 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 99, debunking Greek New Testament manuscript conspiracies with Rick Brennan. I'm the layman, Tray Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how are you doing this week? Very good. Very good. I think listeners will be interested in this episode. I hope they're interested in all the episodes. We've been getting good listenership and traffic, but this one's actually a response to listener requests that I've gotten by email. So I think this will be something that not only answers those questions or those requests, but just as of general interest to lots of people. Anything doing with conspiracies I love, so please, let's get into it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I asked my colleague and friend Rick Brennan, who works at Logos Bible Software, now called Faithlife Corp., to sort of be the the fount of information for this episode. Rick is the guy inside the building, the main guy inside the building, not the only guy, but certainly the main one, who handles Greek databases and Greek products for Logos Bible Software. Rick, why don't we start just by letting you do a little bit more of a self-introduction than that? Just give people a general idea of what you do inside the company. Well, hey, thanks for having me, Mike. I appreciate it. What I do at Logos is, I mean, we could probably do a whole show on that because I've done so many things here over the years. But what I do, my team, the team that I work on, my team is called Core Texts. And what we really do is we develop and maintain all of the ancient language data. So I'm not involved in just Greek, but also Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and other languages. So data about the Bible and about those Bible versions. So we do the versions, but we also do all sorts of layers of annotation on those texts. So we would put a layer of data on the words like morphology. So whether it's a verb, or a noun, or an adjective in the original language. And then other information at the syntax layer. So where the clause breaks are, and where the clause parts are, where the subjects and the verbs and the objects are inside of the clause, all these layers of data we maintain. And then from there we go up into more discourse analysis type stuff. So that's looking at really how the text is structured and coheres at the paragraph and sentence at even higher level. And then through that, we also do linkage with other material. So we've got interlinear versions where we gloss the words. So for a Greek word or a Hebrew word, we would have the English translation under it. But we also do these things called reverse interlinears, where we take a modern language version like the ESV or the NIV, and we align it at a word to word match with the underlying Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek text. So you could say, hey, I want to find all the Greek words and Hebrew words that are translated love or whatever. We marshal all of that data. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I'll just let me just interject here. When I started 11 years ago, it's kind of amazing the stuff you guys have to think about. Versification, hey, when was it divided into verses and why are different manuscripts not doing the same thing? When it comes to something as simple as versification and chapter divisions. Rick is a guy who mucks around in ancient texts and actually has to produce something useful in the software world from that data. Yeah, I actually found an actual title that I could use. It's Data Wrangler. That's actually something that people call themselves nowadays. I finally found the right term for what I do. It was like an epiphany. Yep, I wrangled data. It's like herding cats that are like ones and zeros or something. Pretty much. Yeah. Well, I thought Rick would be the perfect person for this. I mean, there are lots of people who myself included that could sort of talk about, well, here's the history of the Greek New Testament and all that sort of stuff. But I wanted somebody who really, again, just on a day-to-day basis has to look at manuscript material. Rick, I'd like you to say something about some of the scholars and the agencies like the German Bible Society as an example that you work with to produce what you do. Can you just basically describe maybe some of those projects as they relate to the Greek New Testament and maybe something like with Michael Holmes to produce the SBLGNT, something like that? Because I want people to know that this fellow, Rick Brandon, has more than a casual interest in this and also knows lots of important people in the field of textual criticism. The guys who actually do the work, Rick has to do something with the data they produce, again, to make something useful for pastors and other customers. So go ahead. Yeah. Well, the thing you find out about a lot of these people when you work with them is that these are just normal people. They just have got really specialized interests and they're really, really smart and adept at what they do. So yeah, I've worked with people from the German Bible Society, Mike Holmes for the SBLGNT. That was a really neat project where essentially we needed a new version of the Greek New Testament for all sorts of reasons. So what we did was we talked to Mike and we said, Mike, here's what we can do and we did it. So what we did was we did a comparison of a bunch of existing Greek editions of the New Testament and we found all the places where the editions varied. So when I use a term like edition, I mean like the printed edition of the Greek New Testament that we have today. So that would not be a manuscript like from history, from some historical period. But in addition to the Greek New Testament, like the Nestle, Allen, Greek New Testament or the Westcott Hort, Greek New Testament. So we did a comparison of a bunch of editions to basically see where the text agreed and where these editions disagreed, because that's an interesting thing to know where people who have already combed over the text spent their life doing it, disagree on something. So we found a bunch of spots where editions of the New Testament disagree, which is a fine thing. That's not a challenging thing at all. I mean different people look at evidence and come up with different ways to represent it. And then what we did was we presented all of that information to Mike Holmes, Michael Holmes, and he went through the whole Greek New Testament while he was on sabbatical, really in the space of less than a year. The man was a machine. I cannot say enough about the quality and volume of his work. And he basically found the reading that he preferred based on his principles. He would be a reasoned eclectic is the text critical school they would use to describe Mike Holmes. And we ended up with an edition of the Greek New Testament that's actually pretty solid and pretty well received among the guild. Yeah. And Mike Holmes is a professor of New Testament, obviously Greek. And he's still at Bethel, isn't he? He's still at Bethel, and he's actually also involved with the Bible Museum. So, man, I forget the name of the family, but you know, the hobby lobby guys, right? He's one of the directors of some of the manuscript stuff that they're up to as well. So he's highly involved and highly placed in a lot of areas like that. Yeah. And Mike is an evangelical, and he's well recognized in the field of textual criticism, maybe less known than Dan Wallace is, but he's right up there. Well, the thing about Mike Holmes that's really impressive is that a lot of these manuscript guys and text critic guys are mostly and almost completely into the New Testament, right? Their names are only associated with New Testament stuff. But Mike Holmes has edited a critical edition of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers and a translation that's popularly available. And he's also edited an edition of the Greek New Testament. And I don't know if anybody else in that guild today who could say that they've done those two things. Yeah. The other thing about Mike Holmes is he got his doctorate at Princeton and Bruce Metzger was the guy who supervised him. So when you're talking about top-notch people, the same guy over Bart Ehrman. That's correct. And Mike and Bart are great friends. I mean, they get along well together. They disagree quite a bit on how they approach things or at least maybe some of their presuppositions. Yeah. But that's important to note. I'm glad you brought that up because Ehrman is a name that comes up in this a lot. But what we're going to talk about today really isn't Bart Ehrman stuff. The questions that have come to me are things like, hey, what about these Westcott Hort guys? Were they like Satanists or something? Did Satan employ them to produce a corrupt, awful version of the Greek New Testament that denies the deity of Christ and other things like this? And you'll see a lot of this stuff, of course, on the internet, the wild world of the internet. But it's been around a lot longer than that. A lot of people who are into that will be what are called King James-only advocates because the King James version was based on a different manuscript family. And we're going to talk about manuscript families here in a moment. But it's based on a different Greek New Testament. Let's just put it that way. Then a lot of your modern English translations, like NIV, ESV, things like that, the King James had a different textual base. And so people who want to throw rocks at the more modern translations of the New Testament will attack the texts that they used. And that goes back to these two guys, Westcott and Hort. So I get questions like this a lot. Should I be a King James-only person? Can I trust my NIV New Testament because it's not the King James and it's not made from the same source? Because it's different or it's missing verses or stuff like that. Yeah. So let's just jump into this. If you can kind of sketch for us, I guess in broad strokes, how we got the Greek New Testament that we used today, let's just start there. And I'd kind of like to give us an overview, but ultimately we're going to focus on things like Westcott, Hort, and manuscript discoveries in the 19th, 20th centuries. So go ahead. Right. So in my head, I've kind of got it broken down into about eight different parts of development. You can interrupt me anytime here, because I could go on forever, Mike. I'm sure you know that. That's why I asked you. When we're talking about manuscripts, you have to go all the way back to the beginning. Where did they come from? Right? Somebody had to write them. There had to be a setting in which they were written, and a person who wrote them in an audience to whom they were written. So that's the autograph. And that's kind of where you have to start. And that's, at least for the New Testament, we're talking like what, 40, 50, 60, 70 AD, depending on how you date things probably in that timeframe up in the first century basically. After that, you start to, it has to be transmitted in order for it to perpetuate, right? So for some reason, somebody wrote a letter and other people found it helpful. So they wrote copies of the letter or somebody wanted to tell the story of Jesus. So we have these stories sort of combined into a gospel, and then other gospels kind of come around. If there's this period, we don't know a whole lot about directly, because our manuscript evidence only goes back to about the second or third or fourth generation in there, right? We don't have the autograph. We have some early copies probably of autographs, right? It's some sort of transmission there. So these things were typically transmitted in collections. So probably the first things that were available were things like a Pauline letter collection. So some of the longer Paulines and then some of his more personal letters, and then they kind of get combined into really into a collection. And then the gospels also were collected and transmitted. One of the interesting things about gospels though is this guy called Tatian, right? Where he took the four gospels and he made this thing called the diatesserin, which is a Greek from a Greek word, which basically means through the four or by the four. And it was in a gospel harmony where he took and stitched all the four gospels, all the events of the four gospels into a coherent narrative, taken bits and pieces from all of them. And then that started to be transmitted too. So there was just this real hunger for this material. People would copy it and it would get transmitted and it would get copied and it would get transmitted. So one of the things about this guy named Tatian is he probably wrote in Syriac, not Greek. So even early on we've got people translating the Greek of the New Testament into languages like Latin and Syriac and another language called Coptic, which is essentially the last stage of hieroglyphics, but it used a Greek alphabet. All this kind of stuff, this milieu of this early, early period where all this stuff kind of happens. And then we kind of move into like a period in like the fourth through the eighth centuries where this is where we commonly think of our manuscripts today, at least the earliest ones outside of some really early papyri letters and codices and stuff, where we run into the, basically the stars of textual criticism, right? Where we have our Codex Sinaticus and our Codex Vaticanus and Codex Elegus Andrinus and this weird one called Beze and some others that kind of feel that void of major New Testament manuscripts from the early years. And then after that, that wonderful period from which we have a lot of evidence, we have even more evidence that these are different manuscripts that are called miniscuels that use a kind of a cursive handwriting. And if you've learned Greek at all and you can read a Greek New Testament in print, you know, one form of Greek, but the miniscuels you look at them and you're like, what are those things even saying? Their letters are all ligature together and they're, they just take a lot of expertise to read. And then like after that, we kind of come into a time of early printed edition. So I'm talking about like the 15th century, 16th century now, where we get Erasmus, who published his first Greek New Testament, which would be the first one available in print in like 1520, I think, somewhere in there. I don't know if that's the exact date. I think his, I think his first edition was 1518. Yeah, it's in the teens 20. Yeah, somewhere in there 16, 17, 18, something like that. Yeah. And then the, the funny thing is, I mean, even back then people were racing to publish stuff because there's this other thing called the Komplitensian polyglot, which if you've ever seen a page of it is this, this magisterial wonderful thing where in the Old Testament and the New Testament, it's actually whole Bible. This was published in the 1500s and the New Testament portion actually has got Greek, it's got Latin and interlinear. It has got Latin, the system that aligns the Greek with the Latin, right? So you're reading along in the Greek and it's got like a little number over it. And then you look over in the Latin for the, for the same number and it's like this weird interlinear thing. So they're even making these tools back then just to help people read the text. And well, you probably know Latin, but you might not know Greek. So here's how I can help you read the Greek a little bit better. So anyway, that was published and it was actually published before Erasmus' version, but because they were waiting to finish the Old Testament before they released the whole thing, Erasmus technically beat him the market. Crazy story. It kind of gives you a little insight to Erasmus and just the kind of guy he was. After that, we turn into, well, what we're going to be talking about for a lot of this time, I'm guessing, the Texas Receptus. So we've got this French printer whose name I can never remember exactly what it is because he's called so many different things, right? Is it Robert Stephanus? Is it Henri Estan? Or whatever you say in French, right? Is it, what is this guy's name? I don't know. We call him Stephanus or Stevens or something like that, who was a publisher and he published a number of editions of the Greek New Testament. So that's where this Texas Receptus comes in. It was a preface to an edition he published, I think, in either 1620 or 1623 that used the term Texas Receptus, which is the Latin for received text to describe the text of the New Testament that he was publishing. After those early printed editions, which all kind of just recycled the same text that Stephanus had put out, which kind of recycled the text that Erasmus had put out, we move into the like the 18th and the 19th centuries where we have more manuscript discoveries. So we've got Bangal and Trigellus who, not a whole lot of manuscript discoveries, but Trigellus particularly, his Greek New Testament edition was unique because he and Bangal before him started to move away from this text of Stephanus or whatever the guy's name was. And he started to, this is where we started to see really where an apparatus would list where known manuscripts would differ with the reading of the Texas Receptus. So initially we would have the Texas Receptus on the page of the text and then like footnotes it would say, oh yes, but this manuscript has got this and that manuscript has got that. So they start to list variations that way. Yeah, so they're collecting their variances as opposed to producing their own edition. Right, but Trigellus actually started to produce his own edition. It's one of the points where the move away from this Texas Receptus started. After that we get into Titendorf, our friend, Constantine Titendorf, who was just amazingly productive. Indiana Jones. I think, yeah, I mean, yeah, he was just an incredible guy, the stuff that he found and the work that he produced. And he released like eight different major editions of the Greek New Testament and his eighth major edition, which is volumes in print, like two or three volumes in print. It has a text that's like, you know, two lines on the top of the page and then the apparatus for those two or three lines is the rest of the page of text. Okay, so he was classifying and listing like basically comprehensively everything he had found, everything he knew, and it's still used today. And one of the reasons it's still used today is because it's one of the more accurate printings and transcriptions in spite of all of this apparatus stuff going on, of the Greek New Testament and all the variations. So it's still a reliable place to go back. That's how good his work was. So we start to get into this area where after Tischendorf and moving into Westcott and Hort, where there's almost a textual revolution, because there's so much more manuscript evidence available that was completely unknown even a hundred or 200 years before. And Westcott and Hort particularly start to rely more on this manuscript evidence that they found recently, then just reproducing the existing texts and telling you where stuff they found differed. They started to change really that upper text or the main text. For those listeners are familiar with Deuteronomy 3289 and the ESV, which of course is Old Testament, but I'll often make the comment, hey, what makes the ESV different here is that it has incorporated the Dead Sea Scroll reading into the running text of its translation. So that's what you're describing. Westcott and Hort are not content, like you said, to reproduce the additions that had gone before and then adding lists of variants to the apparatus. So people would know, oh, we have more disagreements now than we did 50 years ago. They actually started to incorporate those differences into the text itself. Right. And as important as those Dead Sea Scrolls are for our understanding of the Hebrew Bible today, and I mean, you're the Hebrew Bible guy, Mike, so correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the readings of the Dead Sea Scrolls completely confirm the text of the Hebrew Bible that had been before, right? I mean, there's some stuff like the Deuteronomy 32 that you're talking about. It's a high percentage. It's a high percentage. So in that same way, especially Tischendorf's manuscript findings like Sinaticus, and then being able to get back to Vaticanus in some way because there were facsimiles of it coming available. That was like the Dead Sea Scrolls only in about 1860, 70, 80, 90. And it had as much impact on the New Testament as the Dead Sea Scrolls has on the Old Testament. And this is the thing that people don't really understand. It's not like they were two completely different things, right? So it's not like if I'm reading Codex Sinaticus, I think one thing. And if I'm reading the Texas and Receptus, I think another thing, those texts are largely similar. They are largely, largely similar. If you would actually describe their differences in percentages, they're highly similar. They're like 80, 90 percent the same, right? So it's the places where they're different. They're really helped to establish and understand what the options are there. So you can actually make an informed decision from a text critical perspective of what that reading might be in light of whatever manuscript evidence you've got. So just amazingly formative time in the New Testament and understanding the text of the New Testament, those centuries like the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries. Let's see, after that, we run into the 20th century, which is basically Nessel Allen's century, as far as text criticism is concerned. This guy whose last name is Nessel, Irwin Nessel, was it Irland or Everhard? Everhard. Everhard, yeah. Because his son was Irwin and he took it over later. 1898 was his first edition and it was essentially a comparison of three editions, the Westcott-Hort text and Tischendorf's text and another text by a guy named Weymouth. And he basically compared the three and where they agreed or where the majority agreed. He took that as a consensus reading and where they differed. He basically decided on his own or he took another version as a tiebreaker kind of thing. So he did a really rough and ready establishing of the text and then listed some apparatus material underneath it. And that was basically it for his first version. He kept on going back to it and revising it and going back to it and revising it until his 13th edition came around and it was a complete reworking of the apparatus and really one of the first apparatuses that listed a lot of common manuscript evidence. And then the 26th edition of Nessel Allen, which was in 1979, was just a complete reworking of the text and that one was like the gold standard. That's the one that all, pretty much all of our modern Bible translations are essentially based on in the New Testament. So yeah, that was just really like the high point of the century as far as textual criticism was concerned from the production of edition sort of stuff. So what you have, again, to summarize for listeners is I'm hoping you're paying attention to some of these dates here because up until the 20th century, I mean, again, basically the turn of the 19th, end of the 19th turn of the 20th century, if you were reading the Bible in English, you were reading the King James. That was all that there was. When you get into the 20th century, then you're going to have some new translations pop up. There's a couple, the American standard version right at the beginning of the 20th century, but you more or less have to wait until the 1950s to get the RSV. But these newer translations are now using a Greek New Testament text that is different than the one that the King James was based on. And again, not totally different, not even substantially different. It's different, you know what, 10% of the time, let's just use round numbers. Yeah, somewhere in there. It's not a big difference, but it is a difference. And these differences are based on new manuscript discoveries. And a lot of this material, this newer material that's being discovered was older, again, because we're going to talk about different types of manuscripts here when you're done with your survey. And I know you're almost done with it. We're almost there. These manuscripts were older. And so for that reason, and other reasons too, they came to the forefront when you had new publishers say, hey, we need a new English translation. So this material started to be red. And then when you hit past the midway point, past the 1950s, basically all of your English translations are going to be based on this newer manuscript material. Right. And another thing going on in the 20th century was this the stuff called that we know as the Dishna papyri founded in like 1952. And those are the papyri that basically got separated into like lots and sold off to guys like Martin Bodmer and Chester Beatty, who have basically these are hugely important new testament manuscripts that were found in a cache in 1952. And this is just new manuscript evidence that comes up. It's really important because these are really early texts, like p 46 is third century, which that's before synodicus third century is 200s, right. So these things go way back and p 46 is a Pauline letter collection. And strangely enough, you do a lot of comparisons between like a p 46 and coax Vaticanus. And those guys agree a whole lot to different texts to different areas. But they have a lot in common in areas that differ from other thing mother more, well, we haven't talked about it yet, but Byzantine sort of approaches, Texas receptice approaches. And this is where this new evidence starts to come out and people start to deal with it and work with it and understand it. And it just takes time because this is really hard stuff. But then they start to apply it to translation. So that's why I think like we're talking about the last half of the 20th century, where that change in how all this stuff affects Bible translation really started to happen. Well, let's do you want to add anything else to after the after the Chester BD and like the 20th century is where we are today. And the big thing in textual criticism now is imaging of manuscripts, right. So not only do these specialists have access to the manuscripts themselves so they can study them and look at them. There are high quality digital images of thousands of them that are available and aggregated and queryable, meaning you can search them, you can look at them, just about anybody on the internet, like anybody can go to codexsynaticus.com. Is that it? Or synaticus.com and see the entirety of codexsynaticus in high quality images with a transcription and even a translation you can find anywhere in the Bible and like look and see what synaticus says and what the correctors say and all that kind of stuff. So now there's this we've sifted through the information so much we've taken our pictures and now they're starting to make it more easily available to everybody and to specialists so that projects can continue and we can actually get an even better idea of the text of the Greek New Testament. Well, that's the big change. Yeah. Before we go back and talk about manuscripts and manuscript families, you know, that are what lurks beneath or behind this whole King James only debate kind of thing, TR only sort of thing. People might be wondering, well, good grief. I mean, what other projects could they possibly be working on? And I think it's worth commenting on that a little bit. For instance, I'm sure you follow the evangelical textual criticism blog. One example of a project or projects that still need to be done is it's an amazing amount of work to take a book of the New Testament and assemble in one place between two covers, okay? One volume, every variant reading of every manuscript there is for that book. I'm thinking here of Tommy Wasserman with the Jude volume here. Exactly. It's just this tiny biblical book, but it's a substantial volume. And so I mean, give us a picture for how many books of the New Testament has that actually been done for? Where everything, literally everything known to date has been collected and accounted for in a volume for specialists? Well, it hasn't been done enough. Well, that's really, there's this project that the German Bible Society has been putting on for years and continues to have an effort on called the Etto Critica Maior. So it's basically Latin for major critical edition, right? And their goal with that edition is basically to transcribe everything and make a new text. So what Tommy Wasserman, great guy, what Tommy did for Jude, which was basically, I'm going to go find all the manuscripts and if I can't find the manuscripts, I'm going to find pictures of them. If I can't find pictures, I'm going to find old microfilm of them and read them the best that I can. But I'm going to go kidnap a monk, you know, pretty much. I know you have this. And what Tommy did wasn't necessarily find all the variants. He transcribed all the sources. And then, thank you, 21st century, wonderful computers. We've got techniques to be able to compare all of them and find and list and present all of the different sorts of variations among the texts in ordered inconsistent ways. So what Tommy did there, there is a group that has existed since the 40s called the International Greek New Testament Project that now has sort of merged with the Etto Critica Maior project from the German Bible Society. And they are about essentially doing that work. There's a group at Birmingham, Birmingham, not Alabama, but Birmingham in the UK and London, or I should say in England, that is basically doing a lot of that work. They started with the Gospel of John and I think they're nearing the end, but they did it in phases. First thing they did was they transcribed all the papyri. So that's a technical class of manuscript. These are earlier things, these are fragments, and it talks about the material upon that they were writing on and the way it was transmitted. They translated, I should say, they transcribed all the papyri and then they did comparisons. They transcribed all of what are called the unseal or magiscule manuscripts. So those are the things like synaticus and all the other manuscript evidence that uses essentially capital letters to write things in a manuscript, essentially not technically completely, but that's good enough for our purposes. And there's like 300 or 400 of them, I guess, 300 total for the New Testament. For the Book of John, I don't know, probably 100 or so. So they transcribed and they didn't just like, you know, some dude on the weekends that, hey, I'm going to transcribe this thing of John and he just sat down and wrote it. These are high quality transcriptions of all the variations and not just the text, but the page on the manuscript they occur, the line breaks they occur on. Is there any sort of marking in the text like a nomina sacra? So instead of writing out pheos for God, they just wrote a theta and a sigma and put a line over it. Well, they take care of all that stuff. They transcribe everything you can consider about the manuscript for everything. And they finished with all of the magiscules. They published a volume. And now they're working on all sorts of other stuff, but that's really sort of the process it goes through when they're on John. And I think they're also doing a project on the Pauline letters. There's a project on acts going on as well associated with the German Bible Society. And revelation is another one that's going on that I know of. So I mean, they're starting on some big stuff. Revelation is just fraught with textual peril. So we don't need to talk about that. But there's just all sorts of stuff going on. I'll bet Tim LaHaye knows that. Oh, goodness. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah. Revelation is kind of notorious in this text critical world. But again, like you said, that's the subject for another episode. We can talk about that another time. Yeah. I mean, this isn't just, these aren't projects, individual books. You're talking about the Gospel of John, one of 27 books here. This isn't something that you can do in a few hundred hours. This is years of work just for one book to do the kind of thing that Rick has been describing. So and the John project was was crazy because they had to sort of reinvent all their technology along the way. I mean, that started in probably the 80s or early 90s. And where it made sense to transcribe it on a computer, but they invented their software along the way because these are highly critic highly specialized things. So not only are they transcribing text, they're developing the environment in which they transcribe texts, and they're developing the routines by which they compare texts to figure out where all the variations are and how you might it's just it's like saying, I don't have a great example, but I suppose it could be like, you know, I'm going to go I'm going to drive my car to Seattle because I'm in Bellingham, Seattle's 100 miles away. But I don't have a car. I don't know what wheels are. And I got to figure out how to make the engine work. Oh, and I don't know what an engine is anyway. Okay. That's basically what they're doing. And they made it so let's get started. Exactly. Yeah, it's it's amazing painstaking work that that these people in the field of textual criticism do. And we reap the benefit of it. And, you know, in but unfortunately, instead of being grateful that that there are people out there. And again, a lot of this began before West Cotton Horde. But West Cotton Horde are major figures in this because their own work at the time took a thing of what what was it 28 years? They spent 28 years producing what we now know as this West Cotton Horde edition of the Greek New Testament. Again, this wasn't something that, you know, hey, I don't have anything to do this summer. You know, let's get together and produce this thing. And we know we hate the King James and it's evil, and we're just going to destroy it. Yeah, that sounds like a great summer project. Now, this is 28 years of work, handwork to produce again, something that tried to account for the, you know, maybe not everything, but the mass of Greek New Testament manuscript material that was available, that was that was known to exist. Again, this was not a trivial task. So now you you just mentioned a little bit about manuscripts. So don't we don't need to track through all that again. But basically, manuscripts get named by virtue of what what the text is written on like papyri, well, that's that's written on papyrus. Okay. And that that those are older, generally, generally. Yeah. Then the next thing that sort of comes along the unseal, which is is named after the fact, the style, okay, unseal. This is capital letters. So Sinaiticus, if you saw a picture Sinaiticus, it's written all in Greek capital letters, and it has abbreviations and scribal, you know, this and that to it. But these are written typically on is vellum the sort of the majority medium animal skin. Generally, yeah, I mean, that was Sinaiticus, certainly. And a lot of the other major majestuels or unseals. Yeah. And then somebody has to make the decision, Hey, those, you know, let's not use those scroll things anymore. So we don't have to roll them up. Let's like, you know, level it off here and, you know, put some glue on this side and stitch it together. And we're going to we're going to call this thing a codex or a book, you know, somebody had to invent that. And they did. And often, you know, scholars know when this innovation, you know, these kinds of innovations happen. And so when a New Testament manuscript, you know, appears in one form or the other, it's, you know, it's not an absolutely certain chronological indicator, you got to have other other factors considered. Right. And most most stuff shows up on in the codex. There's very little I can think of offhand New Testament stuff that was a scroll. So it's actually, and Larry Hurtado is really great on this. It's actually pretty much a Christian innovation, as far as embracing it and using it. You can also find where they've recycled scrolls and written Christian documents on them. So there's a bunch of cool stuff like that, too. Yeah. And then miniscule is recursive, as Rick pointed out. Then there's something that Rick didn't mention yet, but we don't need to go down this rabbit trail, but electionaries. You can just tell people what electionary is real briefly. Right. Well, electionary is basically a church document. So it would have a section that has a scripture reading in it. And that's why it's valuable from a text critical perspective. But then after the scripture reading, a lot of times that might be in red to clue the reader in. So a reader was like an official office in the church. Right. So the reader guy would read the scripture, and then you would know what the sort of the lesson is after that, right, which they would then read. So there's a it's like this hybrid thing. And we even see electionaries today. Electionaries are highly in use in several traditions in Christendom. These are just the early, early forms of them where you've got a scripture and a reading. Yeah. You've got a church document that quotes some passage of scripture. And so if those are ancient and they're quoting scripture, well, that tells you what people were reading that that's a textual tradition for a New Testament verse or verses in that church document. So there's all sorts of things that get get useful. Let's talk about manuscript families, because this is sort of the heart of this debate. Again, I guess in simplest terms, I don't know how you want to characterize it, but I am want to try to really only talk about two manuscript families. There are more than two, but the two that that sort of are central to the debate to the debate are there's the Alexandrian family. You can talk about why it gets that name and so on and so forth. But those tend to be among the oldest witnesses to the Greek New Testament. And over against them, you have the what is now known to us as the Byzantine majority textual tradition. And most of the manuscript data is found in that tradition, but it tends to be later than the other one. So I guess with that little basic intro, go to town on this. Yeah, well, you're right. I mean, Alexandrian manuscripts would be stuff like the Vaticanus and Sinaticus, where those are sort of the exemplars of this Alexandrian thing. So it gets the name Alexandrian from the region in Egypt called Alexandria, which is where they think at least Sinaticus came from, right? So that's then used as sort of this shorthand to describe texts that are like Sinaticus, and they tend to be geographically sort of grouped, although they don't have to be. Another problem here is with a lot of these manuscripts, we simply don't know where they came from, right? I mean, we don't know where a lot of this stuff originated or where the scribe was, it actually wrote out the particular thing. Some we do, very few we do, we've got what would be called provenance. We know what the provenance of the manuscript is, but most of them we don't. So you got to kind of guess. And one way that people guess is to sort of group them in texts that handle passages similarly. So the Alexandrian texts would be one group, and then the Byzantine texts would be a different group. The Byzantine texts tend to be texts that are found throughout the Byzantine empire, the large core of that area. And they are the most numerically prevalent. So if you're just going to count manuscripts, you would have far more of the Byzantine category than you would of an Alexandrian category. Right. And ultimately the textus receptis tradition, the Greek texts that Erasmus created, and then you have, you know, Staphonus and the elves of her brothers, and ultimately this thing that became known as the textus receptis. Those additions are a product based on the Byzantine majority tradition. Whereas a lot of the material that was discovered later, 19th, 20th centuries, tend to fall into the Alexandrian tradition. And so when you have an English translation that's modern, that's going to be typically, it's going to reflect the work, translation work done using an Alexandrian text family, as opposed to the King James. And so that's why you get differences that, you know, can be kind of startling if you're not, if you're sort of not used to really looking at your Bible, you know, like, hey, what happened to this verse? Or why is this verse in brackets? You know, it's just that kind of thing. So how, you know, you can have some real significant differences. That's true. So how do we, you know, how does the argument go? Now, again, we've titled this episode, you know, New Testament Manuscript Conspiracies. And this is a subject like any other subject. There will be people who prefer the Byzantine majority family on which the King James is ultimately based for clearheaded, rational kinds of reasons. But then it'll range from, it'll range from those sort of rational reasons all the way up to bizarro world. And again, I referenced the little chick track that basically said all the other translations except for the King James are the product of Satan and has a picture of a devil walking behind the pyramids in Egypt because this is the Alexandrian text. It's the Satan text, you know. So you get, you go from the sublime to the ridiculous. And most of it tends to be on the ridiculous side of things. Very, very sort of illogically argued. It does. But I would like to interject here and say that if you're looking for a reasoned explanation of what somebody called the Byzantine majority, you need to go read Maurice Robinson, because Maurice Robinson is levelheaded and clear and prefers the text and has no translation in mind when he's making an argument for the text. He doesn't prefer the Byzantine text because it's behind the King James. He's got principled reasons in his mind for preferring this text. So if you want to read an actual positive case for the Byzantine text, then you need to read Maurice Robinson because that's where you're going to find it. Now, is he still alive? Yeah, last time I knew. Did you happen to see him last year? It's been a couple of years since I've sort of run into him and seen him. I haven't run into him because he usually, the last few years I've only been going to the SBL conference, the Society of Biblical Literature, instead of ETS. And he's normally at the Evangelical Theological Society conference, but he usually does not go to SBL. So the last time I talked to him was at an ETS conference. So that was probably six or seven years ago. Yeah, but he again is the rational guy in the room, in that room. Again, I don't want to really reference too many names on the wacky side, but there are plenty of websites. There are films. There are videos, quote unquote, documentaries that literally demonize the other side, demonize the Alexandrian text. And frankly, just drift off into irrationality. There are flights from Morison in many cases, but I think Rick has, you've given a good advice here. If you again, sort of gravitate toward this, or you're just curious, how would someone rationally defend the Byzantine majority text? Maurice Robinson would be your guy. The other thing I would say, just while I'm thinking about it, Mike, is that the Byzantine majority text is the text of the Greek Orthodox Church, right? And those guys aren't King James only by any stretch of the means. Sure. So if you would, that's another place to go look, especially if you say you've got friends in the Orthodox Church, you could probably talk to them about it. And they would probably be able to tell you about why they think that's the right text. And their argument has to do more in the basis of tradition than on a textual basis. But there you have a major tradition across the globe, which prefers this text for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Westcott and Hort were evil, the demon worshippers or something. It's because they've got historical reasonable reasons to do it. It's been the text of their church for 1500 years. Why would we change it? Yeah. Now think about it, Eastern Orthodox Church, Byzantium, Byzantine majority text. Again, the reason why this text family gets its name is again in broad strokes here. If you've read a historical treatment of this, the reason why there are fewer Alexandrian texts, that's in Egypt. And that has something to do historically with the rise of Islam. There were lots of manuscript destruction going on in the Middle Eastern regions. The Christians deliberately took manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and fled to the East in what we would call the Dark Ages, late antiquity. And they were safe there. And so they could produce more copies there. And out of that came a whole textual tradition that Rick just used the number 1500 years. Yeah, that's the case. They've had that text in that part of the world for 1500 years in Byzantium and other locations toward the East, the Eastern part of what had been the Roman Empire. And so that's why you get 75-80% of your manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are in that family, as opposed to 20-25% or whatever it is in the Alexandrian family. There are historical reasons for this. It's not that God was blessing the Byzantine ones and using the Muslims to stamp out the Satanic text over here in Alexandria. Again, but you get these absurdities, these arguments from selective providence. And really, they're arguments that only make sense in hindsight. I can only make the argument about Muslims going down and somehow eradicating the text that's completely from hindsight. That's not actually looking at the evidence and understanding how it developed. That's looking from where I am through this filter saying, oh, that must have been what happened, but it's completely a backwards argument. And those poor Christians in Egypt, they didn't really have a good New Testament. Oh, man, that's not true, though. I know, but that's the logic. But there was this whole... It was like... Fascination, you know, I mean, come on. There's this place called Oxyrychus in Egypt, right, Mike? And basically, they found this garbage dump in Oxyrychus, and it was just littered with manuscripts and papyri of all sorts of things. But a lot of the early New Testament papyri come straight from that garbage dump. And it's just amazing to even think that somehow Egypt didn't have a great text. Well, they might... Maybe not in the Greek, but they surely had Coptic. There's the Coptic Orthodox Church there that's preserved the text in Coptic forever all the way back. That's another important witness to the Greek New Testament. So it's just mind-boggling when arguments like that are made to me. Well, let's talk about some of the arguments. So, I mean, the basics of it are you have the minority, again, generally speaking, oldest, and you have the majority mostest kind of thing, the Alexandrian versus the Byzantine majority. And again, that's why it gets its name majority because most of the manuscripts fall in to that group. But again, most of them were produced later because just of a... That's the way historically it worked out. But again, if you put them all together, you're going to have 90% of the same thing anyway, but it's these variances, these differences that have surfaced. So, if I were a... Let's put it this way. If I were... Let's pretend I'm the King James only guy. And I've met Rick Brannon somewhere. And I get... I find out that, hey, you work at a Bible software company and you do Greek New Testament stuff. So if I asked you a question or maybe made an assertion like, well, you know that the King James is really the only translation you should be using because it's based on the textus receptus. What would you say? I would ask him about... I would ask you, I guess, Mike, about what happens to people who don't speak English. Well, this is... The King James is God's word for English speakers. This is through the providence of God and really the act of God. And frankly, the most severe King James only people will say that the King James translation itself was an act of inspiration for the English-speaking world. Those other languages, God has acted to produce the translation he wants them to have, but the King James is the one for English. Of course, they never bother to think about, well, I wonder where the Spanish and the Portuguese and the French one, what texts are those based on? Well, and that's why I would ask the question because it takes... It starts with... Because I mean, really, they even call themselves King James only. So the first question I would ask is about what about other languages, Spanish, French, whatever, because that gets it back to the Greek text. But then the other question I would ask is, what about the Old Testament? Why aren't we as up in arms about that? That is the dagger to the heart, but a lot of... Because nothing that Rick and I have been talking about in this episode has anything to do with the Old Testament. The textual situation for three quarters of your Bible, Bible. Okay, not just New Testament Bible. The whole thing, three quarters of that has nothing to do with Alexandrian texts, Byzantine majority text. It's a totally different ballgame, textually, and in the way it gets talked about too. So, yeah, the King James Bible is one thing, but this textual debate is just New Testament. So that's a really good question to ask. And a lot of people, again, will not have thought about... This is going to sound crazy, but they will not have thought about the difference between the Bible and the New Testament when it comes to this issue. But let's say I'm not deterred, and I say, well, I don't care about all that fancy academic stuff, you're just trying to confuse me. Okay, I can show you verses where these other translations take the deity of Christ out of the verse, or they fudge on it. I would immediately start to ask about those verses, because for any one of these things, one thing that I've heard is that, especially in the Gospels, and I've seen this, where in the Gospels, the King James will have something like, and Jesus and his disciples went into Jerusalem, and then blah, blah, blah, talked about or did a miracle or something like that. And then that's what the King James has, Jesus and his disciples, they went into the... And then the Alexandrian, the evil one, has something like... And they went in to Jerusalem. But see, they took Jesus right out of the verse there. Well, they must have gotten hurt, but they must have hated Jesus. But they didn't. There's still a pronoun referring to them, and anybody who actually knows language could read that in English or Greek and still understand exactly who was there, number one. And number two, I could also probably, I don't have any off hand, but I could probably find some, exactly the opposite situation where the, quote, Alexandrian text has got, you know, Jesus went into the city, and the Byzantine text has got, he went into the city. Those types of things happen back and forth. More often than not, the Texas Receptus expands, I should say expands is the wrong word, has, expands kind of biases the discussion, but more often than not, the King James will have a fuller version, right? Jesus and his disciples went into the city. And those are technically, and I think best explained as clarifying things that Scribes did in a church like the Byzantine Empire, like in the Byzantine Empire, like the Eastern Orthodox Church, where these things are being read, right? The, the prekepi is being read, the section is being read. Let's think back to our electionaries, right? Where they just have a section of scripture, okay? And it starts off, and they went into the city. Well, who are they when I'm just starting off in the middle of it, right? Well, that's probably, I don't know, but that seems to me to be a place where the guy who's putting the text in the lectionary says, oh, this is really Jesus and his disciples. I'm going to put that here. So I'm going to put that in. Yeah. That, that's completely the kind of thing that can happen. A lot of these sort of additions, or let's say removals of Jesus from the text, they're at boundaries in the text where you, if you're reading the text just by itself, might need to re-initialize that character, the person in the text, in order to understand who's doing what and what's going on. Yeah, Scribes, Scribes tend to, Scribes tend to try to make things less complicated rather than more complicated. They, they, they lean toward clarifying something rather than making it something more confusing. So you could, you could have a scribe, whether it's a lectionary or some, just a copy of a text where some scribe at some point in history looking at a pronoun thinks, well, I know that's Jesus. So I'm going to put the, I'm going to put Jesus' name in there because that'll, that'll help. They've altered the text, you know, but for a good reason and they haven't changed the meaning at all, but they have nevertheless altered the text. And so when that text gets copied, when their copy gets copied and so on and so on and so on, you can see how these, these things sort of creep in. Right. And I wouldn't even say, I wouldn't even say that that first guy changed the text, Mike. What very easily could have happened was that first guy in his copy of the manuscript wrote Jesus and his disciples off in the margin. Yeah. Yeah. And then the guy who copied the text might have incorporated that in the margin. Yeah. Or maybe not. Maybe what happened was a corrector to the trans, to the, to the transcription, the guy who wrote, they would have correctors go over the text. Maybe the corrector wrote a note above Jesus and his disciples because he read a text somewhere else that actually said that. Or he confused it with, you know, he's, we're in Matthew, but I, in Mark, it says Jesus and his disciples. So I'm going to put that, there's, there's 800 different reasons why it can happen. And what is synoptic when the example you just gave is a really good one. Well, Mark has it this way and Luke does. Okay. Let's just put that in the margin or over the, over the line or something like that. Yeah. Right. And these are all the sorts of things that the, the text critics, you know, these days, like Michael Holmes, we talked about earlier, those are all the sorts of things that they, they just innately know and they bring to any discussion they have about the text. Oh, this one says Jesus and disciples, this one doesn't. He doesn't just say, I'm gonna flip a coin and pick which one's best. Right. Oh, you know, I think that always text, scribes made text shorter. So I'm just going to, I'm just going to pick the shorter one. He doesn't do that. He looks at it. He says, well, is this at a paragraph boundary? Might somebody have, you know, re-initialized that? Or is there a quotation here? Does this hand up somewhere else? Or is it quoted from the Old Testament somewhere? Or what do other, what does the Byzantine version say over here? And what does that, did it change over time? What's our earliest witness? And then how else does this document talk about that? Like if there's a similar situation, does it always reintroduce Jesus and his disciples? Or does it like, so I mean, he and all these guys, that's the kind of stuff they look at. It's not like they just say, this one has it, this one doesn't, oh, the one that has it must be right. Oh, this took it away. Look, those demons are, it's not at all. I hate this word. I'm not going to use it. Oh gosh. You know, by the way, you know, for listeners, all of these things that Rick just rattled off, they're not speculation. You will find examples of scribes doing all of these things in manuscripts. Again, this is what textual critics, you know, those who spend their life going through manuscripts like this, looking at every blasted line and every word and every feature of the manuscript. You know, over the centuries, these things have been detected, they've been written about, they've been collected and collated. I mean, again, this isn't speculation as to how this particular difference, again, this one that we're making up for illustration, is it a pronoun or is it the name Jesus? These things all have precedent in material that actually exists. And it's not just once or twice. It's many times. And as these, as people spend their lives in this material, they get a feel for, okay, it's a good bet that this is why this one says this and that one doesn't because of X, Y, Z reason, because I've seen this happen 50 times in other manuscripts. Just things like that. Right. And going back to Holmes, Mike Holmes, because he's, I mean, he's the gold standard. He's just a good, honest guy. And he's would be in the school of what you would call reasoned eclecticism. Yeah, we need to talk about reasoned eclecticism. So what that basically means is when I come to this variation in the text, I'm going to look at everything. And in shorthand, what it means is the one that I think is right here is going to be the one that best explains all the other variations that I see. Because a lot of times when you run across a variation in a text in the New Testament, there's not just like two options. It's not a binary option, this or that. There's usually a lot of different ways that could have happened. Right. So like Jesus and his disciples, maybe there's one variation that has none of them. There's one variation that has them all. There's one that just says Jesus and they. Maybe there's one that just says they. Maybe there's one that says Jesus and Peter and John. Right. Well, there's a lot of different stuff that could happen there. So what the reasoned eclectic guys do is they look at all of those and they look at what's called internal evidence and external evidence. So internal evidence would be the text itself, the variations we're talking about and how they were composed. If there's nominous sacra and all that kind of stuff, they look at external evidence. So that would be like your manuscript date where it came from. If you know that they're also going to look at style issues, they're going to look at this other stuff like how else does the same text say the same thing? Or does it do different things in other places? Or is there a parallel in Mark? And then if there's a parallel in Mark and we're in Matthew, what are the variations of the parallel in Mark? What sorts of things are going on there? And you do the whole process, right? So what these, the reason eclectic guys do this, it's not that everybody does this, but they say, okay, I'm going to try to find the one that best explains all the others. And in this case, they might say, well, I like they because I've got Jesus and his disciples. I've got Jesus and Peter and John. It makes more sense to me that those are added in. Yeah. So like if the author uses they instead of Jesus, Peter and John, 95% of the time, then chances are they're at least good that they should be what we read here because of author style. Yeah. All sorts of things like that. Again, this is painstaking work. It's really work. It's not just flipping a coin. It's not just, oh, I like this one or this one's oldest. That must be the best. Right. These guys are completely not like, well, I like the Alexandrian text. So if it's in Vaticanus, that's it because Vaticanus is the best text, period. That is not how they do. That is not what's completely willing to say Vaticanus messed this thing up because of all this other evidence that I've seen. Again, they're coming to the reading. They're working backwards to understand how it happened. They might even start looking at patristic citations of this material or how other early versions, like, okay, so we do have Coptic preserved for this passage in a couple of different forms. What did they say? So these guys have just got to be not just ninjas in Greek, they've got to be ninjas in all sorts of languages that nobody knows today. Right. So there's all sorts of stuff you have to do to bring all the pieces together in a way that completely respects the development of the text that we know, cherish, admire, and love. Yeah. Unless there's a second deity who's sovereign, all of this material we have by the sovereignty of God, not just one family. Again, that's just a hobby horse for me because of the way, I hate to say it this way, but the way God is used to argue a particular point. Again, you don't have, you either believe that, again, you've got providence in history and there's one person, one God behind all that, whether we can figure out the reasons or not, or you don't. You either got one or you don't. And if you got one, well, then we all have it for whatever reason. This is the way it worked out. But it's just not this idiosyncratic, I've just have an axe to grind against this idea and that's why I'm making my choice. That is not the way textual critics work. Right. And it's completely an over time thing too. And what I mean by that is, so we had the period, let's say, of the text Receptus in the early printed editions of the Bible. And then we had more manuscript discoveries and we almost had, especially with Tischendorf, almost an overreaching to this Alexandrian thing. I love this older text. Sinaticus is awesome. I'm going to prefer its readings. Tischendorf was particularly susceptible to that, but I don't blame him. I mean, if I found the manuscript, I would think it was the best thing in the world too. Right. So you've got this almost overreaching and you get that in Westcott and Hort as well too, although they're kind of dialed back from Tischendorf in a number of ways. And so you're kind of over on that side of it. And I think even today, we've sort of got this, it's not like we're swinging all the pendulum all the way back to the Byzantine readings, but there are some places where text critics today would even say, we overreached. And like for this reading right here, the Byzantine actually is probably the better reading. I've been to papers at SBL in the text critical groups, the guys who are actually doing the work on the editorial critic Amayor and the International Greek New Testament Project, all these guys. And I can remember a paper by Klaus Vogtel, who was one of the editors of the German Bible Society, where he was talking about how, you know what, we need to give the Byzantine a little more credence because we've basically overlooked it and we're discounting it. And we need to not do that because there's great textual evidence in there. We hear readings, Byzantine, we throw it away. Well, that's not right. There's a diversity to the Byzantine text, just like there's a diversity in the Alexandrian side of it. And there are places where that diversity can witness something that is valuable and important that we need to integrate and use in our understanding and our development of these readings. And he had, I forget what the case was. I think it was probably somewhere in James or Jude. I don't remember where he was like, yeah. And the next edition, so this would be the Nestle Allen 28th edition, is taking this Byzantine reading that the 26th and 27th edition didn't take because we think it's right based on all this new manuscript evidence we've got and all the different ways that we are sort of sifting this data and looking at it. So it's not like if I say, I think the Alexandrian text is best, I'm going to completely hate the Byzantine. It's not like a Republican and Democrat sort of thing, right? It's not binary. It's not like if I like one, I got to hate the other. This is all evidence. And we are trying to deeply, deeply understand this text and how it developed and the best representation of it today because so much further work of everybody, basically the believers of Christendom is resting on this work. So we are going to go down all the rabbit trails and we are going to find all the readings. So we are going to look at them all. And that's a nice segue too, because the bottom line, again, for listeners, and again, people who aren't specialists, but really getting down to, hey, can I trust my New Testament? Well, the answer is, of course you can. The fact that an English translation, English translations aren't going to agree with every English word they select. And even to the textual level, they may adopt one reading over another. What most translators will do now, most publishers will, if it matters, if it's not, ooh, what's the, what's the, what did the autographer say? Jesus went to the temple or into the temple. You're like, oh, our faith is just hanging in the balance here on this preposition. Excluding nonsense like that, where it might matter for some point of doctrine or interpretation, publishers and translation committees will give you other information and footnotes. It's not that one translation is just stellar and the other one is hopeless. It's just this either or fallacy that, again, has sort of been a byproduct of this kind of conspiratorial way of looking at Greek New Testament manuscripts. I would say you are safe in ignoring all of this conspiratorial nonsense. If you're really interested in the subject, why does this one say this and another one say that? Can you recommend a few good resources or books if someone wanted to read about the history of the Greek New Testament or actually get examples? Oh yeah. Yeah, so the best book I can recommend is just a very basic, basic introduction. So this is like, I just heard about this yesterday and I don't really understand it, but I'd like to read something kind of level. J. Harold Greenlee, who is like one of my personal heroes. This guy was like a missionary and he wrote introductions to textual criticism, he wrote grammars, he did Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias. I mean, he was just as far as getting resources in the hands of people to help understand their Bible better. J. Harold Greenlee was like the saint. He's the patron saint of that right now, as far as I'm concerned. J. Harold Greenlee has a little book called The Text of the New Testament. I'm pretty sure that's what it's called. It's like 120 pages. Baker Academic publishes it now and it's just a wonderful little introduction written at the level of the, again, like I said, I just heard about this yesterday. What does it all mean? Written at that, he goes from a lot of the stuff we've talked about just basically what are manuscripts and he even walks through big examples of text critical issues, none of which we've talked about today. Things like the percopeia d'altre and John, the longer ending of Mark, so Mark 16 versus 9 and following and even the shorter ending. He talks about all that kind of stuff, but he does it in a way that is, that is an honouring to both sides of the argument. He presents it all and he walks you through what he thinks and he lets you think what you think. That's a good recommendation. I mean, I have that. As far as like just a general introduction, that's great. If you are, if you mean something more reference oriented, like you're reading the New Testament and you want to know, hey, are there any sort of manuscript things going on here? Any sort of variations that I should be aware of? There are a couple of books that the classic is Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. That one's really kind of interesting because it was originally geared towards translators, so they could be aware of areas where there are text critical differences that you should be aware of if you're translating the Greek New Testament. You're going to need at least the alphabet there. Yeah, you are going to need the alphabet, but yes and no because it does give you the verse reference and you can find that without knowing Greek. The descriptions are written in English, so you may not understand everything, but it does translate some things. Dialing it a step back from that and this one's only available in Logos Bible Software and disclaimer, I helped write it. I teamed up with a guy that I've worked with before called Israel Loken and he wrote the notes for the Old Testament and I wrote the notes for the New Testament. It's called the Lexham Textual Notes and really where it situates itself is between the footnote you'd find on the bottom of your Bible where it says some manuscripts have blood, right? And Metzger's Textual Commentary. So it's just a little bit more of an expansive discussion of a variation unit. It covers Old Testament and New Testament, so it covers whole Bible, which I think is really important. And it is also written from my perspective to where you don't need to know anything about Greek, you don't need to know anything about Hebrew, you don't need to know anything about text critical terminology or symbols, which if you read Metzger you're going to be overwhelmed. Yeah, you'll even get that like in that Bible, which is a great resource with lots of textual notes, but the net Bible I think it's fair to say will presuppose more of that. Right, because they're more about listing manuscript evidence and that's where you have to use all these weird symbols that you just have to assume everybody knows what they mean. And we don't do, Loken and I don't do any of that in the Lexham Textual Notes, but again that's only available currently in Lagos Bible Software. So that's really the case that I wrote that for. I thought there was a big void between the person who sees this note on the bottom of their Bible and they're like, well, what does that mean? And they don't really have any other place to look for it. I wanted to provide that bridge to give you more information about what's going on there and then sort of inform you so that you could jump up to the next level I guess of either like a net Bible or Metzger's textual commentary where there's another one, another great one is Philip Comfort's New Testament text and translation commentary, which doesn't require as much sort of Greek knowledge as Metzger would. So that would be another interesting area to look if you're interested in this. Yeah, specifically for the King James Version Debate, I would recommend D.A. Carson's little paperback. The King James Version Debate, a plea for realism. And we'll have a link at this episode to a three page summary that someone out there on the internet created. I mean, it's a live link, but it's a three page summary of a section in Carson where Carson responds to specific defenses of the Byzantine majority view because of this King James only kind of debate. So it's kind of a nice, again, just summation that's in comprehensible English. But I think Carson, you know, Carson is, I mean, he would be a reason to collect it. Would he not? Sure. I mean, that's really where most people lie. Most people fall. But his book is, again, it's for the layperson. You don't have to know Greek for it, but just trying to get people to, trying to talk people in off the ledge when it comes to this conspiratorial approach to their New Testament. I want to transition a little bit since you brought up this thing that you created. And before we come to an end for the episode, I want to talk to you a little bit about some other things you've made. You've made what I consider, I think this is kind of a unique tool. If you're interested in Greek New Testament vocabulary, Rick has written a couple of books. Is it two? There are two. Okay. I'll let him describe them. But a couple of books on the past early pistols, I guess it's first and second Timothy. Yeah, there's two different books that do different things. Okay. One of them is on first Timothy and that's the one you're thinking about right now. Little backstory for Lexham Press, which is the publishing house for Lagos for Faith Life, basically, they publish a lot of other stuff too. I did a lot of work, let's say from 2007 through 2012, 13, 14, translating things and editing things, stuff like the Apostolic Fathers in English, I did a translation of that for Lexham. And we also published in the English edition of the Septuagint. And I also did an edition of the Greek Apocryphal Gospels. But the funny thing is, is that all of that work kind of started with me studying the pastoral epistles back in like 2003 through 2006. Exactly. I mean, I would be working through this text and I would be stuck on some words because the pastoral's have a pretty unique vocabulary comparatively. Some people make a big deal about that. I don't really. But in order to understand it, what I noticed is that when I would look through lexican articles like B-DAG, the classic standard Greek lexican, they would always take you out to this other stuff that wasn't New Testament like the Apostolic Fathers or to stuff in the Apocrypha or Deutero Canon or to Philo or Josephus or the Greek Pseudepigaf or anything like that. And you could really get a better understanding of what these words meant in the context in which they were used back in the pastoral epistles. So I started working through the text of 1st Timothy in order, but I would go and I would basically find anything written anywhere where there was New Testament, Old Testament, Septuagint Apocrypha, Josephus, Philo, Apostolic Fathers. I didn't care. Find something that was helpful in understanding what was going on in this letter of Paul to Timothy. And this book on 1st Timothy, it's called A Lexical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles. I hope to do 2nd Timothy and Titus in the future. So this is like the first of three volumes. This is the result of it. It's like 350 pages. I work through all of 1st Timothy and just try to give a better idea of what's going on. So some people could call them word studies. I think sometimes that has this bad connotation. So I call it a lexical commentary because commentaries are just helpful things. Your focus is obviously it's vocabulary, but you actually have full discussion. So again, just for the sake of comparison for people who have used like a Strong's tool or a more substantial lexicon, they will give you the locations of places where a particular word occurs. But they can't because of the space, they can't actually take you to the location. And even if they could, they don't discuss it. Okay, you found it now without really factoring in. Well, okay, I'm looking at it, but why should I care? Right. And that's really missing because a lot of these references, I mean, you look at things and I mean, I'll be honest, I don't look up every reference that I see and something that I'm reading. Okay, maybe you do, Mike, maybe when you run across something that says, you know, see Polycarp five versus two, you say, Oh, yeah, I got to read that. And then you go read that. What this book on First Timothy does is it actually brings all those things back into the context. So if I'm in, let's say, First Timothy six, and it's talking about the love of money. Well, Polycarp's letter to the Philippians talks about that too. And he uses similar forms as like he probably was thinking about First Timothy when he wrote it. So I give you that excerpt in context in the discussion so you can read it too. And then the words that are relevant, I put in italics. So you can know, Oh, that word must be the word we're talking about, whether it's translated the same or not, it's not in Greek, but the translation. So I try to bring all that back into the context so you can sort of follow through the argument and understand how this language was used. And my goal isn't to tell you how to my goal is to tell you about First Timothy, right? Or how to do how to quote, unquote, do a word study. Exactly. I really look at this more as preparation for exegesis than the product of exegesis, I guess, I want you to be able to use this information as you're reading the text and understand more about what's going on there. So that's that's the First Timothy book. Yeah, I can I can tell listeners, I mean, I've obviously seen a lot of commentaries and a lot of word study tools, but but what Rick has made here really is different. It's, dare I say it's, it's actually helpful. I mean, you know, I can say that because I mean, you know, a lot of these tools will get you to, you know, they'll lead you to the trough, but they won't necessarily teach you how to drink or how much to drink or, you know, don't drink from this one drink from that one. Sometimes a lot of it. I mean, some some guys are some people who write are really great about distilling information and walking you through how to think things. And other other people who write are essentially giving you a brain up on the stuff they looked up. Yep, there it is. No deal with it. Yeah, it's like, Hey, I looked up all this stuff. There you go. It's in a footnote now go distill it and move on. And I that's just not helpful. I don't want to doom this stuff to footnotes because nobody nobody ever looks it up. Right. I just happened to look it up and I found it was like, this is really helpful. So that's that's how that book happened. That's one volume then first of the three volume series. And what's the other one that's currently available? The other book that is currently become available is a book, a little book on Second Timothy. It's called Second Timothy notes on grammar syntax and structure. And essentially what that is is a, let's call it a block outline and interlinear block outline of the text of Second Timothy. So on the basically I'll give you in English or English and Greek. So it's got the Greek, let's say phrase with the English representative English phrase underneath it. And then if there's it's like a block outline. So some people when they do block outlines, they indent text to show structure of the text. So it does that too. So both both lines are indented. So there's a there's a Greek phrase and an English phrase that translated underneath it. And you can see the whole structure of what's going on in the part being discussed. On top of that, there are notes on the, the grammar, the syntax and the structures. So I talk about the discourse structure, different devices that are used essentially pretty much random thoughts that came to my mind when I was actually working through the text. This is more like, it was actually a lot of preparation for something else I did, but we can talk about some other time. But it was really helpful to me and I actually wrote it as a bunch of blog posts. And when I pulled it out, it was like 100 pages. It's like, wait a minute, how did that happen? So then I put it into a Word doc and I revised it and I rewrote it and I reformatted everything. And I just figured, you know what, this is just a nice sweet little piece of piece of stuff here that could be helpful. So why not? So we published that too. Yeah, I actually think, you know, for let's say somebody out there is, you know, they're doing a house church or they're doing a small group, you know, study in their church or they want to go through first or second Timothy. I think, you know, either one of these for the person who's leading it, if they have some, you don't really have to have Greek, but if you're kind of used to reading somewhat academic material, I think these would be companion volumes that would really help prepare you for discussion, you know, of what questions people were going to ask you about, well, what does this mean? What does that mean? Why does he say this and not that? Right. I think the first Timothy really helped. More so, the second Timothy probably has a little more intense Greek requirement on it than the first one, but they're both helpful. And again, there's a, if you're used to that sort of thing, it's not going to be dissuading to you at all. And I think there's useful stuff in the second Timothy volume, even if you kind of just skim over all the Greek letters. Well, good. I mean, well, thanks for, thanks for coming on. I want you to give a chance. You know, you referred to your blog, so you should tell people where you blogged. You still blog? I follow you on Twitter. Yeah, so on the Twitter, it's at rickbrannon.com. I have a blog at rickbrannon.com. And you can find out more information about the books at the publisher, which is appianwaypress.com. Yeah, that's A-P-P-I-A-N, and you should spell your last name. Oh, yeah. The last name is Brannon. That's B-R-A-N-N-A-N. Right. Not O-N-A-N. Not O-N or E-N or I-N, but A-N. Thanks, Mike. Hey, Rick, before we let you go, I have a question for y'all. Can y'all speak about any current modern translation efforts? That's a good question. I know that, I mean, I know that just here at Faithlife, we did the Lexham English Bible, which was within the past three or four or five years, which is based on the Hebrew Bible, but the New Testament is based on the SBL Greek New Testament that Mike Holmes put together for us. So that's a relatively recent effort. We also did an English translation of the Septuagint, which is a recent effort as well. It's hard to find an English translation of the Septuagint. There's one published by Oxford, which is called the New English Translation of the Septuagint, which you can get in print, which is all right. I happen to like ours better, but I would say I have a bit of a vested interest in it. Have we bound ours? Can you get it in hard copy or is it just digital? No, it's just digital still. Are there plans for that that you know? If I had anything to do with it, Mike, I would by hook or crook have something available, but that's pretty much out of my hands. Yeah, I mean, because I do get asked that and I direct people to the digital resources, but I was just fishing there to see if anybody had made a decision to put that into hard copy. Yeah, I don't know of anything straight that's going on right now, Tray, but I'm just trying to remember. I haven't thought about that for a while. Nothing pops into my head. I mean, usually you'll hear about a publisher doing something in that regard, because publishers like to have their own translations because they sell. And publication committees, our translation committees are always meeting, so I mean, there will probably be a revision of the NIV in 10 years or five years. So I mean, they're always sort of working on it. I do know that we've been looking at revising the Lexham English Bible. I'm not quite sure when that will come available, but that's something we've worked on internally. Well, the study Bible, I think, are we allowed to talk about the status of the study Bible? I really don't know, Mike. Well, since I don't know either, I'm going to do it. I mean, the LEB is going to appear with study Bible notes. Again, it's going to appear in hard copy, so it won't be this huge digital resource. I mean, I did a lot of these, the notes for Testament books. This is the Faith Life Study Bible? The Faith Life Study Bible, yeah, that uses the LEB. That is at a publisher now. It's going to appear in a hard copy volume. The notes obviously will be quite a bit trimmed, but that would be an example of something that has not hit the mass market, the Christian bookstore market yet that is actually in process as we speak. That would be a new translation for a lot of people, the LEB. If they're not a Lagos user, they would not have seen that before. What's some parting words just for the lay people out there who kind of get caught up on this translation, that translation, this word says this and that. They kind of get lost in it all. I mean, what's the basic takeaway? I would say, if I can go first, Mike, I would say basically, don't lose the forest for the trees. Trees are important to look at, but just because one word differs in one spot, you need to sort of zoom back and look at the entire context and say, is this passage really saying something different than this other passage, and also know that the text behind a given translation has had a lot of work done on it by people who really know and are passionate about getting it right. Sometimes it's good to be skeptical about things, but other times it's good to not let that skepticism sort of override rationality while you're looking at this stuff. I would say, know that just because a word or two is different doesn't mean that one is junk and the other is holy, I guess. Be rational as you look at it, and know that there are all sorts of reasons why these things can happen, some that are understood, some that are not, and sometimes even the text critics don't know, because they differ on a lot of different things. You talk to two different text critics, and you'll probably have three different options on some things. So I would say, know that it is God who makes this stuff available. We have a God who is sovereign, at least I believe that, and that he wants us to know his word. So stop, look, be diligent, but stop dropping roll. But don't go off the edge. I mean, these especially the modern Bible translations that you can find from reputable, solid publishers, they're all pretty good, and they're all really developed by people who are pretty passionate about the text. So if you have a question, I'm a fan, especially if you don't know much about Greek or Hebrew, look at three, four, five, six different translations and see what they all say, and I'm not saying make your own reading from that, but what I am saying is you get an idea of the variation in how important or not important it is. Yeah, I would say there are a lot of people who believe the Bible is the Word of God, who will put both testaments into this, and they do translation work. They've done a substantial amount of it. They work in the field of textual criticism, and they do the best they can to produce English translations that are reliable. Having said all that, they're not omniscient. None of them are going to claim to be omniscient. You aren't omniscient. None of us are, but they do the best they can to produce a reliable translation. And broadly speaking, English Bible translations, especially, I'll go all the way up from the King James to the modern era, because they're basically committee translations. I'm actually wary of translations that are produced by one person for a number of reasons I won't rabbit trail into, but all of these translations are committee translations. You have a number of people who are committed to trying to produce something that gives you a reliable reading, and when they can't agree, they will typically tell you in that source, that's what footnotes are for, or there are plenty of sources available to people now. Study Bibles is kind of like the next level up, because the Study Bible will give you textual notes all the way up into material online or little commentaries, that kind of thing. They'll let you know where there's something to think about here. That's just being honest. They're not hiding information from you. They're not covering up a problem. Oh, we don't want people to read this, or they won't think their Bible is the Word of God. It's the exact opposite. We want you to know that we're not omniscient. There's something to think about here, and do some study. Talk to your pastor. Talk to this person or that person, and they can help you navigate whether this even matters. From one translation to the next, yeah, they're different English words, but I think Rick's advice is good. If you compare them, you're going to realize there are very, very, very few places where you'll compare a translation, and it'll be dramatically different. That just tells you, okay, there's probably a manuscript issue here. Other than that, they're all doing the same thing, and they're all doing it pretty well. All right. Well, good deal. Well, Rick, we thank you and your team for the type of work you're doing at Faithlife. It's important, so thank you. Oh, thanks, Tray. Appreciate it. Yep. Rick and his team, they do a lot of grunt work, and when we are the beneficiaries of it, even within the building, we are the beneficiaries of it. Thanks, Mike. Yep. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Yep. Thanks for coming on. All right, Mike. Well, that was another good episode. We appreciate Rick coming on. Mike, I wanted to remind everybody that next week is our 100th episode, and we thought it'd be fun to include our listeners on the show. If you'd like to be on the show, please send a recording of yourself. Mention your first name, where you're from. Send it to me at Traystricklin.gmail.com. You can get that email on the Neck and Bible Podcast.com, and try to keep it under two minutes, if you can, and just include anything you want to mention, how you used the content, how you found the content, and any positive things you want to say about the show. Record yourself using your phone, or you can use a computer if you don't know how. There's free software like Adacity. You can Google it. Or if you have any questions, just send me an email. I'll be more than happy to help you do that, if you wish. Again, the deadline is going to be May 12th, I believe, Mike, which is Thursday, just at the end of the day, midnight, if you will. Early the 13th, Friday morning, for you late people who like to procrastinate at the last second. I'm one of those people too. It seems like the last minute that papers do, boom. That's where I do some of my best work is under pressure, right? Yeah, well, that's just too familiar. We've already gotten a handful of recording, so I know there's over a week left, so looking forward to the ones that we get. It's fun to listen to people, where they're from, and how they use the content, and it's just nice to hear from our listeners. Yeah, and if we don't get it enough of them, Trey and I will have to sing. I'm just going to call in and do random voices. That'll be a good chance for me. We'll get enough. I'm not worried about it. All right, well, I just want to say thank you to Rick Brennan for joining us this week, and thank you all for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.