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It is wonderfully good, gentlemen, to be back with you once again, and the topic for this week's sessions of seminars, and then the next one, as I understand it, in three weeks time, not in two, is to be scripture, Holy Scripture, that is. Now, scripture literally means what is written. And eh, for one thousand four hundred years around, the New Testament was written out by hand. And all those copies written out by hand are referred to as manuscripts.
Which, of course, as you have all known for many years, is the Latin term for written script, manu, by hand, manuscripts. It was only after centuries had gone by that printing was invented and came to be, uh, the means of, of, of, uh, uh, repeating and distributing scripture. That it has been somewhat overtaken by, or whatever they are, these modern devices called by sundry names, in which you don't handle a book, but you look at a screen.
Today we begin by thinking about the manuscripts, what has b- was written by hand. Let's begin by reminding ourselves of the verses in scripture in two Timothy chapter three verse sixteen. Here is scripture talking about itself. All scripture is inspired of God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work.
In the context, Paul is referring to Old Testament scripture. We shall eventually see that the New Testament possesses the same equal authority on the same ground, that all scripture is inspired of God. And it is then that conviction that I personally talk to you this morning about the way scripture has been transmitted. I believe one hundred percent in the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture.
But in the first days, scripture, of course, was written by hand, and the New Testament in particular tended to be written on papyrus. Papyrus is a reed that grows, eh, by the Nile in Egypt. The reed was cut, then it was sliced, and the thin slices put together and glued, often with the muddy, sticky water of the Nile. And it is, of course, the origin of our word paper.
Later on, copies of scripture were written on parchment or vellum, that is the skins of animal. That is much more lasting than papyrus, because in humid climates, papyrus would soon crumble away. Now I want my first, uh, action to circulate among you now, photograph of an ancient papyrus.
You may well have seen it before, but I circulate it now again. First of all, that you might see a photograph of what, uh, actual kind of thing we're talking about when we talk of Bible manuscripts. Secondly, I circulate it because of the great age of this papyrus. It is dated by experts around about two hundred AD. It is now eighteen hundred years old.
This thing, this actual papyrus of which this is a photograph, is, exists in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. And pages of it are on show in the, uh, uh, uh, exhibition cases there. And it is the hope of all true Christians in Northern Ireland that before they go home to heaven, they will at least go once to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin to see this ancient copy of the New Testament.
Even though it costs a lot of petrol to go. Yet some Christians have been known to go to Dublin for no other purpose than seeing a rugby ball quicked about. A stadium. So that, uh, it is not unreasonable to expect Irishmen who know the Lord and love his word to go down to Dublin and actually set their eyes on this very ancient papyrus. Of course, when you see this photograph, you will immediately see that the edges of the papyrus are worn down, and some places half the page or more is missing.
But we have enough of it to know that originally it was a collection of the epistles by Paul. And that is interesting because when the New Testament was written, it was written as separate books or epistles, and the originals were sent hither and thither, and eventually copies were made. And then, of course, believers in different centers would begin to collect copies of these New Testament.
Uh, in other words, they didn't first of all circulate in a thing called the New Testament in nice leather covers as a collection of the New Testament documents. They circulated first as individual documents. It is very interesting to see, therefore, an actual papyrus copy of Paul's letters, now containing not all of his letters, but a wide selection of his letters, into one volume, into one codex, as they are called.
The interesting thing also is to see the order in which the books were put, the epistles were put, put in this papyrus volume. At the page I have opened for you, you will see that on the left hand side at the top, the Epistle to the Romans comes to its end. It is immediately followed by the Epistle to the Hebrews, at which some people rejoice because they've long since held the theory that Hebrews was written by Paul, you see, and they say that this utterly confounds those reprobates who insist that Paul didn't write the epistle to the Hebrews.
We shall not go into that discussion today. We are noticing here the order in which they come, because there was no fixed order of books in those days, of course. While I'm at the order of books and this matter of their collection, in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, there is a, a copy, a manuscript copy that contains the four gospels in one volume.
That is, it used to. Mice have gorged themselves on holy writ over the centuries, and therefore, uh, it is in a great state of fragmentation. Enough has survived to indicate that it once was a com- a a a complete collection of the four gospels. The gospels, of course, like the epistles, were written as individual books, and at first they circulated as individual books. Somewhere, at some time, somebody thought to put them together into one volume.
The earliest known copy of the, of a volume that had all four gospels in the one volume, the earliest known surviving copy is, where you might guess, in the Chester Beatty Library at, uh, Dublin, which is the second big reason why anybody who dares to call himself or herself a Christian and could go without being paralyzed should go to see these things. As now you look at the photograph I circulate of this document, you'll notice that the script, even though you don't perhaps read Greek, the script is not the best script that ever was invented.
When eventually you stand by the case and see these dark papyri in their cases, and can't read them, of course, but you actually see the papyrus, then perhaps you should think of some of your fellow believers eighteen hundred years ago in some part of Egypt. This document was found in Egypt, because when buried in the sand of Egypt, where they get no rain, papyrus survives. So, dug up, I suspect, from, uh, some waste dump, this papyrus now has survived, but anyway, it is evident that some of the local believers wanted to have their own copy of the epistles of Paul.
Many of them wouldn't be able themselves to write. Who actually wrote it, we don't know. It is probable that they put their money together and hired a professional scribe to write it out for them. We honor their memory, of course. Later on, I have a negative, uh, photograph of a much later manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, and when you look at that, you will see it is written by a tip-top scribe.
The writing is actually beautiful in its regularity and precision. This scribe, whoever he was, wasn't the best of professional scribes. There are mistakes, simple mistakes in copying in this manuscript. The believers did the best they could. I wonder how many of us would have a copy of the New Testament if we had had to write it all by hand. There was a Russian in the nineties and John Lennox met, and because they couldn't get hold of Bibles, he got hold of copies of communist things against the Bible, and of course the communist things quote the Bible, and he cut out the quotations and pasted them together in an attempt to make his own Bible.
Well, without further ado, let me just circulate this. It won't require you long to, um, uh, uh, look at the page I've indicated, and uh, eh, eh, if you want to look at other pages, uh, such as the other one I have indicated here, do, but pass it on, uh, as soon as you can. Right, Rosa? Good. And while that is circulating, let me talk about this other collection, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible.
I will put that on show with the other material, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible. This is now somewhat, uh, uh, uh, uh, old fashioned. It was printed in nineteen eighty one. and papyri, particularly of the New Testament, are constantly being discovered. And if you want a list of them, you will find a list of the papyri, eh, that exist in the, uh, ongoing edition of the Greek Testament by the United Bible Societies and together with the German Bible Societies, edited by the late Kurt Arland and still being edited.
And at the beginning, he will have a list of all the manuscripts known, you see, and the Church Fathers that are relevant to the matter. So I leave that out here too for you, that you can see a list, it covers some pages, of the early papyri. The, uh, letter on the left hand side is the way the Germans have, the Lord bless them, for writing the letter P, do you see, and stands for papyrus, and the number is given at the side, and the places where they are, and the dates, uh, when they were written, as estimated by scholars.
Anyway, I brought this one along too, so that you might see some of the very early stuff when you look at it. Uh, consider the, uh, number four, for instance, number four. number six. number seven. And number eight. Why look at them? Why? Because several of them, they're only fragments, but they are earlier than the one whose photograph I have circulated now.
In Manchester, in the John Rylands Library, there are some fragments from the gospel by John. They are dated somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty AD. So half a century and more earlier than the manuscript of which you are now looking at the, uh, photograph. Uh, do you see? Number six is a photograph of the Chester Beatty one that you are now looking at.
Number seven is also a, a, a manuscript of the Gospel of John, a different chapter. That is dated about two hundred again, AD. Number eight is particularly interesting. Again, it is a fragment. But it is a copy of a work done by a certain man called Tatian. He decided that though they had four gospels separate, he was going to put them all together.
So he wrote out what is called, uh, uh, uh, the one gospel through four. He put all four together, you will see. And here is a copy of his so-called Dia Tesseron. Yes? Aham. I circulate the aforesaid from this end of the division, and you may look at it while the others are looking at the other. Let's not spend too long on it. But I have found sometimes when I have talked about manuscripts, that, uh, some folks can't really visualize exactly what I'm talking about.
Now, gentlemen, we have to face the fact that when we look at these manuscripts, in many places they differ. And there is a very easy explanation of it. I don't know if you have ever tried to write out a copy at longhand, some sizable document or book. If you haven't, have a go at it one of these days, and I can guarantee to you that you will eventually make a number of mistakes in copying out, uh, a, a, a document or a book.
That is what has happened with many of the manuscripts. In the break, you care to come to look at the man- at the, uh, things I have put on this table here. Here is, uh, this is a negative photograph of the famous Sinaiticus manuscript. It was written by professional scribes of the first order. Beautiful writing. Notice, when you come to see it, its irregularity. But notice at the top of it, it has some lines in smaller handwriting, with an indication down at the side that the original scribe omitted it, omitted some words when he got to this point, accidentally, of course.
And then reading it through, do you see, um, he saw that he had admitted it and and wrote the words he had admitted at the top. Big manuscripts like Vaticanus B. Thank you very much. Big manuscripts like Vaticanus B not only started off with a professional scribe, but they had official correctors, first and second hand correctors, you'll see.
Many of the early believers couldn't afford it. I've heard it said by some that God, who inspired her, uh, uh, the New Testament, would have kept it without any mistakes ever. Well, in the abstract, yes, you might argue that, but faith has to face actual realities. There are, when you compare the manuscripts one with another down the centuries, there are thousands of differences.
Let me tell you that, who began this session by saying I believe in the divine inspiration of the Holy, uh, Scripture and the New Testament in particular. I believe it one, in it one hundred percent. But of course, the fact that there are differences raises the question, can we now be certain that we have in the New Testament an authentic representation...
of what the original writers... wrote. In other words, can we be certain that when we read the New Testament nowadays, that we have, for all practical purposes, uh, uh, uh, uh, substantially what the New Testament writers originally wrote. The manner has been a subject of many books.
I recommend to you this little thing, if you don't have a copy, get a copy. And if you can afford it, even if you have to do some overtime at work, do the, buy two or three copies. This is by Freddie Bruce, the late Freddie Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable? It is the first book he ever wrote, and has been used by thousands of people and in many languages to build their confidence in the documents of the New Testament.
Stuart Hamilton has brought me this morning. He's a man that's always up to date with new publications. Here is the newest edition, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable? And it has a foreword by the present Bishop of Durham, who is the NT Right, you see. I knew of one woman was converted through reading this, or at least the first stage in her conversion was through reading this. She, uh, you won't, I might as well talk of ancient history, but this was way back in the nineteen sixties, do you see?
And some eminent gentlemen now present weren't even born, but there was a, a movement, particularly in America, called the flower people and some of the other such things, and they lived in communes, and they did nothing in particular all day long, do you say, other than sing and wear strange clothes and things, do you say? They were protesting against the establishment. And there came to Ireland a good man who was a believer, and he had a sister who had gone over to this way of life and believed nothing about the gospel, about God, or about everything.
She was a rebel against everything like it, you see, and lived this beautiful life of a flower people. Well, anyway, when I asked her how she first came to, uh, what made her think that, uh, the gospel was true. She said she came across a book by a scholar called Bruce, Are the New Testament documents reliable? And it shattered her myths that you couldn't trust the Bible because it had been copied out so many times. It can be a valuable tool in pre-evangelism.
I think I may have told you, but if I haven't, then let me do it. Excuse me if I repeat myself as an old man. But about three or four months ago, there came a knock at my door, and when I went, I found my next door neighbor there, along with a man that wasn't his wife. It seemed odd, and she had a pram with her. And the dear lady explained why she had come. She and her husband had a child that was hopelessly can- handicapped. And she had lasted for twelve years and now had died.
Her husband, she said, had given himself to that child and looked after it. It was his child. And its death, alongside of the sorrow of a child like that that was handicapped, was almost too much for him. He was a Catholic, she said, but had left the church disgusted with it. Now he didn't know where he was, and was there a God or not? And to make it worse, they had a second child that was in the pram. It was likewise handicapped.
And she came to inquire, might her husband come and talk to me, because I had talked to their friend who was my next door neighbor. Do you see? So I said, of course. And when he came and stated his problems, eyes brimming, of course. He said, how can I believe there's any God? And as for the Bible, he says, my friends tell me that the New Testament wasn't copied out for three hundred years before the first copy was made. How can you believe a thing like that? Of course, his, his problem went very deep, didn't it?
Not to be solved by looking at New Testament manuscripts. But here was a bit of actual fact that I could call his attention to. And I said, as far as your friends go, tell you that the Bible wasn't copied out for three hundred years. And I took him to my next room and showed him the photographs I showed you. Facts can be an anchor hold. They are not upset by emotions. He said, well, he couldn't read the Bible in this old language.
Could I give him a Bible like I give my next door neighbor in simple English? So I got him two. Just as I got back from Crimea this last time, being flat out, the next n- night there, there came a ring at my door. It was this good man. Asked could he come in and talk? Do you see? The upshot was he asked if he might come frequently and study scripture, and he's in process of doing it.
Yes, he seems to have got converted because he come from just over the border, and there is a Church of Ireland there, and the minister is an evangelical. So my next, my friend from around the corner told me he had decided to trust Christ. Wants to study scripture. Gentlemen, what we're studying today is not irrelevant to our gospel preaching. What can we say, therefore, about, uh, the evidence for the New Testament compares with that of the evidence of the manuscripts of the Greek classics.
So let me put on some overheads. For the number of the, um, manuscripts from which we get the New Testament. Total number of manuscripts of the New Testament, part or whole.
Was some years ago, it's it's increasing each year with new papyri discovered. Total number of manuscripts of the New Testament, part or whole, was at that stage five thousand three hundred and sixty six. And do here notice what I said earlier about fragments. You see, if you have a fragment of the gospel of John, that can be reliably dated to the year, say, hundred and fifty AD, a fragment is enough to suggest that it came from a whole gospel.
The early manuscripts as distinct from the later ones. The figure five hundred and thirty— uh, five thousand three hundred and sixty six, of course, includes not only the early papyri, but the later manuscripts written all down the centuries until the fourteen hundreds or the fifteen hundreds. Early manuscripts. Among them, Papyrus fifty two, fragments of Gospel of John, between AD one and one hundred and fifty.
Papyrus forty six that you have just been looking at, the Chester Beatty papyrus. Eighty six leaves of epistles of Paul, written about AD two hundred. Complete New Testament, the earliest copy we have, is the Codex Sinaiticus. The Iticus. Here, in a much faded volume, published by the Trustees of the British Museum, dated nineteen thirty four, is an account of the Mount Sinai manuscript of the Bible, with the charming photograph of Tischendorf therein, who is supposed to have discovered it in the monastery, uh, down in, um, Sinai.
It was then acquired by the Russian government, who eventually sold it to Britain. Some years ago, it was announced that at that same monastery, monks knocked down a wall and found boxes of manuscripts. This would have been in the late sixties or seventies. And some of them, they said, were of the same quality as Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Because the monastery was inhabited by Greek Orthodox monks, it became the- their property, of course, and the Greek government took control of them.
I remember meeting the ambassador from Greece in Dublin at one stage, a little party, and I exhorted him with all the diplomatic, uh, powers I could bring to bear upon it, to make sure, uh, that, uh, the manuscripts were published as soon as possible. The scholar Charles Worth was allowed to take some photographs of some of them, and as far as I know, nothing has been heard of them since. Pity. And then we have another source. Quotations in the early church fathers.
Now, the early church fathers are not always the favorite or even the bedside reading of a lot of evangelicals, for some reason or other, but they have their uses. The early church fathers, of course, quote scripture at great length in the many books they wrote. So the early church fathers of the second and third centuries, that is the one hundreds and the two hundreds AD, can be studied to see how they quote the New Testament. There are sufficient quotations in the early church fathers to reconstruct the whole of the New Testament except eleven verses.
And when you have them, and you know the dates at which they wrote, in the one hundreds or the hundreds AD, of course it becomes further evidence for the text of the New Testament. Hm? And then there are the early translations, because the early missionaries, when they went to, uh, places like North Africa, uh, they had to learn Latin if they didn't know it, because the people of North Africa in those days spoke Latin, not Greek.
And so when they go into North Africa, they had to translate it into Latin. The early missionaries did. And of course, when they went to Syriac-speaking countries, they had to, uh, turn it into Syriac. And when they went to Egypt, the local people, the ordinary Egyptians, as distinct from Greeks who lived in Egypt, the ordinary, uh, uh, ordinary, uh, people spoke Coptic. So the New Testament was translated into Coptic and into various vers- uh, dialects of Coptic, Bohairic, Sahidic, and things like that. Early translations into other languages, et cetera, total over twenty thousand manuscripts.
Coming, of course, from those translations made in those early days. So this is a matter of the number of the ev- uh, manuscripts, uh, for, for, uh, the New Testament. Yeah. Now I'm going to compare that with the number of manuscripts for some major classical authors. Now, it's part of the deprivation and the poverty and the suppression of many folks nowadays of the present generation that they're not allowed to study the classics, and some of them have to study social sciences, and some
of them in our own university used to study savages. It's called social anthropology, you'll see. It's very curious, it's never something I hadn't quite worked out yet, why it was beneficial to study savages instead of studying great civilizations, but that be beside the point, you'll see. Here are the great classical authors. And classical scholars studied them.
And are content. When they study them, they have... what the original authors intended. If not a hundred percent, yet close on it. And critical editions of these authors are printed with the text and beneath the variants that might exist in the manuscripts. Now, notice two things. Master Caesar, Julius Caesar of that name.
He was one of the early conquerors and oppressors of the English, you know. English had been suppressed and oppressed by waves of foreigners over the centuries, you know. It's terrible. Anybody who had read the history would have pity on them. Uh, and Caesar came as a Roman, and he oppressed us, you see. Well, anyway, he wrote his Gallic War. It's simple, straightforward Latin, and centuries of schoolboys were, had to read Caesar's Gallic War, being moderately simple language, as that was one of the first books you were set to read. Surviving copies, nine or ten manuscripts.
Printed books galore, of course, we're talking about manuscripts. And then you have to ask the gap. How many years between when the thing was first written and the earliest surviving copy? Earliest copy, surviving copy, manuscript copy of Caesar's Gallic War was written nine hundred years later than Caesar's day. Does any classical scholar doubt the authenticity of what we know have?
No, none known to me. Who will at once see the difference between that and the state of affairs with the New Testament manuscripts? Or take the famous historian Livy. He composed his voluminous history between fifty BC and AD, uh, uh, 17. He wrote one hundred and forty two books, only thirty five survive. Manuscripts, not more than twenty.
The oldest copy, fragments of books three to six, fourth century AD. Gap of about three hundred years. Or the historian Tacitus. He composed his works around AD one hundred. He wrote fourteen books of so ca- of what he named the Histories.
Only four and a half survive. He wrote another set called the Annals, Sixteen books of them, ten in full, Two, survive in part. The text of the above survives in only two manuscripts, one of the ninth century AD and one of the eleventh century AD. No classical scholar doubts that we now have what Tacitus, when in the manuscripts that survive, what Tacitus intended. I used to lecture on Tacitus, gentlemen.
Well, there is the Greek famous, the father of history, it's called scientific history, Thucydides. He composed his history in four hundred and sixty to four BC. Mm-hmm. Number of surviving manuscripts, eight. Earliest manuscript about AD nine hundred, though there are a few first century fragments. The gap, thirteen hundred years.
Now, why do I cite that? And what is the force of the argument? If you want to talk, uh, uh, uh, uh, weigh up the authenticity from a scholarly point of view of the manuscripts of the New Testament, you compare the, can compare the attitude of classical scholars to their classical authors. And if you do that, you will find that the, uh, uh, uh, New Testament scholars have far, far, far more evidence for the authenticity of the New Testament documents.
It is generally people, excuse the vulgar phrase, who don't know what they're talking about, that will come out with statements like the New Testament was not copied down until th- three hundred years after it was written, how could you possibly, uh, trust it, and there are differences in the manuscripts and so forth and so on and so on. So my first argument is, uh, on the basis of this evidence, judged by standards of scholarship in the related classical world, we may have every, uh, uh, uh, uh, every confidence that the New Testament documents are reliable.
The question will arise, of course, how then, if there are differences between them, how do you decide in those cases what was originally written? The discipline, the study that is concerned with that is called textual criticism. And those who, uh, employ themselves in that area are called textual critics. And in the ears of some believers, the very term smells of apostasy.
How could anybody be a critic? Do you see? Desperate. Well, I'm a textual critic, gentlemen. I work not in the, uh, text of the New Testament, but in the text of the Old Testament, and, uh, in the world of scholarship, people that work on the text like that are said to be textual critics. It implies no doubt. It is simply that you critique the manuscripts and decide which of them best represents the original in ev- in every case, yes? So I'm a textual critic, uh, in the Old Testament, and not an authority in the New.
But we'll discuss those matters when we ne- uh, come after the break. Uh, uh, now and the break, I think the, uh, uh, the, uh, the king of these sessions, you see, uh, he allows us fifteen minutes, is it, sir? Yes, fifteen minutes. He nods his head and exhorts us to be back within fifteen minutes.
