 Okay. Go ahead and get started. This panel session goes to 410. We may not need all that time. I want to say it's coming to the front first. A couple of our panelists have to leave early. So if we do go to the end, it's several can of a leave. They may be mad, but that's not why they're leaving. What I'd like to do is I'm going to give them a chance to respond to the papers that they've heard and we'll have some discussion with them. I have two questions I may ask. And then we'll try to open it up to all of you and continue this session in that way. I want to start. I'm not going to introduce each one individually. Many of you will know, or some of them, their affiliations are listed in the program for you. But I just want to say something about the way we structured this session. Elijah had the idea for the book and he and I worked together and we intentionally tried to pick young scholars of up-and-coming or at least young scholars. Is that okay with this? I think for myself. I think for myself. Okay. Sorry. That was a slight on me, not at them. Probably because we wanted fresh perspectives on this issue. And we have, most of us, I think all of us per se in the book have done a quick title discussion. We've grown up in the urban era, as it were. So I was in Bible school. In fact, I was at the Bible school that Mark Irwin went to when his book, Miss Quoting Beads, came out in 2005. So in some ways, my career, my academic career has been lived and processed in the weight of that book and its best-selling status. So we wanted to make the book young voices, fresh voices. Those of us that have sort of lived through that. And then we wanted the panel, really, to be mature scholars who, in many cases, are mature. All of them. Establish scholars. Just pull a hole with your eyes. Whatever it's like going with that. Who have either contributed to the field of text criticism as evangelicals, or in many cases have directly engaged Irwin's arguments. So just for example, Dan, of course, has debated Mark several times through the call of Jones who's written the book directly about Miss Quoting Jesus. So we have lots of expertise and we're very thrilled. If full disclosure, Eli and I have invited them. We anticipated most of them would say no. And then they all said yes. Which is great. So with that out of the way, let me open it up. People will start with you here on the end and give you a chance. Well, great. Well, thank you for the first time I've ever been on the old person's group. Presenters. I particularly want to thank our friend Bart Ehrman for lending his name to this session. Thank you so many people. Greg, I love the paper. Where are you there? I like your circles. I'd love to have this for the actual percentages next to those circles, please. I think on the question, Elijah, about this misinformation being so severe and hard to defend this. I don't think defend the text on the whole have more misinformation than those who attack the text. I think there's evangelicals who can get into this self-flagulation of the subject. Of course, popular writers make mistakes. That's right. They're popular writers. There's going to be loads and loads of that. When I think about Josh McDowell and I have his books when I was 16 or evidence of Martin Vernon, we really enjoy it. I think he was the first guy who told me that there were versions. So I'm really grateful for that. And people like In Your Year and Brian Evans, they're all popular writers. Popular writers always get things wrong. There was a bit of a time yesterday about a written testimony, got things wrong, a letter of the times today, got things wrong. That's always going to be the case. And so we should expect to live in a context where there's lots and lots of popular noise around there and we as scholars are going to try and have a positive and corrective role. Coming to the subject of the comparative argument, I want to split what's called the comparative argument into the analogical argument and the superlative argument. It seems to me that the analogical argument for Bruce Hughes was very good. It was you believe that Caesar's Gallic Wars is roughly well transmitted. On the basis of that belief you already have, I want to say it would be consistent for you to accept this belief with so much greater manuscript support in terms of numbers and all this sort of stuff. Of course it gives a narrative as well as the numbers and of course you need to have statistics plus narrative always. So I would say that's important. The superlative argument tends to be something it is shortened. It takes out your way of accepting this. There are loads of manuscripts. Therefore it's true. There were loads of copies of yesterday's USA Today and it's not always true. So I think we need to use it more as an analogical argument and then I think it's fine. First century mark. I've seen several first century marks but not Mark's Gospels. Now on to just numbers and apologetics. I would say let's keep using numbers but just make sure we use a narrative alongside them. Manuscripts don't prove Christianity but you need to have some manuscripts of what the season of the word and therefore they do become a battleground. So I do think that it's like a little bit removed but still worth discussing. But really I want to thank our panel our panel, our panel of computers and yeah, that's me. Before you come up, anybody you want to respond? Fair enough. All to say a quick thing. I think his point about the comparative art is very important. We would make that in our chapter on that. Actually there are two types of comparative art and it's out there when it comes to comparing the new testers to classical literature. Anybody else who wants to come up or want to stay there? Yeah, let me make a few comments. I'll stay here just to remark on a few things. First of all, thank you to the presenters. Certainly we're all looking for seeking more accurate arguments, details matters, specifics matter and we want to make sure that we get our data as accurate as we can and explain it accurately in terms of what we're really trying to prove by it and make sure the narrative goes with it as Peter indicated. And so that's commendable and I think we've seen a number of those things said here. It's hard to know what to do with this. Some of this, as we were talking about on the panel at the break, a lot of this is going to yield, of course. Nothing said here is really new or surprising, of course. Now I know that y'all's target is probably more the lay level apologist out there or maybe the person who's reading lay level sexual criticism doesn't know a lot of these things so as much as we give them more background of what we're really saying fair enough. I will say, though, that we want to be careful with the sort of reverse criticisms we make, though, and make sure that they're charitable and as accurate as we're asking them to be about the data. Just a couple examples of this. One of the comparative complaints in one of the earlier papers was, look, people get the exact numbers for the New Testament manuscripts but they don't get the exact numbers for Plato, and Tacitus, and all these other Josephus and so on. I feel like that's a little bit of a misleading critique and here's why. When it comes to the number of the New Testament manuscripts there's an immediately knowable source where you can get updated numbers of that. Although ironically, in a later paper, it seems like there aren't reliable numbers for the number of manuscripts. So there's a little bit of an oddity there. It's like, let's get our numbers right and the later paper is like, we can't get our numbers right. But leaving that point aside, is there an obvious place to go that people, at least at a lay level apologetics can get updated manuscript numbers and all these other classical sources, whether it's Homer or Josephus or Tacitus or what have you. And if it is available, fine. I would argue it's not readily available at least in the same number as the New Testament manuscripts. And so I think the point you make there is that the lack of updating those numbers is not due to some nefarious sort of plot to build a biased apologetic into the works. But it's a lack of access to the information at a readily level. And I think that particular fact needs to be taken into account. That is, even if your numbers aren't up to date from Bruce's 1940s version, the argument actually isn't any different. Because even if the numbers are up to date, are they actually flip-flopping the argument? Are we actually saying now that we have more manuscripts of classical works in the New Testament? It may not be accurate numbers, but they're not reversed. And so I think that critique probably needs to be nuanced now as an example of that sort of thing. Thanks, Mike. There's the plate drawings, which it does try to give a good number. But I think that is not accessible and no one seemed to call on with that. The Clay Jones article, the bibliographical test update, is in the handout, which we're not familiar with. But that is a good head-head also. Right, so in 2012, do you mean? Right, I think it's more updated in the 1943. But anybody writing before 2012 wouldn't have had access to that? Right. Well, in 1943, these were the numbers. And I don't see that a lot. Well, if they're quoting F.F. Bruce in the footnote, it would be obvious that it's in 1948. That's part of the problem. So Bruce has been updated in the 6th edition. If you check the copy right there, it's like it's something in the 80s. But he stands in the introduction that he didn't go update anything. And he says in the autobiography why he wouldn't update it. He didn't replace the folks of a young man in the front. So our point is not to call Bruce. I guess what we're trying to say is if you're going to try to be really precise and update the numbers for the New Testament, which is a fair thing to do. And we're not asking for absolute precision, but show the same care for the classical literature that you're implicitly, in some cases, denigrating by comparing them to the New Testament. That's the problem I have. Yeah. I don't think it's denigrating if it's the analogical argument. No, you're not. But Bruce's argument is not followed. He's not using it. Most people who follow Bruce are not using the analogical argument. I would say it does work with homework. There's some over 2,000 issues of homework. But if you compare that to 300 or revelation, there are a lot more. I do take your point. There's a danger of sort of overcorrecting. And I take your point especially about the popular literature. Thank you. Not particularly about the papers. I thought they were all well done. I think there's I mean, I would caution everybody involved in the book be aware of creating straw men. And or even, as Peter mentioned, there will always be lousy apologetics. I mean, it's always going to be out there. It's always going to stop it. And be aware of maybe taking the worst possible expression of an argument and putting that up as though that's everybody's argument who uses that argument, right? Just to give everybody their do when the argument if you think an argument is sound. Can we skip over Peter? I don't know. I see him your way. All right. Firstly, there is something called the LaVan database of ancient books and that is your simplest online site. It's just as accessible as the VMR for New Testament manuscripts and it will give you a database of all the manuscripts of all ancient books and that will give you the latest number of inch and the number of classical text. Have you searched LDAB in Google or any other available search engine? You'll come to the LaVan database of ancient books and you'll find it helpful. Can I say I think a bit more with the youngsters on this that I've found it is a difficulty that I can't trust the things that popular Christian apologists tell me about things in this field and I find that a problem. I can't trust the details. I can't trust that they understand the overall framework and I think there's two reasons for this. They don't know anything about the subject and they are very interested in projecting everything positively for the New Testament and I think that biases their whole presentation. I think that is a problem for them. Remember the Lord said that we'll face judgment for careless words that we utter and those who teach according to James with greater strictness. So we need to be more careful about what we say and I just to do that Jesus said I'm the way the truth and the life. Telling the truth is pretty fundamental to what we do as Christians, as scholars and apologists. If you're not telling the truth you're not witnessing to Jesus as the truth. So I would urge you if you were a popular apologist in the audience to take extra care. Of course a number of things in this book won't be things everybody agrees on. Some of these things are disputed but I think there is a big issue. I was just building on one thing earlier that was said to really seek to think about this way that what you're trying to do is hold a particular type of apologist accountable and that's a good thing to say there's an accountability in terms of what you're doing. I'm not certain that everyone you are quoting and citing as examples of bad apologetics are the type of people you're really wanting and needing to hold accountable in that and I think it's building on the other comment and just make sure that it's actually representative and there's a couple of those that I think that's probably the worst possible example of that apologetics argument. We're apologists accountable who are the people who are the best example of that type of apologetics at that point and being certain to hit back in that. But I do think there's a deep need where I work extensively with college students who are reading apologetics but also reading the new atheists and things like that and there are times when I have to correct certain things that a popular apologist has said which is a difficult thing to do we need to be held accountable on that but making sure holding those accountable that are the exemplars of what you're actually talking about. I've got 17 pages of notes. Let me first offer critique of what my other panelists have said about everything. They all have a nice overview of the papers and I am too anal to even notice the forest so I'll just give a few minor comments. First of all that Elijah pointed out was and I'm going to dispute Tim on this a little bit. He used Greg Gilbert I think was the fellow who wrote the argued some pretty silly arguments I think you talked about that at the Gospel College and at the same time I think you also mentioned Kurt Eichwald in Newsweek who did some unbelievably stupid arguments on the other side and I think those do need to be pointed out on both sides but I think we need to be gracious about it as well so I would agree we need to try to focus on the best arguments but also bring these experience in because they are still influential so Eichwald stuff was really influential that nobody's ever seen the Bible even one word of the Bible kind of a thing and by the way you guys are you wanted to do a book with fresh arguments and so I guess the panelists are giving you stale arguments that's okay immature immature yes that's good what are the problems that apologists have is they like to cite other apologists and they don't do any work and this is something that I learned from Ed Kamyshevsky who I think is he still here back row somewhere when he and I and Jim Sorye co-authored he said we need to cite the very best sources he's worked in apologics I had never done that so it's important to cite the best sources and apologists need to do this as well now one of the things Elijah mentioned is about how these apologists using the Bruce argument about not doing their homework on other classical literature this is also true of Metzger Ehrman in Bruce Metzger's 1964 edition of his text of the New Testament he talks about how many manuscripts we have of Homer's Iliad I think he says it's about 750 1968 he cites the same source written in 1950 I believe there's about 750 manuscripts of Iliad 1992 is the third edition there's about 750 manuscripts of Iliad and in 2005 there's about 750 manuscripts of Iliad none of this was checked Ehrman never updated, Metzger did and here you've got this on here we are growing up in the Ehrman era and Ehrman himself is partially responsible for not updating that side of the argument now one of you mentioned how difficult it is to get a hold of this literature and it's extremely difficult and Ehrman had interns trying to do the research about getting it all updated and reinventing Jesus we said we have nearly I think 2,000 copies fragments especially of Homer's writings Martin West has been especially helpful to give us the information on this the problem you have is that when you read standard introductions to Greco-Roman literature they won't tell you the numbers of manuscripts what they'll tell you is these are the best manuscripts that we've used to reconstruct the texts and there's a lot of copies of this and so trying to get a total number is next to impossible you literally have to write to these people and then they say well I don't know and even West said this manuscript over here might be the same as this one over here catalogued in something other than LDEP so he just wasn't sure now I have a question switching gears here about the statement that was used in the largest paper about in Jude there's one new variant for every hundred and fifty words and frankly the way this came across to me is it sounds sensationalist is what so many apologists are saying I don't know what you're saying what does that mean there's a whole lot more variants than one every hundred and fifty words one distinct variant per word copied that's the key does that make sense to you that makes no sense at all so one distinct variant one variant doesn't matter how many manuscripts are tested but one's reading yeah the number of words that are copied in this total number of manuscripts so if you take an S the total number of manuscripts is not of that difficult task you need a comparison that compares variants to what's actually being copied and that gives you the total number of words that are being copied not per manuscript right so the most reasonable comparison for the number of variants is the number of words they got okay that's one way it just needs to be clarified more or else that's going to be used by apologists and they'll go run with it and say there's only 16 variants per manuscript there's an algorithm and there is an issue with that because it means if two different guys make the same mistake twice count it as one word now let me also respond to Elijah's comment where he said although I haven't asked Dan yet it's a reasonable assumption the details of his agreement about the marked fragment of my nondisclosure concluded a real publication which has been delayed considerably even though it might have looked like a sure deal of the time to the drafter of the agreement let me respond to that I have signed a nondisclosure agreement and I'm not allowed to talk about that so let's move on I can either affirm nor deny that this fragmented mark exists but normally one doesn't sign nondisclosure agreements over pigments pigments and fragments 7Q5 you mentioned Hoseo Kalin and Elijah and there's another identification besides Firstinon it could be simply an ancient honeydew list because you have 10 letters you can distinguish clearly and right in the middle are chi and tib that would be and some and I can easily see some wife telling her husband I want you to go to the store and hit some milk and some bread and some butter and it's an ancient honeydew list this was in fact the doctoral dissertation of Conan DePonio Parsons in 1975 on 7Q5 published by Technosma Press in Snowflake, Saskatchewan at least he's mentioned in a footnote in Bibbsack but he doesn't exist nor does that dissertation in Snowflake, Saskatchewan but it is in a footnote Mezker Mezker originally agreed with O'Callaghan's identification by the way and then he changed after that ok moving on to Greg Blaner's paper one of the things I would mention is I liked a lot of what you had to say Greg and especially the later manuscripts can go back to earlier and give some really great examples however it seems in some respects that your part 1 was based on your part 2 where's Greg? and your part 2 was showing non-visiting manuscripts in the visiting age that part 1 was trying to show how the visiting text was as good as or not as good as an important contender for original wording and so it seems like those two halves don't really help each other that much now you were at times saying I'm using this just as an illustration to show that later scribes often use an early text and I think you did that but just be careful about how you word that in the chapter so it doesn't look like you're trying to say the same thing and I did like what you were arguing about what it does in places in the axe ECM where you've got a distinctively visiting reading so those things are helpful I would have a criticism about using Sturz's data about the visiting text where he argued you mentioned this in a footnote that Harry Sturz found 150 distinctive visiting papyrus alignments and when Gordon Fee critiqued that work he said a lot of these are not distinctively visiting and a lot of them are predictable variants that two scribes completely independently of each other could have come up with it is significant that the visiting text agrees with p66 on many occasions where the scribe is not particularly careful and almost never with p75 and so those are some of the things that maybe at least nuance that a little bit bringing Fee's critique I think would be helpful all right Jacob Peterson and then I'll pass this on to the rest of the board because I have nothing else to say I just need to use the restroom so Jacob here's some other categories of manuscripts that I don't know whether we should count or not you've got the Psalms-Ode's manuscripts that are in the Gregory Allan system for lectionaries where you've got a Psalter plus Ode's plus two New Testament lections what's his name Jacob I know you pretty well Jacob and those were counted by I understand those were counted by Gregory but Allan said no we're not going to count those and same with the Lit manuscripts that is the lectionaries that are liturgical where it might be just like a ukulogion just a part of it that's got some lections in it and when I was working at the National Library of Greece and doing the preparatory work on these manuscripts that we were photographing I discovered about 30 or 40 lectionaries there that we did not count I think we photographed them but we can't count them as New Testament manuscripts because they would be a liturgical with only two or three lections so what do we do with those do we give rid of those 200 or so manuscripts that Gregory counted but Allan didn't even though they have a lectionary number how do we deal with that or should we add these in or just go ahead with the inconsistency so I like to have specific numbers but I have no idea how to do that with that inconsistency in place so that's another issue to wrestle with here's another question that is you've got manuscripts that are dependent on printed text you talked about 24-27 I think but we also and that has now been discounted as an authentic manuscript but we also have about a dozen manuscripts I believe that are based on Erasmus's Novel Instrumentum for Revelation because they have these textual variants that he created from the last leaf of Revelation where he back translated it from Latin and created at least 17 textual variants and then we count those manuscripts are they really based entirely on the TR at that point or are they just based on that last leaf from Erasmus so there needs to be more work done on these later manuscripts since the printing press whether we should really count them or not that would be a nice dissertation to do and let me just mention one other category of manuscript and then I think I had one of the comments for Jacob one other category of manuscripts is what happens when you have the ink of a manuscript with no longer the physical material that the ink is on we have one example of that at least to the monastery of Stefano of Matera where you have a magistral text where the ink is in reverse image onto a minuscule text and so you are getting a mirror image of what that magistral actually said and so it's backwards if you held it up to a mirror you'd be able to see it the right way it can't be it's not a palimpsest because the magistral text is on top of the minuscule text and that's all we have this has been cataloged I mean it's in the Gregorian system and I forgot what the number was but that's fascinating the material no longer exists just the ink do we count that as a manuscript so those are some other issues I don't know if you want to put a footnote in there there's another one of those as well that I'm working on at the moment is everybody signing on this question? not at all well finally the last thing to say to Jacob is you talked about the number of manuscripts the data manuscripts when we have more manuscripts it ends up being worthless for reconstructing the text was I think roughly the wording I would say no that's not true because of the high agreement of these Byzantine manuscripts with yearly manuscripts if all we had was say half a dozen manuscripts from the 11th century or later and we were missing the last leaf of Revelation I'd say we can probably reconstruct the text pretty well and end up with what's called the textus receptus I'd say that comes pretty close so if they're not worthless it's worthless if it just completely disagrees with what we think is that it becomes another vote towards that otherwise and so I think Richard Bentley's argument that the more manuscripts the more variance the better chance we have of getting back to the original is an important point I don't want you to overstate the case these manuscripts they don't help us as you said convincing somebody of Christian faith but more manuscripts are one more vote in terms of this stuff has been out there it was accessible Christians knew about it and the text is reliable and that no essential doctrine is jeopardized by any of these viable plans I'll respond to that point I think so I think I'd push back and say that it potentially strengthens the nuanced point that I was making is that since, say, West Gunn court the discovery of a thousand manuscripts hasn't changed our text all that much in terms of its overall reliability and if we're going to say that the TR was ultimately reliable in terms of the major things of the faith then all of the manuscripts since then are attributed to maybe more reliable but in terms of its general reliability 2,000 manuscripts or really 5,000 manuscripts since you used what 16 hasn't changed much so potentially strengthens the argument depending on which way you want to take that I'm saying that you have this general reliability and each of these manuscripts becomes valuable in that it is an affirmation of what we already believe to be the case although when you get into the details you've got about 5,000 differences over the modern Nestle text and the TR maybe I should just say a lot of us know each other so I think you're offended by all the jokes the text of prison is very detailed this is something I've got a little bit of levity to say anybody want to respond to anything else what are the presenters oh just Peter there's another whole set of categories of manuscripts and witnesses in the amulets, inscriptions and other such things that's in the chapter in your side is it in the book where can we go to learn more I don't know let me one comment this last point about more manuscripts in classical textual criticism about monium which we try to relate manuscripts to each other and part of the point that we're relating manuscripts to each other so that you can actually eliminate some of those from consideration for the purpose of establishing the original text it doesn't mean those eliminated manuscripts become completely worthless in all senses it means for establishing the original text they become redundant and therefore unnecessary so if we find another menuscule and it looks exactly like a menuscule we already have it largely cannot contribute anything to the original text that we don't already have do you think that's great to say or no I would want to go a bit further I think every manuscript does something even if it's just insurance against the nuclear cataclysm so I think that we mustn't think about the more there's changing the New Testament their purpose but each one of them is a witness I think we enjoy the fact that we have all these witnesses I think what we want to correct against is this idea that we're waiting for one more manuscript before we can trust the Bible that we don't need to do so a new major discovery is exciting and it may tell us something we don't know or it may show up what we already didn't think before but it's not like we're waiting to discover the truth in Christian Christianity is that fair to say I think we can all agree on that we can become more true as we go exactly is someone making that argument that's the question I think we have we don't disagree with the point you're making but it's just a mysterious person out there making arguments like that I don't know who's making the argument they're waiting for one more manuscript to be able to believe that's behind some of the excitement about the mainstream discoveries I'll say it's implicit in a lot of the arguments so my paper doesn't have the citation of all that many people and it's because no one's making explicit arguments it's more of they throw out a big number and then the assumption is therefore Christianity is true and so it's developed in the later arguments they're not making that connection explicit but it's hey let's talk about the manuscripts as a point of reliability it's a huge number I just wonder if that's the inference you're drawing of what people are saying rather than what they're actually intending to do I mean there is some connection between witnesses to the text and the proof of Christianity they may not tease out all of that but I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to introduce people to a subject who don't know anything about manuscripts at all the person writing may not be the world's greatest expert on manuscripts but they're trying in good conscience to do that and in the short space of a popular book they may not lay out all of the connections that all right, let's wait for the both of them I agree I want to ask a question oh, Pete, you're more intimate he doesn't lie always I did, you're a quite right I had to sleep in a room with four other people anyway that's so I guess the structural question I had about the book was the myths so this is I think the question is are we documenting these myths are all these myths documented in popular evangelical apologetics is that what the myths are about we give ourselves the caveat that not all of them are evangelical myths but most of them are okay there were some things we really want to talk about but no, they're not a myth so most evangelicals don't know very much about the ancient translations at all so that might be their myth but it'll be a book that informs Christians and evangelical apologetics what I said two things about the book one is that Dan mentioned the introduction we mentioned that we mentioned Herman in the introduction and we clearly say I have to think that most of the errors actually are on the other side but I'm not interested in correcting them to shore up their conclusion the aim of the book is to correct our bad arguments in order to shore up the right conclusion of the many people we think use some of these bad arguments and let me just also say we think there are plenty of good examples and they're on the panel so we're not saying that this is everyone is using it what we're saying is there's mistakes that get repeated over and over and over again kind of like mistakes in manuscripts and they get multiplied and get broadcast to large audiences and that's what we want to try to correct let me ask a question to the panel what do you think is the connection between inerrancy and apologetics on this front I think there's a connection should there be a connection there's a question I think we need to distinguish between inerrancy we when I'm dealing with a skeptic in apologetics I'm not trying to argue for inerrancy that's something that is an affirmation we make by faith that is based on the character of God and the plausibility we find in what we have that's not the argument we're trying to make in apologetics the argument we're trying to make in apologetics is that the text as we have it is a reliable text that represents a reliable story and that's what we're confronting the skeptic with in apologetics and so I'm not personally I'm concerned with the connection between textual criticism and apologetics in I'm sorry in textual criticism and apologetics in inerrancy in that textual criticism and apologetics yes but not inerrancy because that's not what we're trying to do that's an internal discussion we have in some sense that we should affirm and we do affirm in apologetics that's a different something different we're trying to do then I take a little different approach on it where I would say depending on your view of textual criticism your theory we do have evangelicals who hold to inerrancy who embrace the major schools of textual criticism therefore the text that they have reconstructed as original is inerrant and consequently the issue of inerrancy and textual criticism is a moot issue another way to put this is as Peter Waves did in his response to Herman I think on the radio some time ago was Herman keeps talking about how we don't have the original text so how can you claim that it's inerrant well we don't have the original manuscripts but we do have the original words and consequently you can test the theory whether inerrancy is violated by this and I wrote an article that I got I don't even remember the name of the book nor the name of the article but it has to do with is inerrancy something that is attacked by these textual variants and I listed I think a dozen of the most egregious problems for inerrancy that are related to textual criticism and they do not even hit the radar of the big problems for inerrancy and so I think it's we have the original words we have the original text that says above or below the line of the Nestle text for all practical purposes that's where we have the original and we can test whether inerrancy is true on that basis so I don't think there's a problem for it all people, do you want to say anything? yeah I think what we've got to think about is that you don't need to have any copies to believe that when God speaks he's a truthful character, everything he says is true, that's what inerrancy is fundamentally about I think there's also a question of the burden of proof so I think that back in the days of Erasmus you know, John's Gospel still began in R.K.N. Hologos and there was a production of reformers and others who read the descriptions that this was what was first given and the burden of proof is on anyone to show it's not what was first given so it's not that you have to go out and verify and show that something hasn't changed it's that simply there's no reason to think it has changed and so you accept that and that's where I think we can say, text is an ambiguous word but original wording we have the we have the original wording it's original to believe we have the original wording or it's your job to show we don't so that is it's a disprovable presumption and so it's simply that's the epistemic status of what you have until someone shows you some great argument or early manuscript to the contrary there's no reason not to receive a witness that comes from the past the other thing is the question of not to confuse the question of our certainty about the text with the certainty of the wording or text God is completely certain about all the words he ever spoke and whether or not I'm certain about which of this variant or that variant is the one he spoke well that's a statement about me it doesn't actually depend on how certain I am at all so I need to bow that in mind God's words can be completely certain and I might be drunk and not have a clue which one of them is so that doesn't I appreciate the doctrine of scripture for whatever reason presumably you think we do have most of it on the word I think that there's no reason to believe we don't all of the words he gave it's the burden of proof is on someone else to demonstrate that there's good reason to believe we don't I think finding a text that you think is to make a stronger case that we don't have the wording than that we do God is I'm going to go ahead for the same time and open it to floor of questions yeah just two concerns I'm an apologist I've been doing apologetics for 25 years and one of the challenges that we face as apologists is that we don't we cannot be experts in all the fields and the nature of our business is variety and we have historical challenges, philosophical challenges theological challenges I mean in every branch so what we do and I speak for myself is rely on the experts I get your books and I don't have the PhD in what you do but I'm going to trust that you're going to be honest and you're going to give me material that I can then turn around that I put it in a way that my audience is going to understand it but this type of workshop that you guys these papers you guys have presented have been invaluable to me because every single apologist that I know in the circles that I have circulated for 25 years has been doing it wrong our approach has been a three-pronged approach I mean what's the most well-attested ancient document other than the Bible? Homer's Italy had 645 copies and that number has been forever the number then the second is how close can we get to the originals within 50 years of the original and what about accuracy? 99.5% accuracy that is something all of us are doing but we didn't pull this out of a hat and we'll go to F.F. Bruce who we would consider to be an expert on this and we'll go to Josh McDowell and we'll go to these guys and we'll take the data from them and then we'll run with it so my concern is that your book will be very beneficial to us if it doesn't turn out to be used against us and that's the goal not to use against you you can only use it for you in a sense I would without seeing the text I would request that when apologetics are being dealt with our apologists are being dealt with it would do no service to any of us to discredit Amy or you or Josh McDowell or any of these people because in doing so you're discrediting part of what we need to distinguish I'm not sure we're always great at doing this and even don't distinguish an argument from a person and their whole work if we give an example of Craig Blumber I'm hardly saying that don't trust Craig Blumber's work on a gospel that would be absurd if I'm saying on this one issue he's a good example of how easy it is to not have the right narrative so what we want to do is say let us walk you through why the statistic is wrong but to replace the stat and then replace the narrative so that you do have something to work with whether the book will give you easy sound bites to replace your current sound bites with I'm not sure we'll do that I want to leave that up to your creativity does that make sense? what we want is the truth we need to take that truth and make it digestible and part of what we're saying is we're not all great at being people that digest we actually think a lot of you are better than we are at digesting so we want to give you the ammunition that you can then figure how can I communicate this at a better level but using the same information does that make sense? check I was thinking about some of those things that Juan was talking about wondering if even the title of the book and the titles of every chapter if you might consider rethinking those instead of myth, myth, myth, myth which does come across I think to a lot of people as maybe everybody before us has been wrong something like refining the argument just changing the key a little bit marketing I understand I would say with all the things that I've engaged none of the arguments have pivoted on how much attestation there is for the New Testament it's always been on other topics that they argued against the existence of God the failures of the church to be the church and unrelated to prayer or seemingly that God isn't showing up or whatever I've only talked to one in all my years of trying to engage people on the subject that I've had the person flat say the problem is that you don't have a text without corruption and that was my brother and that took place a week ago but that's not the problem my brother went through some really tragic circumstances and so now I believe there's no God and he's latched onto this soundbite that says well you can't trust scripture and that's what he's blaming and we are this is about the bottom of the church we all have our own gifts so we're trying to do our part my concern is what this brother brought up is that that your book could be used by those who opposed God or whatever as a means to find not maybe a specific apologist but the idea of it at all so I would just say I think I'm hearing that from others as well just a real caution about how it comes across in the book sir could I jump in on this real quick I get an email at least one email every week from somebody who says I have completely converted to Ehrman's views that the text is corrupt the original or I have come back from that view and I have I'd estimate that there are at least tens of thousands of college kids who have left the church during their college years because of Barbara Ehrman's writings in particular in this quote in Jesus so this is a huge issue I call it a pre-apologetic issue namely has God said and that's the first place that they are coming to so I hear this argument all the time so well I could just verify that I have debated an atheist with a very popular website with more than 10,000 people listening and he did hit me with the you've got the numbers wrong for Homer you've got the numbers wrong you know so it's out there and look like what Pete said we wanted to know the truth and there's important questions about how we tell us so we don't miss for what we need to tell the truth for those of you who are experts and whatever it should feel the internet is huge there was a study done on atheists and atheist college groups around campus they typically became an atheist not on these kinds of grounds but after they became an atheist or their favorite crumbling they'd gobble up stuff on atheists websites and you get all these kinds of things and I think it's very important for us to be aware what's up there and if nobody's responding to it but something else comes up as a response to it that's a real problem because people will read what they want to read they'll read this atheist stuff but if there's not something right next to it the challenge is that that's a problem so I just think we need to be very aware of what's going up there on the atheist websites and be able to have those of us who can't respond and make sure that there are things up there of the challenge let me ask the panel as you've taught and written on this subject how has the apologetic issue or has the apologetic issue changed in your career? I've heard from some for example I did have a colleague who said before he wrote he as soon as never heard about text criticism and now they hear about it quite a lot is that a shared experience on the panel or like maybe you could talk to that since you've written a book yeah I mean I think the title of this whole session is growing up in the Herman era and of course we've all in one sense grown up in the last 20 years in that era with whatever page you are and so my experience is is that every year that goes by his writing has become more popular the more people want to talk about it I think a seminary education that doesn't address text critical issues at a fundamental level and whatever classes need to be addressed is going to miss the mark for these folks the problem pastors face is that it's not that they're getting asked these questions from scholars, they're getting asked these questions from the people in the Pew that are reading Kurt Eichenwald's disastrous news week article or one of Herman's books and they're thinking why do you need answers and they go to their pastor and the pastor has no idea what to say so yeah we've tried to make it something that is a foundational piece of our prep for those in ministry and I think that's becoming more and more urgent and I'm sure my colleagues would say in their seminary situations or university situations they've probably seen something very similar I would say I've served both as a pastor and as a professor and there's a distinction between so the students, the college level students they may be consuming this at the level of miscoding Jesus or some books like that but people in the Pew are absorbing a dumbed down version of it in the article and in soundbites they're seeing and everything like that so part of what we have to do is be able to deal with this on both of those levels at the same time on that very basic level the problem is I think with textual criticism you should be honest about it is sufficiently complex that giving a soundbite answer is almost always the wrong answer and that's just hard at that point and I think we can be honest with ourselves and with others and be able to say this is and then give an idea of something but at the same time to say now there's much more to this to add caveats to that so that we can make sure we're being honest to what we're doing but at the same time actually engaging the questions just to be aware of that but I had a great group of of course I just taught on how on the history of the Bible and those students were far more interested than I think it would have been in the past in textual criticism and in digging into this I had them actually read misquoting Jesus and and actually learned to engage with those arguments in that and it was a really good experience for them in doing that as well just a quick survey if I may other people in this room who would say that they were drawn into textual criticism because of the writings of Barthembe and their engagement with it anyone please we've got one two anyone three that's not bad actually because I think you'll find out round the bend there are lots and lots of evangelicals taking textual criticism more seriously because of our friend Barthembe has actually drawn people into this so the great result of all of this is it's going to be far more Bible positive textual criticism because of his work so I'll just test my own take I didn't get into textual criticism because of them but my interest was increased significantly we have a former student right here I'll add to that that was the exact question I was going to ask I think everyone in this room probably has some critiques of him what would you say have been some of the positives of his work obviously do you see any others are we willing to admit those out loud should we only do those in secret I mean what have been some positive consequences of his work let me address that which was part of what I wanted to say anyway that is one of the things that Herman has done in his television interviews his radio interviews newspaper magazine interviews is he starts out being very sensationalistic and I have seen audiences gasp when he says well the story of the woman caught adultery might not actually be part of the Gospel of John and yet in their own Bibles in the margin it says these things first don't have it so it's as if well they're just not reading this I think what Herman has done positively is he has let the cat out of the bag of the issues that scholars know about and that lay people should know about because of what their Bibles are doing but they don't know about them and consequently what one of the tasks I think we have is to address those very passages that have some doubt to them about their authenticity and people need to hear this Christians need to hear this from us not from the enemies of the Gospel and so in the debates I've had with Bart I start off by saying he and I agree that these passages are probably not authentic which takes all the teeth out of his argument he doesn't have any kind of a shock and awe kind of a thing after that and then I conclude by quoting him and misquoting Jesus page 252 of the paper back where he says no essential doctrine of the Christian faith is jeopardized by any variance and I said well we could have started with this but then the debate would be a lot shorter so he has done some positive things for us to talk about these very issues but we need to be talking about it too I think it raises the question Danny you mentioned I always tell my students or people I talk to about it most of the most interesting variants are in your English Bible is there something we need to be doing better on this front and what is it? Reading the Bible Reading the Bible Reading the book though Reading the book I don't know I don't know what else to do I'll mention this I wonder what most pastors do when they get to the longanita mark or the built supplement whether that would be an opportunity within and I'm not saying I should turn into lectures but I'm saying there's an opportunity to educate your churches at those junctures in appropriate ways and where the Bible came from my experience is in the evangelical world most people in the pew believe the Bible but in the evangelical world most people in the pew also have no idea where the Bible came from or how it got here in their life the only person that's going to be around to do that is the person who's been charged with their spiritual health and as a pastor and so I go back again to the occasion on this topic and the pastors at some level not at a crazy technical level at some level need to probably address it from pulpits I think in our attempt to make user friendly sermons at times we don't deal with it when I'm preaching I want to when there's a text that is questionable what I would point out is it takes a minute out of the sermon to say you know some manuscripts say this and some say this but I want you to notice that really the whole point of this passage wasn't changed by the difference boom and you move on and what you just expressed to them is faith in the text they have but also an honest awareness that there are manuscripts that are different in that and that's what if you do that on a regular basis when you get those texts in your regular cycles of preaching what will happen over time is when they hear something sensational from somebody like Bart Ehrman they just aren't as shocked by it at that point and that's what we're trying to do we want to make sure that when they hear it from the skeptic it's the second time they heard it and because what I get from college students over and over they get a hold of me on this is I got to college and I've never heard this before I've never heard it before okay well I want to say not being an evangelical even something of a liberal nothing that Bart Ehrman ever said in his books is new everything is under the yes in Germany we had discussions about this over a hundred years now Ehrman came up with his he makes everything very sensational what is trivial many things of it certainly there are variants many variants but the variants don't change the meaning of the gospel many things and even I also worked as a pastor for some years and I had no problem in preaching to say this letter I think most of the scholars think the letter of Paul was from his school so but the letter is right the texts have reached to them I think the most important thing is that we have to be honest to our audience and I would not ever say this can be used by some bad people but everything every truth can be used for some bad purpose so I think we have to as a scientific person we have to find out the truth and then we can act as apologetic and say now what do we do with this historical truth or with this historical hypothesis they have because one thing I always think Ehrman and all the others they say scientific theology is something that is totally true now if we are working scientifically we only have hypothesis about the truth the word of God as a Lutheran theologian I think the word of God is not identical with the scripture word by word the word of God is really in the scripture but for example as a Lutheran theologian I believe in the prego prego I believe in the father I believe in the son I believe in the Holy Spirit but nowhere I believe in the Holy Scripture I believe in the word of God but to say but to believe in the word of God the scripture doesn't mean that the scripture is inherent in that case that every word every sentence really is word by word the word of God for me in herency as a Lutheran theologian what concerns the truth of the gospel what concerns my believe what I have to believe and what I have to do in life their scripture is in herency because scripture is the only way to find out what God wants from me but I think we should distinguish between the gospel the word of God and this text critical problems we have is very important that's my job but it never changed my believe this is very very important take the oldest manuscript on the one side and the youngest manuscripts you will not find another gospel but airman tries to say you will find another gospel he talks about many Christianities that's not true that's not true from a historical point of view and it's not true with my belief I can say many of the pieces of airman are definitely wrong not because I have been and not because he's an atheist not because he doesn't believe anymore but because his argument does not sound and so I think the most important thing is for making apologetics is to be true and honest to ourselves and to the audience because we are not honest that we all put our back on us thank you very much do you want to explain that? I think what Holder was saying was very important we are confident that the text itself the original text that God gave is inerrant and even some of us, most of us probably that original wording is available somewhere it's there to be discovered but we don't have to have the actual every word we don't have to have every word that Paul wrote or that Luke wrote to say that we have the word of God so yeah and that's and ultimately we don't want to lose the forest for the trees and all of our discussion of the manuscripts and the variants and so forth and as has been said before that will not bring someone to God God himself, the gospel and the word of God, Scripture are all self-authenticating they prove themselves and that's what brings to faith I was just going to say in terms of resources for the church Van Wallace's 18-hour class on text criticism just went up on biblicaltraining.org and they also have a 3-hour summary that he did for biblicaltraining.org however you need to read a book to fix all the mistakes and myths that I have in this I have a question on Herman I've heard several apologists use the tactic of pitting Herman the scholar against Herman the sensational popular writer is that an accurate argument? I mean I'm not an expert on Herman but I've heard several be that those sources, academic works, which seem to contradict some of his statements as popular works when Herman did a critique of the James of the ECM he said well there was very little difference from the nestly text one, maybe two variants and he said it seems like what we're at now in text criticism is a mopping up job in other words we've arrived at the original let's move on to something else and then he writes his popular work where he says we have no idea what the original text is but I think his sensationalism has now become his conviction I think he is moving towards that every time he writes another book it moves more in that direction when we first debated in 2008 he felt that intrinsic evidence was important, that is what did the author say now he says I have no idea what the author says so he has to throw that complete category of text criticism out and he's moved from agnosticism now to atheism so he keeps moving further and further to the left so I'd say there isn't much of a difference now between the two there was before when he's pushed on that can he show a progression of evidence that has cost him to move in that direction or not can he show the dots of how he has now disagreed with his earlier self I've asked him about that and one of the things that he has said is in our debates I am not allowed to use his earlier works against him yeah and so at one point in one of our debates I showed all these books that he had written he assumes he knows what the bible originally said in 99% of the places and then he writes this quote in Jesus where he assumes we can't know what it originally said and he did a blog about that where he said you know Wallace's citing books that I wrote 30 years ago and so how could he possibly use that against me I've changed my views well one book was written 30 years ago one was written 3 months before that and he was still saying the same thing so he was being very selective in how he responded to that I ask everybody to have an overview about the Islamic world is there something similar going on like an Islamic part of Yemen and what is the state of the Quran textual criticism I have no idea there are some who are working on the Quran textual criticism I forgot his name in the film I did it at London School of Theology and there is some criticism with Quran anybody know his name on there I know I see it now Dan Rubaker doing some work on that the bigger thing is Keith Small Keith Small is small he's done some really good work there is now more work being done on the Quran palimpsest manuscripts that are pre-Uthman that seemed to contradict what Uthman had to say but in Small's dissertation what he essentially argued is that both of them are reliable texts and that even though the Quran can't get asked Uthman with the New Testament we have the main scripts that differ significantly more than with the Quran both we can get pretty much back to the original text and so now the question becomes okay what do they say not or what do they teach rather than how do we know what they said so he's done some good work and there are some others as well I'd like to ask the panel to be honest with our audiences and say let them know about these problems in their texts just imagine my church saying somebody will stand up and say Jesus said that not a John or a Tittle disappeared from God's work how would you handle that there is an assumption that the Bible teaches the doctrine of its own preservation and it's based on about five verses of that being one of them some people actually like to quote from the Olivet Discourse where heaven and earth will pass away but my words will not pass away as though that's talking about the same thing well if that's the case then Jesus must have spoken for only two hours because if you take I mean if you take all the red letters in the Gospels and you read them at a reverential pace assuming they're all different settings that's two hours of reading so he never said another word because none of his words were able to pass away those passages are either talking about the promises of God or the commands of God the word of God cannot be broken this kind of thing it's not talking about the written scripture being available to us today so I don't have a doctrine of preservation that says we have the original I argue for that on the basis of historical evidence not on a theological basis there's a tendency sometimes that we have as even adults to see the word word in a vital and assumed that means written scripture any other questions I want to maybe try to end early since I know this is the last session let me just say for those of you who are scholars in every way I was looking at a catalog for the great courses people want to be able to get into the US around the world to be able to actually have a video of this course and they have about three things in the New Testament two of them were Bart Ehrman I think someone can write to them and say Bart Ehrman doesn't represent where scholarship is on these things and here's a person you might consider who is a very eloquent instructor to encourage them to include something to get a little bit of balance so if people will read that and they think these are the top scholars in their field and then they get harder write to them I'm going to give the last word to be head that's alright, is he awake if you have any final words you would like to leave us with you came very far that's all that is to play the words always be ready if anybody asks you to give an account of the hope that is in you