manuscripts say this. So we're not talking about a secret that we're trying to shovel under the carpet. No, this is just part and parcel of who we are as a Christian church. We recognize that this is what our Bible is. 01:16:11.090 --> 01:16:55.415 At the same time, we have such confidence in what we have as the text, that it is coherent, that it makes sense, and that the text of the early centuries are substantially the same as what we have nowadays, that we are confident that we have access to the original text. And that means that some of the difficulties in the text were difficulties centuries ago, and are still difficulties. We don't try to hide these. Sometimes we need to think very deeply before we have the beginning of an answer. But you can trust the text. 01:16:56.295 --> 01:17:39.800 Sometimes we are told that it was in the Council of Nicea that the church decided which books to be to be part of the New Testament and which book weren't. Well, they were fighting about many things, the Council of Nicaea, but actually both sides of the debate agreed on one thing, and that was the basis on which you could make an argument. They agreed from the outset on the shape of the New Testament, the shape of the Bible. So that is not a valid argument. Now Our awareness of what the New Testament is goes way, way back to the earliest times of the followers of Jesus. 01:17:39.960 --> 01:18:13.205 Dirk Jankind, thank you so much for your time. You're welcome. Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dickson, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed and edited by Mark Hadley. Sophie Hawkshore is on socials and membership. Siobhan McGinnis is our online librarian. 01:18:13.205 --> 01:18:39.820 Lindy Leverston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DeMarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant. And our voice actors today were Yannick Laurie and Dakota Love. You can become a member of the Undeceptions Club and get access to special extras, an exclusive annual gift, and much more by heading to undeceptions.com/club. Becoming a member is the best way to help Undeceptions help us all look deeper.