 Okay, according to his own welcome everyone to the second lecture on Christian apologetics. We've been talking about the accuracy and the authenticity of the Bible scriptures. And then we've been just looking at two important criteria. When it comes to any kind of ancient scripture, how to say that, you know, how we determine the reliability, the accuracy and the authenticity of any ancient scripture, which is the number of manuscripts and the time gap. And so we were just talking about the oldest and scriptures, and we were looking at how amazing the oldest scriptures are when it comes to this whole aspect of time gap and the accuracy with which they were hand copied. So what we said was, and I'm just quickly reviewing what we said in the previous class, was up until 1947, the oldest copies of the Old Testament scriptures was from 980. That was when, that was the time we had the oldest copies. Of course, it was done by certain Jewish scriptures. So we had those. And then in 1947, something very interesting happened, which was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So basically, these were scrolls that were found alongside the Dead Sea in the Cundran caves. So what they found was, they found all of the Old Testament scriptures in the Dead Sea Scrolls, except for the Bacchus of Esther. And these writings or these copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls was from 100 or 200 BC, before the destruction of Jerusalem. It was from that time period. So we go from 900 AD to let's say 100 or 200 BC, almost 1000 years. And what we find is, there's hardly any change in the text of the scriptures, which is so amazing. It is telling us how accurately these Jewish scribes copied the text. That means it was very meticulous. And that's why we have so much confidence that now we have copies from 200 BC, which is very close to 400 BC, the time when the Old Testament was finalized. That was the last prophet. So we're very close to the original compilation. And we also have evidence of meticulous copying by these scribes. So it really encourages our confidence in the accuracy of the text, the Old Testament text. Any questions on that? Everybody's clear. You're following me so far. Any questions? Any doubts? Okay. Let's move forward. We'll share the notes. Okay. So we come at this, right? So if we compare other ancient writings, I mean ancient, you know, from BC or the AD, when you compare it, the Bible also has more manuscript. More manuscript evidence. We will show that. Supporting the reliability and the accuracy of the writings. And we also look at the New Testament banisters. It's also very close. So what do we know about Old Testament? So let's just look at the Old Testament. So we know that the Dead Sea Scrolls was from 100 to 100 BC. The oldest Greek version was from 250 BC. So almost overlap here. You've got the Greek version, you've got the Hebrew, and then you've got manuscripts from that time. So you could compare. And the complete copies of the Old Testament in Greek, which is to be talking about the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, we have complete copies. And they are, you know, we have different compilations all from, you know, 325 AD around this time period. And they're kept in different places. These were from different, you could say, you know, like what I explained earlier, you could call them libraries. You had copies of all of these from various libraries all around this time period of the Greek version of the Old Testament. And they've been preserved in various places. The New Testament, we have 5,500. Of course, the New Testament also took in Greek. So we have 5,500 Greek manuscripts. We have 10,000 Latin manuscripts. So they were first translated from Greek to Latin. And nearly 9,300 early versions in other languages were also translated. So if you put all of these together, of course, you have a huge number, 25,000 manuscripts of the New Testament totally from the early period. Now, of course, what is interesting is that the earliest known manuscripts is from 120 AD. And they were all written, like we said earlier, between 45 AD or 45 AD to about 90 AD around that period. So we're talking about 1995 AD. So we're talking about a very small time gap about, you know, 25 years or less and some 200 years. So between this timeframe, the earliest manuscripts from the time of the original writing, what do we have? The time gap is basically like 25 to 200 years, very short time gap. And we also have versions of the Bible, like we said, it was translated into Latin from 400 AD. So again, you can compare that, you know, okay, so these people translated that, let's compare. Now, what was the text from there? So we go from Greek, Hebrew, Hebrew to Greek, then from Greek to Latin. We have all of these translations. Again, it's useful for us to compare and make sure that everything is consistent. So if you put them all in a small table like this, in general, I'm not saying for every manuscript, but in general, what we are saying is for the Old Testament, we have more than 10,000 manuscripts with a time gap of about 150 years. In the New Testament, we have over 24,000 manuscripts with the closest, I've given the nearest time gap, the nearest time gap is about 50 years. Now, if we pause and think about this, compared to, you know, the earlier table we showed about Plato and Aristotle and some other historians, what did we see? We saw a time gap of about 1,200, 1,400 years. And we saw copies, very few copies, like 250 copies, in some cases, eight copies of manuscripts, compared that to 10,000 or 24,000. Time gap, 1,200 years, 1,400 years, compared that to 150 years or 50 years. So what are we saying? We are saying that the Old Testament, just based on all of these manuscripts, if you look at all these data, the Old Testament, the New Testament, we have so many manuscripts that we can compare, we can cross reference, verify that the text is right. And we are also very close, as close as possible to the original text. So if there was any Old Testament, I mean, any ancient manuscript, any ancient text that was reliable, the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament is way on top. Most number of manuscripts, shortest time gap. So here are ancient works that are, you know, we could call it, you could say, it's unquestionably authentic. You can't find anything more than this. So there may be, you know, insignificant variations of grammar or spelling, and not more than 1,000 part of the New Testament is affected by differences. So this is an eminent Greek scholar says, yeah, there may be some variations, grammar or spelling, but other than that, there's hardly any difference. So you compare the Bible. Again, we're not doing this to be, you know, condescending or looking down to saying, you know, you compare the Bible with other scriptures. The Quran, which was written around 600 AD by Prophet Muhammad and what he was, he claimed to have taught. Compare the Vedas, which were, you could say, writings and some of the mythological writings from the early civilizations in and around our subcontinent. So you compare, you know, the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas. In terms of the text and what is written, the content, we will see the Bible is standing out. Not only in terms of the manuscript, but also in terms of the historical content compared to, again, I don't want to speak ill of any of these texts. But if we can compare and look at this, we see that the Bible is standing out in so many ways. It's set apart in a very special way. I want to just share a little bit now on what Jesus have said and then we will kind of come to the canonization. We will talk about the inedency of the Bible and then come into the canonization of Scripture. So the other important thing for us to keep in mind is what Jesus himself said about the Old Testament. And that is very important because for us, this is God who became man, Jesus Christ, he became man. And when Jesus himself turns around and speaks about the Old Testament with such, how would you say the word, respect? He himself is affirming the Old Testament. So we know, for example, in 94, when Jesus was being tempted by the devil, Jesus is saying, each time it is written, he is quoting Old Testament Scripture in his conflict with the devil, in his teaching. We know when Jesus was teaching the people, he looked into the Old Testament and he pointed from the Old Testament to himself. They said, search the Scriptures, they are there which speak of me. So what Scriptures was he talking about? The Old Testament Scriptures, the Jewish Scriptures, he said, they are speaking of me, heaven and earth will pass away. But God's word will not pass away. So in so many ways, in so many ways, Jesus was affirming the Old Testament Scriptures. And we know this that after his resurrection, when he was with his disciples, he took them through a whole journey of the Old Testament. Showing them from the Old Testament, right from Moses, all the way through the Psalms and the prophets. How does Old Testament Scripture was speaking of him? And so this is amazing because Jesus himself affirmed the truthfulness and the accuracy of the Old Testament. As he was not questioning, he didn't treat it lightly that this is the word of God, thy word is truth. So if Jesus himself affirmed the authenticity of the Old Testament, the authority of the Old Testament, we can be that much more confident. This is true. Now generally speaking, there are people who will want to point out problems in the Bible. It may look like to point out maybe sometimes historical letters, sometimes they say, hey, this is, you know, these things are wrong. So how do we respond to that? I want to just mention two things here. That first of all, if we look at the Scriptures carefully, there is what is what we refer to as law of non-conradiction in logical thinking. So when we look at some records in the Old Testament or even in the Gospels, it may seem like the two Gospel writers are not telling the same story properly. They're not saying that there's some, you know, some mismatch. But then actually it is not a mismatch. What is described may be different, but they are not contradictory. So how can I explain? Suppose, you know, I met, I'm just giving an example. Suppose at nine o'clock, I met with John. And so suppose John and Jim, they met me at nine o'clock in the morning and they met me in the office. And then later in the day, I'm meeting somebody and I tell them, I met John at nine. Then later in the day, I meet somebody else and I tell them, I met Jim at nine or I met John and Jim at nine. Now, these statements are different. To somebody, I said, I met John at nine. To somebody else, I said, I met Jim at nine. To somebody else, I said, I met John and Jim at nine. So all three statements are different. But they're all right because indeed I met John and Jim at nine. Just that my emphasis was different each time. Once I emphasized that I met John, to another person emphasized I met Jim. To another person emphasized I met John and Jim. All three are correct. They're true statements. They're not contradictory. They are different. But they're all true. So this is the law of non-contradiction. So in the Bible, for example, let's just give you an example. Matthew might say when Jesus came to Gadarra, there were two demon possessmen. Mark might say, I'm not sure it's Matthew or Mark, but Mark might say there was one demon possessman who was very vicious. Now, both are narrating the same incident. Jesus is coming to Gadarra. One is saying they were true. They're focusing on both the people. But one was focusing on one of them. The one who was more violent, more aggressive. So Jesus, he met this demon possessman. Are they different? Are they different? Are they contradictory? They're not contradictory because they could have been two. One is focusing on two, mentioning both of them. One is focusing on the person who was more aggressive, more of whom Jesus dealt first. So they're not contradictory. They are different, but they're not contradictory. So we will find in the Bibles, you have some narratives, historical narratives or statements like this, which are... They're talking the same thing. They look different, but they're not contradictory. They're not opposite to each other. So we can... If you study them carefully and you can say, look, we can explain it like this. It's not a contradiction. Yes, it's different. But then that happens all the time in how we report situations. We write about situations. The emphasis could be on different things. And so we might emphasize different things in different situations. Of, let's say, a little bit. Second useful thing to do is that if we do sufficient background information research, we can clear up difficult passages. So it is true that in the Bible, there will be certain passages that are not easy to understand. Or there might be situations where we like to say, why did he say this? Why did he do this? Right? It's not easy to understand. But then to us, it may seem inappropriate. It may seem wrong. But then we go into the context, the background. It will help us understand. So example, if somebody reads how Jesus dealt with the... I'm just giving one example. If somebody reads how Jesus dealt with this sort of woman from Canaan, that's like he's so rude. How can he say, I can't take the children's bread and give it to the dogs? Right? So when we read it in English, the English translation, we say like, no, this is not right. And we can make up a lot of things based on just that reading, that sentence. But then what do you do? Understand the background. Understand what was happening. What do we know? Well, we know that in his earthly ministry, Jesus was focusing on the house of Israel. He was focusing on the Jewish people. So that is why he said, I cannot take the children's bread and give it out. Now secondly, when he used the word, I can't give it to the dogs. He was not referring to... He was not saying the Gentiles are unworthy of soul. No, he's using a language of their day and time, referring to how the Gentiles would be addressed. The Gentiles, the non-Jewish people. Now when we translate today, it looks very harsh in the English language. But the context is, when Jesus was ministering in the earthly ministry, he was focusing on the Jews, the house of Israel. He said, I cannot minister now out of that. And secondly, it was a language of their day to refer to the Gentiles. It was not an insult. It was not a demeaning thing. So we interpret it from that perspective. So I'm just giving one example. So like this, you could think, when there is something seemingly difficult, then understand the culture, understand the history, do some background check, then things become clearer and it's not as difficult as we initially thought. So in the scriptures, this is something we need to do. When people say, hey, there are contradictions in the Bible. These things are like this. Okay, let's take some time to study it. Then we can explain the right thing. Okay, let me pause here to see any questions before I change the topic. Everybody's okay with me so far? Okay, any questions? Okay, no questions. Fine. All right, all of it. Okay, let's go forward. All right, thank you for your comments on the chat. So I can understand all of you. All right, let me, sorry. Let me go and share the notes again. All right, so now we're changing a little bit. Okay, now we mentioned earlier about the 66 books of the Bible. We used the word canon. Canon. So literally canon means, you know, a standard or a straight line or something that's used to measure, keep things in line. So when we say canon, it means that these books have met a certain standard and they're measured, they're measured up to a straight line, a criteria for their selection. So we refer to that as the canon of scripture. So the question many people ask is how did it happen and why only the 66 books are in the Bible? Why not others? Right, so the answer is pretty simple. There was a standard or there was a canon or a standard or a criteria by which these 66 books were selected. And of course, man selected it, but God was behind it. Okay, so what was the criteria? It is the book had to be inspired by God, right? Sorry, that means for any book to fit into the Bible, the 66 books, it had to be clearly inspired by God. So any book that had any literary work that was purely a work of literature and that was not inspired by God was not allowed to be part of these 66 books. So the 39 books of the Old Testament, the Jews, meaning the Jewish elders, leaders, recognized these 39 books which we refer to as the Old Testament as truly inspired by God. They were spoken and written based on the words of prophets or actual inspiration. So that is how the 39 books were selected by the Jewish elders. So remember this was done by 400 BC. So the Jewish elders, their criteria was it had to be spoken by a prophet or it had to be given by inspiration. It had to be known that this was given by inspiration. So like we said, there were a lot of other books and other things that were written but they were not included because of this criteria. The books had to be inspired. Did a prophet speak it? Were the words of a prophet recorded by somebody? So were they actually inspired? If it was, then it will fit into the 66. It will be part of the 39 books, part of the old, their Jewish scriptures. So that was a criteria by which these 39 books were selected and it was done by the Jewish elders, religious leaders themselves by 400 BC. Now we know that the Christian faith came out of today's. So what do we mean by that? Jesus was born as a jury. He validated the 39 books of the Old Testament. He quoted from it. Like we said earlier, he quoted from it. He affirmed it. And then he taught from it to his disciples. He taught from that. So Jesus is coming to introduce the kingdom of God but he's teaching from these 39 books to the early disciples. So the early disciples recognized the 39 books. Jesus was teaching them from it. Then when, so Jesus' death, burial, resurrection, ascension, the church was bought the atmantic cost. Remember, all of them were Jews at that time and they were preaching from these 39 books. The very first sermon, Peter stood up and said, you know, this is what Joel prophesied. So they are preaching and teaching from these Old Testament scriptures. Jesus had affirmed it to them. Jesus had taught it to them from the Old Testament scriptures. Now they are preaching. So the early church, they preached and taught from the Old Testament scriptures. So the Old Testament scriptures now became part of the church, the New Testament church. And then after about 20, 25 years, yeah, I would say from 1830 to about 1845, 15 years, we had the apostles start writing. So of course, we know most of them are written by the apostle Paul and the other apostles wrote. They recorded for us. So we had the 27 books. And the criteria for these 27 books was similar. It had to be inspired by God, but it had to be written by those who are recognized as apostles and enemies by the early church. So there were other writings during this time. So we said the early church continued with the 39 books. It was part of their teaching and preaching. But then the apostles, the early apostles, between 1845 to 1890, that period of time were writing scriptures as writing books as inspired by the Holy Spirit. But what was the criteria? Same thing. It had to be inspired by God and it had to be written by those who are recognized as apostles or those who are recognized as leaders by the early church. So that constituted the 27 books. And of course, man was involved in this whole process. Yes, man was involved. The Jewish elders were involved. The early church elders were involved. They recognized. So man was involved. Yes, man is the one who made this selection, but they had a criteria. They had a canon. They had a standard by which they made this selection. Mainly it had to be inspired by God. Old Testament had to be given by the prophets. The New Testament was inspired by God. It had to be given by the apostles or those recognized by the apostles. And so based on that, these documents, these written texts were put together and other things were rejected. No, no, this is not valid. This cannot be. They are not being included. They are so on. Now, what has happened is that the book of Apocrypha, which we don't have in our Protestant Bible, but in the Catholic Bible, the Apocrypha, those works were not recognized as inspired by the Jewish elders and leaders. They were not recognized as inspired. They didn't consider as inspired. But the Catholic Bible includes it as part of their literature. It's part of what, okay, this was the literature written during those 400 years. We said Malachi, but there was 400 years or so before Christ came. This was what was written. They included there. Now, it was not recognized either by Jesus or by the Jewish elders or by the early apostles. It's not recognized by any of them, but the Catholic Bible includes it as literature work, as part of their Bible. So we don't consider it as part of scripture. We don't consider it as inspired. And so we don't even feel that we don't teach from it because neither Jesus nor the early apostles taught from that. They didn't. It was left out. Okay. So somebody asks us, you know, why the 66 books? How are the 66 books selected? Well, when we say canon, it means a certain standard. What was the main standard? It had to be inspired by God. It had to be spoken by the prophets. The Old Testament was already recognized by the Jewish elders. Jesus affirmed it. He used it in his teaching. It was passed on to the early church. They used it in their teaching. So we know that 39 books of the Old Testament, they were valid. Then how did these 27 books come in? Well, these were again the same. It had to be inspired by God. It had to be written by the apostles or those who were recognized by the apostles. And that was recognized by the early church. And so those 27 books became part of the New Testament. So then the Old Testament and New Testament were put together. It became the canon of scripture. Or the 66 books meet the certain standard. They make up the Bible. Okay. Any questions on that so far? Everybody's with me. I know a lot of information from different sides. But shall that be so far? Okay. Any questions? All right. We'll just take a little bit more time and before we pause today. All right. Let's go forward. All right. Okay. So the Hebrew scriptures. Now, this is just a little bit of overview. Okay. The Old Testament. Now, you would have studied this in your Old Testament survey. So I'm just kind of reviewing this a little bit. So the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, the Hebrew Bible was essentially divided as the law of Moses. So the first five books are the prophets and the sacred writings, also known as Haggim Rafa. So the prophets really considered of the books of Joshua, churches, first and second, Samuel, first and second kings, which we call as first kings. And then all the major prophets. And then the 12 minor prophets. Then the sacred writings consist of all the other books, many Psalms and Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, these are the books that were written during this time. So these were the books that were selected by, like we said, the Jewish elders over time, based on them being inspired, and they were part of the Hebrew Bible, which then was passed on to us. So the end of the Old Testament basically comes when the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, were prophesying. And after that, there is no more Hebrew or Old Testament or Vida photos, the Old Testament scriptures. So Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, for the last of the prophets, and then there was a spirit of silence for 400 years. The last books of history, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and then the Old Testament canon was completed. So basically, Ezra was in Jerusalem when he compiled all of these things. So Ezra the scribe was very instrumental in preserving the Old Testament scriptures for us, keeping that for us. So he's a very important person from that perspective in maintaining the Old Testament scriptures for us. So this is just some general information. So overall, like we had mentioned earlier, everything was completed. The Old Testament was completed around 400 BC, and then that was it. Nothing was added after that. They were called the sacred writings by that time. And so Ezra the priest, like we mentioned, he was very instrumental in preserving the collection of the Old Testament canon after they came back from the 70 years of captivity. They came back and he was very instrumental in preserving the sacred writings. So he's highly, what to say, honored, respected among the Jewish Ezra the priest. And this was the criteria that was used on the Old Testament books, which I had summarized earlier. And was it given by inspiration? Was it a prophet of God speaking? Did it maintain doctrine throughout? And then, of course, the writings survived over time. And Malakar was the last recognized prophet within the end of the 39 books were brought to Congress. So this is just general information. You can take some time, a little time to read it. And I've kind of summarized all this for you. But apocrypha and then the New Testament. Again, same things, same criteria was used and Old Testament Jesus, Jesus affirmation of the Old Testament, then the Apostles work. So, okay, so let's pause here. I will pick up from here. I talked a little bit about the early church and how they meant about that. This was in 8360. And how they canonize or they came to accept, you know, the canon of scripture. So I will pick up from here next time. Till this, I've kind of summarized things for you. You can read the text, read the lecture notes, but we will pick up from here next week and we will finish this whole section about the Bible and how it came to us. Okay. All right, let's see. All right, let's see. Okay. Thank you, Collins, and thank you for your feedback. Appreciate it. All right, so, you know, whenever I just make a few comments, whenever I think about the Bible, think about how amazing, you know, God brought it about. You know, we take it for granted, you know, when we open up our Bible and we read it, we take it for granted. Yeah, okay, I'm reading my Bible. But if you think about how starting from Moses, how the Old Testament came to us, how the New Testament came to us, and today we are so blessed. We have many versions of the Bible. We will talk about it next week. So many versions of the Bible. We can read it in different versions. We can read it on a computer. We can read it on our phone. I tell you, we are so blessed. We are so blessed that God would do this for us and he would give us something very simple, the scriptures. He would say, this is my word for you. It's so amazing. And so I want to encourage us to have full confidence in the word of God, in the written scriptures and, of course, to base our life in ministry on the written scriptures, okay? We'll pick this up next week. We'll go forward in this next week. May I request somebody please to close the class in prayer and leave a listness after that. Go ahead, Tiffina. J, Heavenly Father, we come to you under the name of Jesus. We thank you for the beautiful J and for the beautiful class we have. God, we thank you for this precious word that is in our hands. When we look back and we think how it is formed, how it got collected, what an amazing thing that we are right now here with the Bibles in our hands and we can read it every day and we can get deeper and deeper with you each and every J. God. We are so thankful for giving us this word, God. As we are learning, be with this and guide us and help me and all my classmates and all the pastors to get deeper and deeper into it while we read it fill us with the revelations that the Holy Spirit guide us. We are so thankful right now, Jesus. Our heart is filled with thankfulness for giving us this amazing words and instructions so that we can live a beautiful life with you. What an amazing little of you from Jesus name. Amen. Thank you everyone. Please have your break and we'll get ready for our next class. I'll see you again next week. We'll continue this. God bless. Bye now. Thank you everyone. God bless.