Uniqueness of the Bible

Authority of Scriptures — Steve Gregg

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Alleged Discrepancies (Part 1)

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Uniqueness of the Bible

Authority of ScripturesSteve Gregg

In "Uniqueness of the Bible," Steve Gregg highlights the distinct characteristics of the Bible that sets it apart from other books. The Bible's unity, internal consistency, and vast coverage of historical and instructional content underscore a greater power at work. Despite criticism regarding human error transmission, the strong manuscript evidence of the Bible's authenticity and survival throughout ages of persecution suggests it may be of divine origin. Gregg encourages further investigation and contemplation of the Bible's uniqueness.

Transcript

Well, we have covered in our consideration of natural evidences by which we are examining the Bible's claims that it is the Word of God, a couple of major categories of evidence. One has to do with the interaction of the Bible with science, science as a whole category of knowledge, and also the relationship of the Bible to historical information from outside itself, archaeological and other historical documents. And while considerations like that probably could never really prove that the Bible is inspired for the simple reason that the absence of scientific errors or the absence of historical errors does not prove that a book is inspired by God, yet you should bear in mind that if the Bible were inspired by God, we would require it and expect it to have just this kind of evidence.

The Bible is sort of at a disadvantage in this respect. It can be proven to be correct every point along the way and yet not prove itself to be inspired. Yet if you found it to be false at one point, it would prove it wasn't inspired.

It's vulnerable to falsification. What's interesting is that that vulnerability has not led to a disproof, which it seems like it could. All you would need to do is to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Bible contained a historical inaccuracy or a scientific inaccuracy and you would have demonstrated that at least in that portion it could not have been inspired by God.

The interesting thing is that no such proof has been forthcoming and that, in spite of the fact that a great number of people who have it as their determined purpose to prove that the Bible is not inspired and with great expertise have been devoting themselves for centuries to trying to discover just those flaws. And the fact that they have not found them doesn't mean that they perhaps never will, but it certainly is significant in view of the fact that those who are looking for those flaws have already made up their minds that the Bible must be wrong, and yet the evidence is against them. The evidence seems to point in the direction of believing the Bible is true.

Now, if it is true, it may also be inspired. It could be true and not be inspired, or it could be false and not inspired, but it is true and it may therefore be inspired. There's more to consider, however.

There are areas of consideration of the Bible that I think are helpful in just weighing the full evidence of a natural sort as to whether the Bible's claims to be inspired should be trusted or not. And at this point, I'd like to turn to the material that begins at the bottom of page 6 of the notes you've been given, point C, the unique character of the Bible. Now, the word unique doesn't mean unusual or rare.

The word unique means one-of-a-kind. To say the Bible is, well, a lot of advertisers say their product is very unique. Well, nothing is very unique.

A thing can't be very one-of-a-kind. It's either one-of-a-kind or it's not one-of-a-kind. It's not, there's no grades of uniqueness.

Something is either unique, absolutely unique, or it's, that word doesn't apply. It's not unique, if there's anything like it. When we talk about the unique character of Scripture, we're not saying that the Bible, you know, ranks among the most unusual books in terms of certain virtues.

We're saying it alone, of all the books in the universe that are known to man, it alone possesses certain characteristics. And when you consider that of the making of books, there is no end, and there are trillions, I'm sure, of different titles that have been written over the centuries and are in print today, at least billions. The fact that the Bible stands out above all other books ever written, in certain ways, is telltale.

Perhaps it's not proof positive, but it does tell you something, at least points a certain direction toward a certain conclusion. Now, think about it for a moment. If, indeed, the Bible was the book that God inspired for man's benefit, and all other books were not such books inspired by God, you would expect the Bible to be different from others.

I mean, God is different than people. God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts. His ways are different than our ways.

As high as the heavens are above the earth, so higher His ways and His thoughts above our own. We would expect that a book that truly proceeded from the mind of God would stand out like a sore thumb in the world of literature, where all other books were simply proceeding from the minds of men, even the best wisest men. And the Bible, in fact, has that trait.

Now, this seems to agree, generally, to confirm the fact that the Bible's claims are true. It doesn't necessarily prove them, but anything that confirms them somewhat, or points in that direction, is useful for our examination, our investigation. The Bible is unique in the world of literature in many respects.

First of all, I want to talk about its unity. There is no other book like it in terms of its unity. Now, unity means that it agrees with itself.

Now, you might say, well, it's not that unusual for an author, you know, in all the pages he writes between the covers of his book, to agree with himself. I mean, one does not need to be inspired to avoid contradicting himself. For a person to be consistent in what he says all the way through in his book is not that unusual.

Why say the Bible is unique that way? Well, it's unique because it's not just a book by an author. It's a collection of writings. It's an anthology of writings by many authors, as many as 40 different authors.

And once more, these 40 different authors were not all acquaintances with each other. They lived on three different continents. Some lived in Africa, some in Asia, and some in Europe.

They spoke different languages from each other. Some spoke Aramaic, some spoke Hebrew, some spoke Greek. These men were not from the same cultures.

Some were raised in ancient Egyptian culture. Some were nomadic Hebrews. Some were metropolitan Hebrews.

Some were Greeks, or at least raised in Greek culture or in Roman culture. And so these are people of very different backgrounds. They lived over a long period of time, 1,600 years, from the earliest to the latest of them.

It's quite clear people who live over a span of 1,600 years don't know each other, and in many ways cannot influence each other. Now, I won't pretend that some of the later writers didn't have the advantage of knowing the writings of the earlier writers. Let's be honest, they did.

I mean, the New Testament writers had the Old Testament. So even though they are separated from the Old Testament writers by a great distance culturally and chronologically and geographically, yet they did have some influence from them. I won't deny that.

But still it can be said that the vast, well I don't know about the vast, but let's just say the majority of authors of the Scripture did not know each other, and many, many of them did not have access to each other's writings. Now, add to that the fact that the Bible doesn't restrain itself to addressing only safe and sane and uncontroversial topics. The topics addressed in the Bible are, many of them, extremely controversial.

The kind of things that people have a variety of opinions about. The Bible addresses issues like, what is the nature of man? What was the origin of man? What is the purpose of man? What was the purpose of life? What is right and what is wrong? What happens after people die? Who is God? How many gods are there? What is he like? These kinds of questions are the kinds of issues that not everyone agrees about. In fact, you could take a group of writers who are much more closely, had more affinity to each other in terms of culture and the time that they lived in and the language they spoke and their educational similarities and so forth.

You could take a group of people much more closely aligned to each other than the biblical writers were to each other and ask them to write papers on some given controversial subject. Let's say the ethics of euthanasia or the ethics of abortion. Should a woman be allowed to have an abortion if she was raped and became pregnant through rape? Not all Christians even.

You could take ten people who went to the same church, went to the same school, had this equivalent education, were all raised in the same town, in the same culture, had the same religious convictions, and you would not find those ten persons writing articles on the ethics of abortion if the woman was raped. They would not all agree with each other. You would find various opinions, various shades of opinion.

Now I'm not saying that there are different views that are legitimate. I'm just saying that people on controversial subjects don't agree with each other very much. And yet the Bible addresses what probably could conservatively be said to be scores, if not hundreds, of different controversial issues.

And it is written by forty different authors. They didn't all go to the same church. They didn't even all come from the same religious tradition.

True, most of them were Jewish, but the Jewish traditions of one period of time were very different than the traditions of different periods of time. The time of Jesus, Judaism was defined largely by the rabbinic traditions of the Pharisees. In the time of David, it was very different than that.

In the time of Moses, it's different still. These people were not the products of a monolithic cultural phenomenon. They were people who lived through a long period of history, different countries, different continents, different languages, different cultures, and different degrees of education.

Some were written by practically illiterate. Of course, they were not illiterate when they wrote, but not very well educated. Fishermen.

Some were written by kings. Some were written by people who had been a tax collector or whatever, a physician. People with varying degrees of education and different fields of expertise.

Now, if you would take a comparable anthology, if there were one, there isn't one, I don't know of one. If you could take some other book, let's say someone put together a book and got 40 different authors and said, we're going to put together a book about generally the issues of ultimate reality. Write a paper and we'll stick her in there.

And then you look and you would never find the degree of agreement and the absence of mutual contradiction in that book, as you would find, and you do find in the Bible. It's Josh McDowell who has made popular this illustration I gave a moment ago. I didn't give it in all detail, but he said, if you would take 10 people living at the same time, essentially the same culture, same educational background and so forth, and ask them to write a paper on one controversial subject, he said you would not find the same degree of agreement and unity among them on that one issue as you find among the 40 different biblical writers on hundreds of topics.

Interestingly, one time I was lecturing for a women in Honolulu. I was teaching on this very subject of the authority of scripture and a student came up to me, it was not in a DTS, but in an SOE, a school of evangelism there. A student came up to me and said, he says, you know, I was witnessing to someone at the Alamoana Shopping Center in Honolulu, and the person told me the Bible was full of contradictions.

And he says, and so I challenged him. I said, well, oh yeah, name one. Usually if you say that someone that you've got them, you know, most people say the Bible is full of contradictions, can't name one.

Just so happened, this guy could. In fact, he had 30 of them that he had discovered or found or stolen from some previous writer or something. And he gave this student a printed sheet off his computer of 30 something, 31 contradictions in the Bible.

Well, the student didn't know what to do with them. He was, you know, he was shaken by this. He had the paper.

But the guy had given him his phone number and said he'd be willing to discuss it with him. So the student came up to me, said, would you be willing to talk to this man? He gave me this paper, 31 contradictions in the Bible. I said, of course I would.

And so he called the man and we set up an appointment. In the meantime, I read his paper. His paper was singularly unimpressive.

The man had not probably discovered, he probably had not discovered these alleged contradictions himself. These were shopworn old, I mean, for a few centuries after the time of Christ, porphyry, a cynical antagonist against Christianity had come up with most of these. I mean, these are old, old complaints.

All of them have been answered. All of them easily answered by somebody who doesn't have a bias against the Bible. You can see by understanding this passage and this one correctly, they don't contradict each other.

It's by a failure to try to understand them that appears to be contradictory. By the way, in a later lecture, I will be devoting a whole lecture or two to the subject of seeming contradictions of the Bible. I'll show you where they are and how to deal with them.

But anyway, the man's paper provided no challenge to anyone who was acquainted with the material. And so I met with him. We had about three hours to talk together and he happened to be living with his girlfriend and she came along too.

And it somehow gave me some impression of why it was he didn't like the Bible. It had little to do with his intellect. It had more to do with his lifestyle, I think.

But anyway, we had a good talk. I did not convert him and I doubt as long as he was living with his girlfriend, he wanted to be converted. But as a matter of fact, he did have to acknowledge that the answers I gave were at least as reasonable as his objections were.

Anyway, when I left that meeting, he asked me if I'd read another thing he'd written and he gave me a paper that he'd written where he was criticizing Josh McDowell's illustration about taking ten people and having them write about one controversial subject and you won't find the same amount of agreement among them as you find the Bible. He had read this illustration or this claim from Josh McDowell, I think in the book, More Than a Carpenter, which Josh wrote. And this guy, this atheist, as he was, he had written a paper critiquing Josh McDowell's illustration and he asked if I'd read it.

So I was glad to do it. I took it and read it. And I was really fascinated by this man's inconsistency.

He said in his paper, Josh McDowell's illustration is invalid because it is not reflective of how the Bible was really put together. He said in order to be a true analogy of how the Bible was put together, Josh should change his illustration this way. You get ten people, you tell them to write on a controversial subject.

They submit their papers to an editorial committee. The editorial committee rejects the papers that they don't agree with. And the ones that they mostly agree with, they edit and they change and they comb through and they make sure that they make all the papers agree with each other before they accept them to be collected.

And of course, then you have the final edition. And lo and behold, you've got the very unity in it that Josh McDowell claims is in the Bible. Now, of course, what he's saying is that that's how the Bible came into being, that these people wrote their books and maybe some group of priests or some kind of religious hierarchy, they just threw out the books they didn't like and the ones that tended to agree with each other, they kept and they smoothed out the problems in them and so forth.

You get a similar claim from the New Age people about the New Testament in general. If you point out to them that Jesus did not say things agreeable with the New Age, even though of course New Agers believe Jesus was a New Ager. You point out that Jesus didn't believe in reincarnation, he believed in resurrection, he didn't believe in an impersonal force, he believed in a personal God who was a father.

He didn't believe in karma, he believed in forgiveness of sins. Jesus was extremely un-New Age in his beliefs and he pointed out by the things Jesus said. New Age people have a standard answer they always give, and that is, well, Jesus didn't really say the things the Gospels claim he said, because the Gospels have been altered.

The Roman Catholic Church in the medieval period, they were the custodians of the scriptures and they changed and omitted, they left out books about Jesus that they didn't agree with and they changed the ones that were there so that they agreed with Catholic doctrine more. And therefore they say, even though Jesus was truly a New Ager and taught reincarnation and karma and impersonal force and all those things, we have lost the record because the Roman Catholic Church changed them. Of course, the question that immediately suggests itself, if this is true, how do we know it's true? If all the records about Jesus were changed a thousand years ago by the Catholic Church, how does the New Ager know what Jesus really said, since we don't have any records of it anymore? Do they get this by intuition, do they get it from channeling, or how do they get this knowledge that Jesus was a New Ager? Obviously they don't have any manuscripts to go on because the only manuscripts that exist are those of the Gospels, and the Gospels do not present Jesus as a New Ager.

So you can see right at the start that that's wishful thinking, but what they don't seem to know is that we have copies of the Gospels in Greek and in Latin that predate the formation of the Roman Catholic Church by several centuries. And those have been found, they can be compared with the later manuscripts that are much more recent, and they are not different from each other in any significant way. So this suggestion that the Roman Catholic Church changed things and all that kind of stuff, it just doesn't fit the facts, that we have texts of the New Testament that predate the Roman Catholic Church by centuries, and they're essentially almost identical to the ones that are later.

No significant changes have been made by the Catholic Church in the meantime. Furthermore, one could deduce that this scenario is false simply by the fact of the Reformation. If the Roman Catholic Church had indeed taken all the documents of Scripture and combed through them to find everything they objected to, and everything that disagreed with them and removed it and changed it to agree with them, there would have been no Reformation.

The reason the Reformation happened is because a Catholic monk named Martin Luther read the Scriptures and found out that they don't agree with what the Roman Catholic Church teaches. And so he taught different things than what the Catholic Church taught, much to their chagrin. It caused them a great deal of headaches.

But it's clear that the Scriptures as we have them are not the product of the Roman Catholic Church. They are the nemesis of the Roman Catholic Church in many respects. The Roman Catholic Church has tried to suppress it in many cases because the contents of Scripture are so contrary to many of their doctrines.

Well, anyway, this man who said, well, Josh McDowell should change his illustration to be more accurate, where he indicated that some kind of editorial group smoothed out everything, excluded books they didn't agree with and so forth, so that the Bible exhibits this unity that Josh McDowell describes. And therefore, we don't attribute that to anything supernatural. That was just a human device.

As I read that paper, I thought, this is the same man who wrote that there's 31 contradictions in the Scripture. Seems like he can't have it both ways. You can't, on the one hand, say that some group of editors carefully edited out everything that they disagreed with and smoothed it out to make it look as perfect as it is, and yet at the same time say it's full of contradictions.

How could it be full of contradictions if somebody went through it to make sure there weren't any contradictions? It's quite clear this man is just grasping at any anti-Christian argument he can come up with without even realizing that some of the arguments he uses contradict other arguments he uses. The fact of the matter is, there are no contradictions in the Bible which are of any, that in any way challenge a belief in the inspiration of Scripture. There are passages in the Bible which on the surface, they say different things than each other, but in order to be a contradiction, two things have to both be impossible to both be true.

And that is not what you find in the Scripture. But we'll talk about that more in detail later. Suffice it to say at this point that people who study the Bible have long marveled at the fact that so many different people writing on so many different subjects agreed with each other completely without necessarily having been influenced by each other.

And certainly there's no evidence that some group of editors took their work and changed it all. There's no evidence of this. The manuscripts go back too far.

You can see the early manuscripts alongside the newer ones and see that no one has really done any significant changes on it. So the Bible is unique in that it is an anthology of writings by a lot of writers who happen to show an incredible degree of unity, of thought, about a whole bunch of things that people don't generally agree on. Even people of the same religion don't generally agree on.

And realize too that the writers of Scripture as individuals didn't say, I'm going to write a book so it can be included with these other books in the Bible. Jeremiah and Isaiah, they never assumed that their books were somehow going to be added to the Pentateuch and the Psalms and eventually called the Bible. They just wrote what God told them and their writings were preserved.

And the generation that had this said, wow, these prophecies came true. This man was of God. And so eventually they included it in the Bible, not because of the content of his doctrine, but because of the fulfillment of his prophecies.

That's how they knew that he was genuine. Anyway, this doesn't prove the Bible is true, but it certainly makes it stand out in the world of literature. It's such a collection of writings that have that degree of unity.

Another unique factor, characteristic of the Bible, is the scope of its contents. The Bible covers, as it says in 2 Peter 1, 3, it contains all things necessary for life and godliness. Do you know the word Bible comes from the Greek word, biblos, which means little book.

Now this is a fairly little Bible, but Bibles are not generally speaking thought of as a little book in our culture. Some Bibles are quite large. In fact, the Bible has probably at least 1,200 pages in it in most editions.

How many books in your lifetime do you read that have 1,200 pages in them? That's a big book by our standards. Why would it be called the little book? Well, when you consider that it's the only book, it's the only collection of writings that God has given us that are directly inspired to meet all the needs of all people of all lands, of all cultures, of all ages, it's a remarkably little book. You'd think that something was going to contain all things necessary for life and godliness for 10 billion people who would live in all kinds of situations.

You'd need a set of books the size of Encyclopedia Britannica at least, but you've got it all between these covers. That's a small book concerning the scope and the range of its coverage. Remember 2 Timothy 3.16 said that all such is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, so that the man of God may be perfect or complete, thoroughly furnished for every good work.

That's a sweeping statement about how you can be equipped for every good work by simply what's in here, between these covers. This is like the whole education. This is all the education you need to be complete for every good work.

That's incredible, but it's true. There isn't any other book that is so complete in all that it tells that we need to know. I mean, first of all, just in terms of its information content, it tells us about events before the world was created.

Where else can you get authoritative information about that? It tells of events about what will happen after the world is no longer here. It tells of the historical development of God's plan of saving man from the beginning. Every relevant detail is given, a consistent chain of events, nothing's left out.

That's just the historical stuff. When you get to the ethical and instructional stuff, it's an amazing thing. When I was a young Bible teacher, when I was 16 years old is when I started teaching, it was during the Jesus movement.

There were a lot of people even younger than me in my age who wanted to be taught, and it was no problem filling a whole house with people who wanted to be taught, even by someone inexperienced like myself. I had a Bible study. I remember in a home, eight people from my former Baptist church where I'd been, they asked me if I'd come and teach them the series on the gifts of the Spirit because I'd been baptized in the Spirit since they had seen me, and they wanted to know more about that.

So I started meeting once a week in this home. It started out with these eight guys, college guys, my age essentially. I mean, they'd been through high school and even grammar school with me because I was raised in their church.

But they were now, by the time they asked me, they were in their late teens, and some of them were college age. I started teaching there, and within three weeks or four weeks, we had 50 people there, and it continued for two years. I didn't just teach them the gifts of the Spirit.

We taught a whole bunch of things. But these were people who were serious about God. They wanted to really make sure their lives were right with God, and they came to me frequently, and they said, would you counsel me? I've got a problem.

I want to make sure that I know what God wants me to do. I want to be able to get over this problem in my relationship for my life. I remember I was really intimidated because I was only 16 years old.

I thought, well, first of all, I don't have any training in counseling or psychology or any of that stuff, which I assumed would be important. I said, I'm also just 16 years old. I still live at home.

I haven't had any experience in life. I mean, it seems to me if you want to get counseling, you get it from someone who's been around the block a few times, someone who's gotten a few lumps and learned a few lessons and maybe picked up some wisdom here and there. I just felt woefully inadequate to counsel people.

I actually told people, please do not come to me for counseling because I felt very intimidated by it. But what happened is people ignored my requests, and they came anyway. They said, I've got a problem.

Couldn't I talk to you? I said, okay, talk to me. So they began to share with me their problem. It never occurred to me that I was counseling until later, but I realized that as they shared their problem, there was an answer to that problem in the Bible.

It was quite obvious. They were having a problem with a relationship or a behavior problem or a mood problem or something. And as they shared it, it was quite clear to me, well, the scripture says, the scripture addresses that.

Here's what you have to do in that situation. And this happened again and again and again. It never occurred to me I was counseling.

I just thought I was doing Bible teaching one-on-one. But as I look back, I realized that over the years, practically every problem that people ever go to see counselors for at one time or another came to me. And I never even thought of it as counseling.

I said, well, the Bible answers that right over here. I look back and I think, wow, I can't think of one human problem that I've ever been presented with that the Bible didn't address, that the Bible didn't give the answer to. Now, I'm not saying that just by giving people Bible verses, it solves all people's problems.

You have to believe it. You have to follow it. And you have to do so consistently.

If a person consistently follows the truth that God gives, I believe they'll never need a counselor. Now, counsel is one thing. Counseling is another.

The Bible says, with good counsel make war, and the multitude of counselors are safe. It means people who will give you advice about what you need to do when you've got a decision to make. That's different than counseling.

In our society, counseling usually means therapy. Someone trying to tell you why you have this behavior problem, why you're struggling in this area. And once you figure out why, we'll get to the root of the problems and we'll try to find some way out through this therapeutic procedure or something.

That's what we call counseling today. And the Bible doesn't have anything of that in it. And I don't think it's ever necessary for Christians.

If they are, follow the scriptures because the range of problems man has are all contained within this small book. Everything's there, necessary. I can't think of any other book ever written that addresses every human need, every human problem.

I remember I was once living in a house with a lot of Christians years ago, and one of the ladies who lived in the house was an older lady, fairly depressed most of the time, she seemed. Nice lady, sweet, loved the Lord, but she was just really never been discipled, I guess, and really kind of emotionally messed up. And she kept several counselors busy on a regular basis.

I mean, she had several pastors she'd visit probably once a week each, and I don't know where else she got counseling. But I think she just she'd get a shot from a counselor and then, you know, not a literal shot, and it would carry her for a couple days, and she'd go see another one. Really dependent on counseling, of a therapeutic sort, you know, never helped her, as is so often the case.

But I remember once we were in the kitchen of the house where we lived, and she said, Steve, where do you go when you need counseling? And I had never been asked that, and I didn't even know what the answer was. Initially, I didn't know what the answer was. I mean, I kind of knew what the answer was, but I thought that can't be true.

The real answer was, I've never gone to anyone for counseling. I can't even imagine doing so. The reason is because whenever I have the problems she has, I don't go to a counselor, I go to the scriptures, and I find the answer, and I don't need to go to a counselor then.

And I've never found the scriptures to be inadequate. I've never found them insufficient. I've never found one problem in my life that I could not find the answer to in the scriptures.

Now, that may seem like an irresponsible statement, but it's just plain truth. That's the way it is. I finally had, I was almost embarrassed, because I thought this can't be the right answer.

You know, if I say I just go to the Bible, just me and God fix it, in those days, the spirit in Christian circles was, oh, you've got an independent spirit. You know, don't you acknowledge the interdependency of the members of the body of Christ? Don't say you don't need anyone. The hand cannot say to the foot, I have no need of you.

I almost felt like by saying I don't need a counselor, I was almost being guilty of saying, you know, I have no need of the body of Christ. I know I need the body of Christ, but I don't need counselors. You know why? Because thy testimonies are my counselors, it says in Psalm 119.

And I have just come to really be impressed with the Bible, that the scope and the range of its coverage is like you'd find in no other book. I'm convinced that if I had nothing but the Bible, I would never encounter a personal problem that I couldn't discover the answer to. Now, overcoming the problem is another story, because you have to do what the Bible says, and that's not as easy as reading it.

But at the same time, I'm not aware of any information that people need to live a balanced, wholesome, sane, well-adjusted life. I 'm not saying that information alone fixes the problem. You need the information, then you have to act on the information, and that's two different things.

But if you do what it says, Jesus said you'll be like a person who's built his house on a rock, and even the storms can't knock it down. Another area in which we could observe the uniqueness of Scripture in the world of all literature is its universal appeal. Now, when I say its universal appeal, you might think I mean that everybody likes the Bible.

Not everyone does. A lot of people don't like it at all. I can't imagine why any good person would not like the Bible.

It's a wonderful book, refreshing, edifying, comforting, encouraging. I can understand why bad people wouldn't like it, because it'd be condemning, and convicting, and disconcerting, and so forth. So if I meet someone who doesn't like the Bible, I try not to say what I think, but I have an opinion of what kind of person I'm dealing with, because the things in the Bible should be welcomed by good people.

And it seems like only people who want to do bad things would really have a reason not to like the Bible. But without making that assumption too hastily, we can acknowledge that although not every individual likes the Bible, the Bible has a unique universal appeal in that it transcends culture, it transcends age, it transcends educational levels. People of goodwill who love God all love the Bible, and all benefit from reading it.

Now my children, when they were little, enjoyed listening to or reading Dr. Seuss books, or Winnie the Pooh books. And I myself still kind of enjoy reading these to my children. It's kind of delightful literature.

But I wouldn't sit down and read it for my own gratification, my own enjoyment. I mean, read it to children's fun, because you kind of enter into their delight while you read it. But if I'm sitting down thinking of something I want to spend an hour doing, I don't pick up Winnie the Pooh, and I don't pick up Dr. Seuss, the cat in the hat, you know.

Simply because that's not really written at the level that I like to read. At the same time, a lot of stuff I'd like to read, not only would my children not appreciate it because it'd be too sophisticated, some of you wouldn't appreciate it. I like things that go into technical detail, you might have guessed that.

But not everyone likes the same kind of stuff. Different people of different ages appreciate different kinds of literature. People of different educational levels appreciate different kinds of literature.

For some reason, there's people out there who like all these romance novels. I mean, to each his own, I guess. I can't understand why anyone would want to spend time doing that.

That's my taste. I have different tastes. I'd rather read something worthwhile if I'm going to take the time.

I don't have time to read novels. But there are people who would not like the kind of stuff I call worthwhile, but they love the novels. In other words, there's a wide variety of tastes, and then if you go to another country, another culture, they're going to be totally into something different, you know, if they read it all.

But what's interesting is that when the Bible has been translated into other languages of other cultures, and it has more than any other book, it's been translated into several thousand languages now. That's no hyperbole. There are several thousand more languages that have not yet been broken and had the Bible in it.

But there are several thousand languages now that the Bible has been translated into. By the way, there's no other book that's been translated into so many. They say you can call a book a classic if it's been translated into three or four languages, because so few books are.

But the Bible has been translated into probably three or four thousand languages. But what's interesting is once the Bible has been translated into the language of a people group, it doesn't matter if they're what we call primitive tribal people, or whether they're sophisticated Europeans or whatever. Once they read it, they find in it the same life, they find the same benefit, they find the same addiction to its contents if they are people who have a heart after God and after the truth.

And that's an amazing thing, that one book could have appeal to so many different kinds of people when you consider a variety of tastes in literature generally among people. You know, there's a story that was told by a man who was writing a book about the Bible, about how great the Bible is. He told a true story.

He was, I think, a university professor, and he was visiting a friend of his, I think in New England, who was a university professor also. And he was visiting for a few days, and one day he was looking for his friend through the house, and he wasn't quite sure where to find him. And he opened the door to see if his friend was in there, and it turned out he looked into the nursery where the man's four-year-old son was, and the nanny was reading to him from the Bible.

He was reading the story of how Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, and the child was enthralled with the story as the nanny read to him. So this man quietly dismissed himself and kept looking, found his friend up in his attic studying. His friend was a professor, held several degrees.

Turned out his friend was reading the same story in Genesis when he found him, with the same fascination. And it just struck him. You know, I mean, that's quite a coincidence maybe, but it just struck him at that moment.

Here's this very same story, in the very same words. We're not even talking about children's version over here, dressed up with, you know, talking vegetables or whatever, but we're talking about, we're talking here about the same actual words on the page. And a four-year-old child who can't read for himself at all, and a university professor who's probably read zillions of books, they both find the same thrill in the material.

Now, that is definitely unusual, if not unique. I can't think of any other book of which such a thing could be said. By the way, I mentioned, you know, they will not necessarily have to read a children's version.

My own children, when they learn to read, and with each of them it's been either at age four or five, we have, as soon as they learn to read, we got them their own Bible. We never bought children's Bibles. Sometimes grandparents buy children's Bibles for them, but our children don't spend much time with them.

Our children want to read the same Bible we read. And we usually read the New King James, although I like the King James. I've been reading the New King James more recently.

So when we buy our children Bibles, we buy them the New King James. Well, my three older children have read most of the Bible without our encouraging them, in the New King James, and when they were six and seven years old. And it never occurred to them, you know, that this wasn't written at their level or something.

I mean, the words are all intelligible in the New King James. They're not written for intellectuals necessarily. And they read on their own.

We've never required our children to read the Bible. We haven't had to. They wanted to.

And they have found it fascinating. But it just so happens it's also the most fascinating thing that my wife and I like to read, that may have something to do with my children's initial interest in it. But I've observed this same phenomenon.

Now there's another way in which the Bible is indisputably unique, in a feature that no other book can make this claim. And that is that the Bible has had a beneficial impact on society, greater than that of any other book ever written. Now, one might say, well, that's just a Christian propaganda statement.

It is not a Christian propaganda statement. It's objectively true. Now, there are some other books that have had equal impact on their societies.

The Quran, for example, has tremendous impact on the Islamic world. But whether it's an improvement over what they had before us is open to question. I mean, most of you women, for example, if you went to live in an Islamic country, would probably not last very long.

For one thing, in many cases in the Muslim world, women are not even allowed to go out of the house. In Pakistan, there are women who are not even allowed to ever leave their house or be seen in public. In other Muslim countries, sometimes they can go out, but they have to have their whole face covered all the time, wear these long black, hot, in the heat of the desert, you know, clothing that covers everything up.

In many cases, women are not allowed to speak to men and so forth. And men are allowed to have several wives, but wives can't have several husbands. It's very clear that the Quran, which has definitely had a tremendous impact on the Muslim world, has not had an impact such as most of us would consider beneficial.

It's at least not in the societies that live by its rules are not societies that most free people would enjoy living in. It has not really promoted what we would call equality and general welfare of everybody who lives under its system. Now, the Quran is probably the only book besides the Bible that could be said to have had such an impact.

I suppose Karl Marx, Das Kapital, or whatever it was called. No, that was, is that what Marx wrote? Yeah, whatever. The Communist Manifesto is really what I'm thinking of.

You know, the writings of Karl Marx and these guys had a tremendous impact on the societies that they affected. But most of us would not, again, as free-thinking people, would not like that kind of impact. We would not call it beneficial.

To have a society where people cannot disagree with the official policy without being tortured and thrown in prison and maybe killed is not really what we call a benefit to society to have that. There are books, in other words, besides the Bible that have had comparable influence in the lands where they have been embraced. But there can never be said to have been a book that has had comparable beneficial influence, comparable to what the Bible has.

In most of history, you will find very little of what we call basic decency and compassion and so forth that we take for granted here in the Western world. The Bible early on came to Europe and, you know, North and South America and Australia were countries that were colonized by Europeans and therefore this part of the world, the Western world, has been forever, as long as, most of us, well, for hundreds of years under the influence of the Bible. And because of it, slavery no longer exists in the Western world.

It still exists, by the way, throughout the Muslim world. Slaves and people that make, you know, African village to be raided, all the children be taken off and sold as slaves, the girl slaves can be used as sex slaves and so forth. Islam allowed this.

Or at least it's practiced widespread. Islam, though it has had a tremendous influence in North Africa and the Middle East, has not abolished slavery. Christianity has.

And interestingly enough, it has done so without actually saying, thou shalt not have slaves. Actually, the New Testament doesn't actually outright condemn slavery, but the New Testament teaches, love your neighbor as you love yourself. And people, as they work through that, eventually say, hey, I feel kind of bad about treating the slaves.

I would like to be treated that way. Eventually, the conscience of the Western society simply wouldn't tolerate slavery anymore. So it's not here anymore.

Women have risen to tremendous heights of privilege in the Western world, such as are unknown throughout most of the rest of the world. And this can be directly attributed to the Bible. Many people wrongly think that because Paul wouldn't let women be elders or because he said men are the heads of the homes and said things like that, that therefore the Bible suppresses women.

The opposite is true. It is true that these restrictions are placed upon women in the scripture, but it is not true that they suppress women. In the lands that have embraced the Bible, women have fared better than anywhere else in the whole world in terms of equality and treated with respect.

I mean, in almost every other land, if a woman is divorced by her husband, he has all the rights. He has all the privileges. She's left out.

She might as well sell her body for a living because she can't really do much else in many cases. But in Christian lands, if a woman is divorced, she has about as many rights as her husband, sometimes more. Sometimes the courts give her more rights to the children than they give the husband.

Now, not all of this is directly taught in scripture, of course, and some of it even goes contrary to scripture. But the fact of the matter is there is a conscience, a social conscience, that has been inspired by acquaintance with the Bible in societies that have known the Bible for a long time that has led to what we would in most cases call improvements in areas of compassion and human rights and things like that, and equality. No other book has had any impact like that.

Do you know that there were not really orphanages in Europe or anywhere until Christians, influenced by Christian compassion, decided that someone should do something for these orphans? Franke in Germany and George Muller in England were some of the early pioneers in the area of orphanages. They were Christians. Hospitals, for the most part, were an innovation of Christian lands.

Now, it's true you can go to non-Christian, even communist, atheistic lands now and find orphanages, and you can find hospitals there. But they borrowed the ideas from Christians, and basically you'd have to, I mean, if you looked at history, you'd have to say that it is the Bible, more than any other influence, that has inspired a concern for the disenfranchised, for the hurting, for the poor, for the sick. I have a friend who was in India a few years back, and there was a train wreck there.

And the train was derailed. Passengers were injured, and some were killed, and there were, you know, bodies laying around, some of them still alive, some not. But the uninjured passengers quickly got far away from the train and simply stood and watched as the others suffered.

And he began to speak among them, and so they said, when the missionaries get here, they'll take care of them. Because they knew that the missionaries would, Christian missionaries, that is. Well, these Hindus, why didn't they help them? So there's a very good reason for that.

Hinduism does not encourage compassion. I'm not saying that you'll never find a Hindu that is compassionate, but I'm saying there's nothing in the philosophy of Hinduism that encourages acts of compassion. Because Hinduism, which is the other alternative to the Judeo-Christian worldview, Hinduism teaches a concept called karma and reincarnation.

And karma means sort of like credit, moral credit. You either have good karma or bad karma, depending on whether you do a lot of good things or bad things. If you have bad karma, you've done a lot of bad things, you have bad karma, you got bad credit.

You've got to pay it back somewhere. If you do a lot of good things, you have good karma, and you've got to pay that, and you get to be rewarded for that somewhere. Now, because they believe in reincarnation, they believe that a person can do many good things and yet die miserably.

But if he does, he has a lot of good karma accrued that he has to get paid back in a good way. So he's reincarnated, comes back in a better situation. Karma pays him back for all the good deeds he did in a previous life by making him have a better life.

But contrary-wise, if a person does a lot of bad things, and he dies with a lot of unpaid-off bad karma, in the next incarnation, he comes back in a more miserable state to pay off his bad karma from a previous life. That's what Hinduism teaches. That's what New Age teaches.

You want to live in a New Age society? The people who preach New Age over here would like to see us become a New Age society, which it's becoming. They ought to go to Calcutta and see the fruit of New Age philosophy, of Hindu philosophy. Before Mother Teresa came to Calcutta, there were lepers and miserably sick people laying around in the streets.

No one cared. Why? Because in the Hindu philosophy, you see a person suffering, you say, well that person is suffering because he's paying off bad karma from a previous lifetime. Now, if you intervene to make him more comfortable, you're interfering with the karmic cycle.

You're just going to make it so he has to come back and go through it again because he won't pay off his bad karma if he doesn't suffer now. He has to pay this karmic debt off so that next time he's incarnate, he won't have to suffer. And you're doing him a disservice if you help him today because you're just prolonging his suffering into another lifetime.

Let him suffer. Let him go through it. And that way, maybe next time around, he won't have so much bad karma.

He might be a happier man in the next life. That's Hinduism. That's consistent Hinduism.

You can see why that would not encourage things like institutions of mercy and compassion and hospitals and welfare systems and things like that. Mother Teresa comes in there. She's got a Christian worldview.

She was a Roman Catholic, but Catholics have a worldview based on the Bible. And she comes in there and she starts cleaning things up, cleaning up the lepers, cleaning up the wounded. And of course, what she has done has inspired many others to do so.

I'm not going to try to tell you that Hindus don't have hospitals. They do. But it's not consistent with their philosophy.

It's the biblical teaching about love of neighbor and so forth, even love of enemy, that is the basis for all institutions of compassion. Although some nations and societies that have now long abandoned any belief in the Bible or never had it, have nonetheless more than they know borrowed their ethics from the influence of the Bible. Tremendous way the Bible has influenced culture.

I have a lengthy quote here from a man named John Blanchard in a book he wrote called How to Enjoy Your Bible from page 7 of your notes. I'd like to read it in its entirety. It's a very good illustration of what I've been saying.

John Blanchard writes, some years ago, Reader's Digest carried an amazing story called Shimabuku, the village that lives by the Bible. When American troops liberated Okinawa toward the end of World War II, they found it in an appalling social and moral condition. Then they reached the village of Shimabuku, where they were greeted by two old men, one of them carrying a Bible.

Suspicious of a trap, they entered the village very cautiously, only to find it spotlessly clean, its fields tilled and fertile, and everything a model of neatness and cleanliness in stark contrast to all the other villages around about. The reason? Thirty years earlier, an American missionary on his way to Japan had called at Shimabuku. He only stayed long enough to make two converts, happened to be those two old men, to teach them some hymns, leave them a Japanese translation of the Bible, and urge them to live by it.

With no other Christian contact, and guided only by the Bible, those two old men had transformed their community. There was no jail, because there was no crime. There was no brothel, because that's the house of prostitution, no prostitution.

No drunkenness, no divorce. Instead, the people lived healthy, happy, fulfilled lives. An oasis of love and purity in a desert of degradation all around them.

Clarence Hall, the war correspondent who wrote the story, summed up his feelings in the words of his dumbfounded driver, who said, maybe we're using the wrong kind of weapons to change the world. The evidence of history is that wherever the straightforward teaching of the Bible has been rightly applied and obeyed, society has undergone a moral and spiritual revolution. Another writer, Thomas Kiplati, in his book, The Influence of the Bible, said, no other book has so completely changed the course of human destiny.

In light and power, the Bible stands by itself. It borrows from none and gives to all. Where it shines, life and beauty spring to birth.

It is the supreme book of power. Well, there have been many writers who have made quotes and observations like that. Some of them are very famous people.

People like Charles Dickens and Benjamin Franklin and other famous names whose names are household words today. There are quotes that can be collected. I think Haley's Bible Handbook has some quotes like this.

I haven't observed them all. But there have been many people who have observed this very fact, that the Bible has had an impact for good on society as no other book has ever done. And our entire culture is shot through with biblical ideas.

Many times unbelievers even quote scripture without knowing that they're quoting scripture. And that's because the Bible has permeated our culture thoroughly. Now, our culture is, of course, drifting into some tremendous injustices and abuses, but it corresponds with our culture drifting away from the contents of the Bible.

And so this does not disprove my point. As a culture embraces the Bible, it becomes a place worth living, a place where people are treated with equality and respect. Old people and children are revered instead of exploited.

Women are given a high degree of equality, as opposed to places where the Bible is not influential. This is simply a fact of history. It's not propaganda.

It's not putting a Christian slant on things. It's simply observable, objective fact. Only the Bible can this be said about.

There's one other aspect of the uniqueness of scripture I wanted to carry through in the rest of this lecture. It occupies the rest of the notes in this handout. And that has to do with the way the Bible has survived through the ages.

There is certainly, and this can be said without any fear of contradiction, there is certainly no other ancient book that has survived like the Bible has survived through time and through persecution. Now, it would be wrong to say that there are no books as old as the Bible that have survived. Certainly we have books as old and maybe even some older.

We certainly have some that are older than the New Testament that have survived. We have Greek historians, we have Greek philosophers' works, we have Greek mythology and Roman writings and so forth from a period earlier than the time of the New Testament. In other words, there are other books besides the Bible that are comparably old and that have survived, but they haven't survived the same way or through the same kind of opposition that the Bible has.

The Bible stands in a class by itself certainly in this respect. Now, you need to understand a few things before we actually read the quotes and the information in your notes. Let me give you a quick course in textual study.

There is a fact to reckon with when you study the Bible that we do not possess the original, what they call the autographs, the writings of the New Testament written in the actual hand of the writer. The actual letter of Paul to the Romans in his writing doesn't exist anymore. Actually, it never was in his writing.

A man named Tertius wrote it, but in Tertius' writing we don't have it. We don't have any of the writings of the Bible in the original autograph. The autograph is a reference to the document written by the man himself, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Moses, Paul, Peter.

We don't have anything in their handwriting and probably never will. There's reasons for this. They wrote on parchment, in many cases, which was goat skin, and they wrote on papyrus, which is sort of a primitive form of paper.

Now, these things simply don't usually last well through the centuries. In fact, you take a newspaper from the 1920s, if you can find one, and what's it going to be? That's much modern paper than papyrus, and yet it's so brittle and yellowed, you'd be surprised if you could turn the pages without tearing them. And when you take something that's much more primitive, much less technologically created and much older, and you're not going to expect to find much to survive, and very little does.

Paul wrote on parchment, he wrote in papyrus, and these things just don't typically last through the ages. Even the paper that we use right here, probably a hundred years from now, if people found these notes that I have in my hands, they'd be terribly yellowed and very brittle, and they might fall apart if they're not treated gently. Now, that may not be true.

You can find old books that are a hundred years old that aren't falling apart, but their paper is definitely much more brittle than it was before. So, we need to take this into consideration. The original documents in the handwriting of the original writers don't exist, probably.

If they do, they have not been found, and they probably won't be. But that is to say only the same thing that we say about all ancient documents. We don't have any original autographs from any writings more than a couple hundred years old.

Shakespeare's writings are only 400 years old. No one has the originals of Shakespeare's writing. They don't exist.

They probably couldn't. Now, they could if they were preserved nicely, but that's not what we have. When it comes to books that were written hundreds of years ago, we don't expect to have the original autographs.

Scholars have contended themselves that what we have are copies that were made from earlier copies, that were made from earlier copies, that were made from earlier copies of copies of copies of copies, going back eventually to the original. In other words, when the original was getting old and dilapidated, someone who wanted to preserve it copied it out on a new piece of parchment or a new piece of paper. And then when that one got old, someone copied that out.

So you've got generation after generation of copies. Now, this is a known fact with all ancient writings, including the Bible. Now, there is a phenomenon with ancient texts that are copied in this way that the copying from generation to generation is called, there's a word for it, called the transmission of the text.

You transmit the text to a new generation and a new paper, then you transmit it again. The whole process of carrying down an ancient work to modern times through copying, copying, copying, copying is called the process of transmission of the text. Okay.

There's another phenomenon that scholars know about, and that's called corruption of the text. And that is really, refers to the phenomenon that as it gets copied over the centuries, sometimes it changes. Usually by accident, a copyist, a person copying it may accidentally misspell a word.

The original had the word spelled right, but he's got it wrong. He might even leave out a word or a whole line by accident because he's sleepy. Or if there's a whole room full of copyists, one man had to pull him right and everyone at the table was making their copy, someone in the back row might not have heard correctly, might have written down the wrong number.

He might've said 50 and he wrote down 15. Things like that happen. It's the element of human error that exists in the transmission of documents.

It's an amazing thing, even with our ultra modern publishing methods. I have been amazed because just last year I published a book and I, you know, I have a computer with a spell checker and I ran spell checking on it. I read the manuscript through three times before I sent it to the publisher for errors.

And I'm a good speller and I'm good at grammar. I'm pretty good at this. I read a lot and I did well in English and I was able to catch things.

Each time I proofread it, I found some more things that were wrong. I thought, how did I get past that last time? And then I sent it to the publisher and they had editors who proofread it and they found some more things in it. And then they sent their version back to me for me to reread again before I went to print.

And I found more things to change. And some of them were errors, you know, punctuation errors or something. And I was thinking, this is an amazing thing.

This has been proofread four or five times and there's still errors that someone missed, didn't see. And then it goes to press and you know what? I found a few typos in it even now in its printed form. And I find that often in books, which must have gone through the same editorial process before they were printed.

Modern books that are proofread and proofread and proofread. Now we have computers to run grammar checks and spell checks to help us up. And still, when it gets published, it's got a typo in it.

Or three or four or ten typos. I've been amazed sometimes the books that get published with, I find typos every few pages sometimes. And that just shows how profound the element of human error is in the transmission of material.

Now, if that's true with our ultra careful publishing industry now, how much more so back when one guy stood at a podium in a monastery and he read the text of scripture in 20 months and then we're writing down what he said. And they didn't have time to go and proofread every one of those all the time. You've got to know that there were some mistakes made.

I mean, not on purpose. It's just humans make mistakes. Sometimes it's illustrated this way.

If you, sometimes I think there's a party game that they play where they put maybe, you know, a line of people, maybe 10, 20, 15 people in a row sitting on chairs next to each other. And somebody has a written out statement, a sentence. And he whispers it in the ear of the person at the one end.

And that person whispers it to the next person, whispers it to the next person. It gets whispered, so no one hears anyone else whispering. But each person gets it just from the previous person.

And the person at the far end of the line repeats the message as it came down to him compared to the written message that was given at first. And usually there's been tremendous corruption of the message in the sense that it has been changed. Now, this is not necessarily on purpose.

It's done because somebody hears it wrong and repeats it wrong. And then another error comes down later on. Eventually there's so many changes that at times the final result is not recognizably related to the original.

Now, this phenomenon of the corruption of the message, the corruption of the text is something that scholars are well aware of. In fact, it's this very thing that has led many people to try to feel like they can neglect the Bible. There are people that you'll talk to who will say, well, even if the Bible was inspired originally, it has been passed down through so many hands and so many copies that it must necessarily have been changed a great deal.

And we can't have any confidence that the Bible as we read it today and in the manuscripts that we use to translate it, we can't be sure that they really reflect what the original said at all because of this phenomenon of corruption of the text. Well, okay, we don't want to react in blind loyalty to the Bible and say, no, that's not true. There hasn't been any corruption of the text.

As a we also don't want to overrate this phenomenon. There is corruption that takes place in the text of any ancient document that is passed down from generation to generation. It's just it's observable.

You can see an early document and look at a later document of the same piece of writing and it's different in some respects. There's been some corruption. There's been some accidental errors made by a copyist somewhere.

And you see the problem is if the copyist makes a mistake, the next generation is using his as an original. And they don't know there's a mistake in it. So they reproduce that mistake and probably make a few new mistakes of their own.

And then, you know, it's incremental. It increases. So you get a lot of changes.

And that is true, not just to the biblical writings, but of all ancient writings. Now, there's a whole class, there's a whole field of scholarship called textual criticism. This may bore you terribly to hear, but it's very important to know if you're going to have any confidence that the Bible has come down to it substantially as it was written.

Although it may sound boring to you, it's comforting to know that there's some people who don't find this boring. There's some people who spend their whole lives studying manuscripts. It sounds terribly boring to me, believe it or not, but I'm glad someone thinks this is interesting and does it, makes a life study of it.

We're talking about people who get their PhDs in textual criticism. And what they do is they look at ancient manuscripts and they compare the various available manuscripts of the same work and from different periods of time, and they see how it has changed. They try to determine what the original said.

You know, here's a manuscript that reads this way, this one reads a little different, this one reads a little different. And they compare from as many manuscripts as are available to see what, you know, which is the oldest, which is the most frequently, you know, repeated reading. And they try to figure out from this what the original said, or get as close as they can to it.

That's the field of textual criticism. Well, when this is done, the Bible shines more than any other ancient document. And when I say more than, I don't mean a little bit more than.

I mean, it's in a class by itself. You see, an ancient work that has come down to us can be described as having strong manuscript evidence or weak manuscript evidence. If it has strong manuscript evidence, we have more confidence that we can pretty much determine what the original said.

If it has weak manuscript evidence, we can't really be sure. There are two factors in particular we need to know about that determine whether the manuscript evidence is strong or weak. One of them is what has been the time interval from the original writing to the time of the earliest surviving manuscript.

Now, what I mean is if a work was written in 30 AD, but we don't have any manuscripts that are any earlier than 500 AD, let's say, we have maybe some after, but the earliest manuscript probably we have that survived is 500 AD. That means that between the time it was written in 30 AD and the time this particular manuscript came into existence, that 500 years had transpired of copying, which means there might have been a lot of changes made between the original and this earliest manuscript, and we can't be sure of anything that was before that, and how much change may have happened. If you've got a short gap, that's good.

You know, if there hasn't been much time between the time of the earliest manuscript that you have available and the original writing, then there hasn't been much time for change to occur. There haven't been many generations of copies made. So, it would be considered strong.

A work would have stronger manuscript evidence if the gap is shorter between the time of original writing and the time of the earliest extent manuscript. Another feature that makes manuscript evidence either strong or weak is a consideration of how many copies have survived. If you have two copies or three only of a work, it's harder to know what the original said than if you have, say, a hundred copies or two hundred copies of the same work, simply because the more copies you have, the more you can see trends.

You put them in their chronological order and say, oh, I see a change moving in this direction, and many times the larger number of copies that agree with each other reflect the original, and if a few copies disagree with it, then they're probably the exceptions that were flawed. Anyway, none of you probably will ever be textual critics, and probably never want to be, and so I won't bore you any further with the science of textual criticism, but these things are important to know in evaluating the Bible. Because, as I said, the Bible is not the only book that has come down to us from antiquity, but it has come down to us as no other book has.

When we talk about the strength of the manuscript evidence for the Bible, it is second to none in the world of ancient literature. Let's talk about the Old Testament first. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was in 1947, the Old Testament was known to us by no manuscripts of earlier vintage than 1008 AD.

Now think about it. The Old Testament was written B.C. It was written, even the most recent Old Testament book was written 400 years before Christ. But until 1948, and there was a lot of Bible translating going on before 1948, before that year, there was no surviving manuscript of the Old Testament that we had available to us, except one that was 500 or 400 years, 1400 years, excuse me, 1400 years later than the actual writing.

In other words, from the time the Old Testament was written to the time that the earliest manuscript we had came into existence was a period of 1500 years. Well, that's not very encouraging, because 1500 years, a lot of changes can come in. But we didn't have anything better to go on.

We had what was called the Masoretic Text, or the standard text of the Old Testament. The Masoretic Text was so called because it was created by a group of Jewish priests called Masoretes, and it was their whole task to transmit the manuscript faithfully. And so they copied and copied and copied, and this text that was produced by the Masoretes was called the Masoretic Text.

It dated from about 1008 AD, and it was the oldest manuscript available to us of the Old Testament. Well, that's, you know, you've just got to live with it. That's not really very good, but you've got to live with it.

Well, in 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, written about the time of Christ. Now, the Dead Sea Scrolls were a remarkable discovery because it is very rare for any actual papyrus or parchment documents to survive for 2,000 years and still be legible today, for reasons I mentioned earlier. They corrode, they corrupt, they rot.

The reason the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to have survived is because they were stored in airtight pots in a region of the world that is the driest area on the planet Earth, the Dead Sea region. A group of Jewish, what shall we call them, hermits largely, I mean, the scene community, had preserved their sacred writing, including the Old Testament and some other writings. They had the Old Testament writings and they also had other writings.

And when the Romans were coming to destroy the whole region, they hid these writings in sealed clay pots in a cave in this, the driest spot on the planet Earth. Well, dryness helps to preserve things from rotting. And in 1947, a young goat herder was out in that region watching his goats and just to entertain himself, he was throwing stones at places and he saw a cave up on a ridge and he threw a stone to see if he could get it into the cave.

And it got into the cave and heard a clunk, like something broke. And he climbed up there and he found out there was a whole bunch of jars there. One of them was broken by his rock.

And he went and told some authorities and they came and discovered and they found here the cache of writings that these scenes, almost 2,000 years had hidden and they were preserved. Now, not preserved excellently. They were so brittle that for the most part, they couldn't just open them up and read them.

They had to treat them with lubricants and things like that. I think they had to oil them and things like that. And it was a very slow process getting these things open.

But once they got them open, they were able to read them. Now, what's interesting here is that the Dead Sea Scrolls date from the time of Christ. The Masoretic Text itself only dated from the year 1008 AD.

But here we found a group of manuscripts of the Old Testament written by the Essenes and preserved by them that was a thousand years older than the Masoretic Text. Now, you can understand the impact that would have on biblical scholarship. You've been translating the Bible for hundreds of years from a manuscript that's 1,500 years later than the time of writing.

Now you find manuscripts of the same works that are 1,000 years older, 1,000 years closer to the time of writing. So it changes the gap from about 1,400 to 1,500 years down to about 400 or 500 years gap from the time of original writing to the time of the earliest manuscript. That shortened the gap by two-thirds.

What's more, this allowed scholars a chance to see exactly how much corruption would happen in a thousand years of copying because the Essenes version of the Dead Sea Scrolls represented the Old Testament as they had it in the year 77 AD or 73 AD. But the Masoretic Text reflected the way the Old Testament existed a thousand years later. So they could see how much change had happened between then and now or in that thousand year gap.

Well, the answer is now known because scholars have compared word for word the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Masoretic Text. And what did they find? This quote comes from Gleason Archer, an Old Testament scholar, in his book, Survey of the Old Testament. He said, The Dead Sea Scrolls proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible, meaning the Masoretic Text, in more than 95% of the text.

The 5% of variation consisted chiefly in obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling. In other words, some corruption had occurred in a thousand years, about 5%. But even that 5% was not very consequential.

It was such corruption as you'd find as a word misspelled or maybe word order changed or someone made an obvious, you know, copied a letter wrong, obviously, but didn't, you know, you can still make out what the original would have said. It's just a misspelled word. In other words, so little change occurred in a thousand years to the Old Testament scriptures that one could have grounds to believe maybe there hasn't been much change overall.

And what little change there has been is not of a very consequential nature. It's, you know, things like words misspelled and stuff, no big deal. Certainly, we do not have to wonder whether the Old Testament stories are essentially the same stories and the details of the stories are essentially the same details as were originally written.

There's good reason to trust the Old Testament text, in other words, and the Dead Sea Scrolls went a long way towards showing us that. Now, the New Testament, as I said, is considerably more important to the Christians. And here we have somewhat different kinds of evidence have survived.

We have a lot of ancient document, pagan as well as Christian, from the general period that the New Testament was written that have come down to us. But there's a vast difference in the manuscript strength, the strength of manuscript evidence of the New Testament and these other works. To illustrate this, F. F. Bruce, in his book, The New Testament Document is Reliable, he compares the manuscript evidence for several other works of maybe the same general period.

For instance, Caesar's Gaelic Wars, written between 58 and 50 BC, so generally within a century at the time of the New Testament being written. That work today exists in only nine or ten good manuscripts. The oldest dates from 900 years later than Caesar's day.

So we've got a gap from the time of writing to the oldest surviving manuscript, about 900 years, and only nine or ten copies even then have survived. Of the 142 books of Livy's Roman history written between 59 BC and 17 AD, only 35 survived, known from no more than 20 manuscripts of any consequence. Only one of which dates as early as 400 years after the date of the original.

So there's still a fairly substantial gap there, and only 20 manuscripts of the material. Of the 14 books of the histories of Tacitus, written about 100 AD, four and a half survive, and of his 16 books of Annals, ten survive in full and two in part. Both of these great historic works survive in only two manuscript copies, the earliest being 700 years later than the original.

The histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, both written 400 BC, are known from only a handful of useful manuscripts, the earliest dating from 900 AD. So you've got a gap of about 1,300 years there for these works. FF Bruce says, yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt, because the earliest manuscripts of their works, which are of any use to us, are over 1,300 years later than the original.

Now what he's saying is, he wants you to be able to put in perspective what you're about to learn about the New Testament manuscript evidence. These are works that scholars take for granted that they've got the authentic text. I mean, they know there's been some textual corruption, because there always is, but they don't consider there's been much.

If you study the Greek or Latin classics in university, which many of you probably wouldn't do to save your life, but if you were one of those people who studied the Latin classics or the Greek classics, you would study these works. You'd study Livy, you'd study Homer, you'd study Cicero, you'd study whatever, Plato. You'd study these guys or people like them.

But your professor would never suggest to you that the text of that work that you're reading is very substantially different than it was originally written. They just assume it's come down reasonably faithfully. Even though you've got very few manuscripts, and most of the manuscripts are not very close in times of writing to the original, which means that we have what we'd have to call weak manuscript evidence.

It means that there's very great possibilities that those works have changed considerably without anyone knowing it today, and that they don't resemble at all what the original said. Now compare that or contrast it with the New Testament. The New Testament today exists in full or in part in over 13,000 manuscript copies.

Not 9 or 10, not 20, not a handful, not two. 13,000 manuscript copies exist of the New Testament. By manuscript copies we mean ancient handwritten copies of the work.

5,000 of these are in Greek, which of course is the original language of the New Testament, and 8,000 of them are early Latin versions. Now they're helpful too, because when you translate something from Greek into Latin, you still retain the same thought. You don't have the same words now, you're in another language, but you have the same ideas.

And if you look at an early Latin translation, it means that you're looking at hopefully a faithful translation from an early Greek version. And you can see if it's still the same ideas there, if there's been some change. So you've got thousands of manuscripts, and the earliest of these dates from 127 AD.

Now that earliest is a little portion of the Gospel of John. It was found actually in a mummy in Egypt, but another very dry place where papyrus or parchment can survive a long time. And they found a manuscript of a portion of John, of John's Gospel, dated from 127.

John's Gospel might have been written as late as 100 AD, or close to it, some people think. If that is so, then this manuscript only has a gap of less than 30 years, it may be, from the time of the original to the time of this earliest manuscript. Not much change would happen in 30 years.

Now of course there's not many of the manuscripts go back that far. More of them are several hundred years after the original. But the interesting thing is that what we do find is very agreeable with the original, or with what we have now, and comparing it with what we think the original was.

Sir Frederick Kenyon, who was one time director of the British Museum, wrote a book called Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts. And he said, quote, scholars are satisfied that they possess substantially the true text of the principal Greek and Roman writers whose works have come down to us, of Sophocles, of Thucydides, of Cicero, of Virgil, yet our knowledge of their writings depends on a mere handful of manuscripts, whereas the manuscripts of the New Testament are counted by thousands. Another scholar, John Warwick Montgomery, in his book History and Christianity, wrote, to be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.

In other words, nothing has as strong manuscript evidence as the New Testament does. F. F. Bruce, in his book New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable?, said, the evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.

Now, the reason he makes that statement is, he's suggesting that those who doubt or want to doubt that the New Testament writings have come down to us faithfully as they were written, their objection is religiously based. It's not based on scholarship, it's based on their religious preferences. If the New Testament was secular, if it was not religious, if it had nothing objectionable to their religious sensitivities, they would consider its authenticity as beyond doubt.

It is, in fact, their religious prejudices that cause them to question it. I was, I picked up a hitchhiker in Santa Cruz once, a long time ago, a hippie guy and girl, who, I picked him up in my VW van, put him in the back and drove him across town as they requested, during which time I struck up a conversation with him about the things of God. And shortly after I got into it, the guy said, well, you know, I used to be interested in Christianity.

I once was going to read the Bible. He says, no, I did some research, did some study, and I found out that the biblical manuscripts have changed over the years so dramatically that it's hardly worth reading because we can't know for sure what it said originally. I said, wow, that's interesting.

You've hit on one of the few subjects I know a little something about. I said, I've studied that very subject for about ten years at the time I said, and I've reached exactly opposite conclusions. I'd be curious to know, which textual scholars did you consult? He didn't even know what a textual scholar was.

And when I began to say, well, what did you read? What were the authorities that you say you did research on? And he couldn't name one. He said, well, actually, I just had conversations with friends and stuff. And he picked it up somewhere through the grapevine or something.

And that's usually the way it is. Most people who have objections to the Bible on these lines, they can say it because it's easy to say, but they can't confirm it because there's not one scholar who would agree with them. If any scholar would say the Bible had been corrupted through time and has lost its integrity through copying, they would have to say the same thing about every ancient document, only more so.

And they're not willing to do that. And they shouldn't because it has been, most of these had been preserved rather well. Certainly the New Testament has it.

The text of the New Testament is found by comparison of all the manuscripts to be 98.33% pure. Remember I said that in the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls were 95% equivalent to the Masoretic Text word for word. Well, in terms of the New Testament documents, when you compare them, they're 98.3% pure.

That is, they agree with each other that much, which is pretty high percentage. No doctrine of the New Testament rests upon the testimony of a disputed reading. So even if the disputed readings, we couldn't figure out what they originally said, it wouldn't hurt anything because the real doctrines of the New Testament are dependent upon readings that are not in dispute, where all the manuscripts agree.

Contrast this with Shakespeare's 37 plays. They're only about 400 years old, yet each play contains in surviving manuscripts at least a hundred disputed readings. These are passages that are not identical in the various manuscript copies, some of which materially affect the meaning of the passage in which they occur.

Here's a work 400 years old. Every one of his 37 plays have a hundred or more disputed readings. You can't determine from manuscripts what the original said.

That's much different than the New Testament, and yet it's a much newer work. Sir Frederick Kenyon said in the Bible in archaeology, quote, the interval then between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extent evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to as substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.

Now, I'm really fighting against the clock right now. I think the only way I can even hope to get through this material before we run out of time is simply to read the notes without comment, and they'll be good enough. I want to talk here quickly about the fact that the Bible has not only survived through time, but it's survived through hard times.

Bernard Ram in his book Protestant Christian Evidence has said, not only has the Bible had to run the gamut of centuries of transmission, but it has been from time to time and place to place vigorously persecuted. It has been banned, burned, and outlawed from the days of the Roman emperors to the present day communist dominated country. No other book has been so persecuted.

No other book has been so victorious over its persecution. The emperor Diocletian in 303 AD issued an edict to destroy Christians in their sacred book. The historic irony of the above edict is to destroy the Bible is that Constantine, the emperor following Diocletian, 25 years later commissioned Eusebius to prepare 50 copies of scripture by hand at expense of the government.

Same government that banned the Bible is now publishing it at their expense 25 years later. There's also been scholarly attack against the Bible. Bernard Ram says from the days of Asterix, a scholar who lived in 1753, till today has been one series of attacks on the Bible that for vigor, intensity, and attention to detail has been unparalleled in the known history of literature.

The attacks have been made by men of great learning and exceptional mental vigor. The attacks have been publicized abroad in a never-ending stream of periodicals, journals, pamphlets, monographs, books, and encyclopedias. The larger universities of the world and hundreds of theological seminaries have taken up the cause of radical criticism.

A thousand times over the death knell of the Bible has been sounded. The funeral procession has been formed. The inscription has been cut in the tombstone and the committal has been read.

But somehow the corpse never stays put. No other book has been so chopped, knifed, sifted, scrutinized, vilified. What book of classical or modern times has been subject to such a mass attack as the Bible? With such venom and skepticism, with such thoroughness and erudition, upon every chapter, line, and tenet, considering the thorough learning of the critics and the ferocity and precision of the attacks, we would expect the Bible to have been permanently entombed.

But such is hardly the case. For example, Voltaire, a critic of the Bible who died in 1778, said that within a hundred years of his time, Christianity would be swept from existence and passed into history. Voltaire, however, has passed into history.

But fifty years after his death, the Geneva Bible Society bought his house and used it to print Bibles. 1 Corinthians 1.20 says, Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? H. L. Hastings said, Infidels, that means unbelievers, for eighteen hundred years have been refuting and overthrowing this book, and yet it stands today as solid as a rock. Its circulation increases, and it is more loved and cherished and read today than ever before.

Infidels, with all their assaults, make about as much impression on this book as a man with a tack hammer would on the pyramids of Egypt. When the French monarch proposed the persecution of Christians in his dominion, an old statesman and warrior said to him, Sire, the church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers. If this book had not been the book of God, men would have destroyed it long ago.

Emperors and popes, kings and priests, princes and rulers have all tried their hand at it. They die, and the book still lives. I'm not going to read the rest of the quotes.

You can read them on their own. We're out of time. Let me just say that these are various ways in which the Bible is unique.

It is unique in ways that we would expect a divine book to be unique, stand out in the world literature. This doesn't prove that it's divine, but along with the other evidences, it certainly points in the same direction. We'll have more to say about this in the following lectures.

We'll be talking about the alleged contradictions in the Bible, which is another criticism people sometimes make, but when you look at it, actually the Bible shines through again against its critics. But we'll take a break here and take that next time.