How We Got Our Bible L8

Opening

The words of God to then, okay, we have them, we have the letters of Paul, we have the perfect Old Testament, we have the Gospels, the church has accepted them and started to copy them, and so now we get into what we call the transmission, which is how it got to us, how it got to us. And what we want to always remember is that God's hand was in the giving of His Word, but it also had to be in the preservation of His Word. It wouldn't have done him any good to just be involved in the giving of His Word and not the preservation. It's interesting that when the material, and it's a massive corpus of material on manuscript evidence and the canon of Scripture, and that as soon as men leave the apostolic era, you're, not all of them, you'll find some believers in there, but as soon as men leave the apostolic era, there's no more Scripture.

There's no more Scripture, it's just all, it's all an invented form of science. And faith goes out the window. And to the point that many of those in modern times that have undertaken to determine the true text of Scripture are men that aren't even born again. And I feel, I don't think this is unreasonable, that a man who is tasked with studying manuscripts and working on the Word of God for everyone else should be a holy man and a man of faith. I think that should be a minimum requirement, don't you? And so, I want you to look at Romans chapter 1, Romans chapter 1, and I'm not saying he has to be a Baptist and has to agree with me, alright?

I'm not saying that, but a man with the fear of the Lord? what I'm saying? Romans chapter 1, Romans chapter 1, and I want you to see what Paul says here. We talked last week, and this is kind of where we finished up, that the Gospel was always meant, and it started out as an oral Gospel, right? Before the New Testament was even written, the Gospel had spread to the ends of the empire. Before everyone even had the written Gospels. And it just spread by word of mouth, right? Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. But look at Romans chapter 1, and verse 14, and Paul says this, I am debtor, I owe it, I owe it.

It's a great verse. Both to the Greeks, and we talked about this last week. So, Christianity entered a Greek world, right? That's why, while it was the Roman Empire, we call it the Greco-Roman world, because the language of the world was Greek, and I mean the known world, the civilized world. And so that's, did I go, did we go there to Acts? We went to Acts, where Paul says, canst thou speak Greek, right? The centurion asked Paul. And so, Greek was how you got around, okay? But he says both to the Greek, and so that term in the Bible, the Greeks, is meant the educated, the civilized, right? And beyond the bounds of empire, there was still a very dark world.

A world where most people, they had a language, of course, but they didn't have a written language. And a written language is one of those fundamental elements to a civilization, right? So that you can condense, outline, and pass along knowledge, right? But most of the world didn't have, a lot of the world didn't have written language. They had languages, but not written. Now he says this, both to the Greeks, and look what he says, and to who? The barbarians. Now, barbarian doesn't just mean, Conan the Barbarian. It doesn't just mean Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guy dressed in skins and having a club. It just means barbaric, as in unlettered or uncivilized, right?

Okay, so Paul says, I'm better both to the Greeks and to the barbarians. So, when we talk about this, and this is where we left off last week, we talk about how the Bible was quickly translated into Latin, because that was the local language when you got west. When you went west, when you got west of where, like, Greece and Macedonia are on the Ionian area, and you got into Italy, and then you got into what is today France and Spain, and all of North Africa, there was a lot more Latin than Greek when you went west. And, of course, Latin was the language of the army, and it was the language of the Roman government.

The Lesson

And so, right away, right away, the Bible started being translated into Latin. And I think that we, I think this is where we left off. Is this where we left off? Yes, it was. All right, and how quickly was it translated? Oh, I think I talked about this, right? How you would have a side-by-side Greek and Latin notes. A pastor would have that. So, initially, and I don't think, I do not believe this lasted very long, but initially you would have a copy of Paul's epistle, say, in Greek, but your congregation was Latin. So, you're preaching in Carthage, you're preaching in Lyon, you're preaching in Spain, right? Okay, so your people speak Latin, they don't speak Greek, but you do.

And so you would have your notes in Greek, and then you would translate them yourself over into Latin and preach to the people. And the Bible was meant to go to everybody. It wasn't meant just to stay in the language of the priesthood, right? That's one of the biggest mistakes the Catholic Church made, was that they kept that mass and they kept their liturgy in Latin and didn't allow it to be translated into any of the native tongues, right? They kept the Bible for most of the people, right? And so the Bible just became something that was in church, right? And when did you have the English Reformation, I mean, excuse me, the European Reformation?

When the printing press was invented and everybody got a copy of the Bible in their language, right? And then light came into the world, okay? So, just as an anecdote here of how this worked, right? The skeleton martyrs who were, they were, there were 12 Christians that were put to death for Christ during the reign of Marcus Aurelius around 180 AD in North Africa. They were brought before the consul and asked about their faith and why they wouldn't sacrifice to the gods, the standard thing. But one of the guys, his name was Sparatus. He had a satchel with him. He carried a satchel around with him. And there's a record where the consul asked him, he said, what's that in your bag?

And he says, I got letters from a holy man. His name's Paul. And so that's 180 AD. These guys are already packing around Paul's epistles in Latin. And so it, like I said, it got translated really early. Now, Latin, and we're going to talk about this for a second because the Bible was meant to go on to all the world. Latin is very important. It brought, Latin brought Christianity to Europe. It brought civilization to Europe. It brought Christianity to England, right? Christianity to England came with missionaries, showed up there with a Latin Bible. And that's why you have the gospel. Latin ruled the Western world for a thousand years, almost all.

When I talk about the Western world, I'm talking about after the split of the Roman Empire. These are Roman provinces. But after the split of the Roman Empire between East and West. So in 395, the Roman Empire split, right? Between the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire. And then shortly thereafter, and we'll show you this, Rome fell. It actually capitulated several times to barbarian invasions. But I just want to show you, like, the language that you would use to get around, okay? So, in some eras and still in some parts of the world, the language you use to get around is French, right? Now, a lot of times the language you use to get around that works in a lot of places is English or German, right?

Depending on where you're at. In the Roman Empire, it was kind of like this. These were Greek areas, right? And Syrian was more of a native dialect. And the Bible was translated into that very early, right? These are all Greek areas, all right? And then this area was Greek and Latin, of course, because it's the center of the Roman Empire, a lot of Greeks. Okay? And then the further west you went, right? It was more Latin. And it was a vulgar type of Latin, just a real common type of Latin. And that's kind of the common languages of the known world at that time. Now, when Rome split, when the empire split right here, the empire was no longer united politically.

And what happened was, is this part of the world, which is the part we know a lot more about because it has more to do with us, right? The Roman Empire existed here until 1453 AD. The Roman Empire continued in the east for another thousand years in Constantinople. But they called it the Byzantine Empire, okay? But this is what we know about because this is England and France and Germany and, more to do with our heritage. This part of the world, even though the Bible was given in Greek, very quickly this part of the world became more Latin. Very quickly. In fact, I was reading something the other day where you had these Irish monks up here in Hibernia and in the 5th century, 6th century, and they're all reading Greek and translating Greek Bible manuscripts at a time when Pope Gregory, the, head of the church, couldn't speak Greek himself.

So this world went Latin. It went all Latin. And then on top of that, on top of that, right, and this is just a simple map, but this is what happened to the world in the 4th and 5th centuries, okay? All this brown here is the Roman Empire, right? All the way up to Hadrian's Wall, all of North Africa, right? All of Southern Europe, right? Borders the Danube because they could never beat the Germans, right? But they just couldn't, right? They're just too nasty. And so, but that was the Roman world. But what happened was, right, these people living up here, your ancestors, got sick of living in the forest and got sick of horrible farmland and got sick of no sunshine and a hundred different things.

And the empire got overrun by what they call the barbarian tribes, right? So, like, the Gals moved into Brittany, or Britain, excuse me, and then the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, right? They're all Germanic tribes. They came over to Britain, and that's where you get, like, the Anglo-Saxon language, right? And Angles, that's where you get the word England, okay? Of course, you had the Huns that were way over from the Asian steppe. They came all through here and tore things up. You got people like the Vandals that really moved, really moved. They came out of this area, what would be modern-day Germany, and then they moved all the way across Europe and actually crossed the Straits here and set up Vandal kingdoms in North Africa and the Isles of the Mediterranean, of course, even attacked Rome.

Then you have these people, the Goths. These people are way back from, like, Sweden. Again, Germanic tribes, right? They went all over the place. They went all over the place. They sacked Rome, set up the Visigothic kingdoms, right, in Spain, and that's why, Spaniards don't look like Mexicans, right? They're tall, and a lot of them are fair-skinned, and they got blonde hair because they're Germanic. They have Germanic blood in them. But this, what this did, what this did is, okay, you basically had Greek and you had Latin, but then you had a complete influx of barbaric tongues, Germanic tongues and Gallic tongues, all right? And this contributed to what the world needed as far as scripture goes.

And I'll show you that. Let's see here. Here's one right here. Okay, here's another map. Okay, so this is Europe in 476 AD. That's where we date the fall of Rome from when they capitulated to the Ostrogoths. You have the Eastern Roman Empire, and then you have the Western Roman Empire, and then you have these areas that are controlled by Gallic people and German people. Okay, so what do you have? You have Latin-speaking churches on this side, and you have Greek-speaking churches in this area. Then over here, you have Syrian churches, and these are the three main streams of Bible manuscripts that were preserved the best. These three streams, Latin, Greek, and Syrian, and they all come from an early era.

So the Bible was finished in Greek in 95 AD. It was probably translated in Latin in 120 AD, and it was translated into Syrian from 120 to 150 AD, very seriously, or very early. But the Syrian churches split off of the Greek churches and kind of had a lot of doctrinal differences, and so they kind of have their own manuscript stream. Okay? And what happened was, and I'll kind of show you this, this is what you have here in 350 AD, you have a missionary named Euphilus, or they call him Wufilus. And he translated the Bible into, he went up into the Germans along the Danube, and he translated the Bible into the East Germanic language.

All right? And then you had the West Germans, and I want to show you this Latin influence. The West Germans, their written language, right, because they spoke German for a long time, but it was written in Latin characters. So what these people had was they had a, they had a spoken language, but they didn't have a written language. They couldn't read the Bible. You couldn't give them a Bible to preach to someone else. They didn't speak Latin. And so what these missionaries did is they would, they would learn their language, they would learn to speak their language, and then they would phonetically, they would give their language a sound, right, and a symbol.

And so that's why West German was a Germanic language, but it was given Latin characters. And that's why a lot of different languages have an alphabet that looks similar to ours, right? But the language is very different. And what I'm showing you is that the languages of Europe grew out of Latin. Are you following me so far? Okay, good, good, good. You're still with me. All right, just some examples of this. So like this, Latin in this area, I mean, excuse me, French is a mix of Gallic, Germanic, and Latin, right? With the Latin alphabet. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, right? Okay. You've got Latin plus Anglo-Saxon equals English.

English is 60% Latin roots. So your English language came from the Latin language, mixed with the native Anglo-Saxon language and a few other things, right? It's 29% words came directly from Latin, and another 30% came from languages like French that are also basically based on Latin. And so Latin gave Europe its modern languages. But how did it give it its modern languages? By the one thing that they could all pass around. That was a Latin Bible. Latin Bible brought the written word to your ancestors. That's where civilization comes from. It comes from this book. You can go on and on about this, right? So Spanish is, these guys, these Goths, actually ended up over here.

So Spanish is a mix of local dialects, Visigothic, and Latin. It's very Latin-based. We call these like the Romance languages, and there's a bunch of them. And so the modern languages of Western Europe are directly related to the influence of the Latin Bible. Now, why am I saying all this? Go to John chapter 19. John chapter 19. I want you to look at John chapter 19. I want you to... The Lord knew what he was doing because he knew what was going to happen. The Lord knew... Rome crucified his son. Those are Roman nails, right? We know the Jews put him to death, but Rome had something to do with it.

Pilate could have let him go, right? They put the nails in Christ's hands. They stuck the spear in his side, right? Rome's going to get there. The Lord knew that, right? The Lord knew that, and he already had plans for it. And John chapter 19, all right? I'll hold your place there. I want you to see this, all right? When you go a little more east, the Slavic Bible, translated in about 900 A.D., all right? Their language was, once again, not written, but instead of giving them a Latin alphabet, it was based on the Greek alphabet, right? So the written Slavic language, or what we call the Cyrillic alphabet, used by 250 million people today, including Russians and Ukrainians and Bulgarians, right?

Came out of the need to translate spiritual texts into their language and give them a written language. So that's the Slavic Bible. Well, the Armenian and Georgian script is dated to Christianization in 400. And so I just want to show you this. It's an example of how the Bible brought light to the world in more than one way. Now, the modern languages of Eastern Europe directly related to the influence of the Greek and Latin Bibles. So the modern languages of Western Europe are directly related to the influence of the Latin Bible. And I will give you, here's two examples, and I think I already talked about them, a little bit.

But to the Greek and to the barbarians, okay? So the Goths, this is Euphilus right here. Now, the only thing I don't, these pictures, you get what you can get, right? I have a feeling he wasn't dressed like that, okay? When he's preaching to those barbarians. Probably looked exactly like them, right? But at least I found a picture where he didn't have this thing around his head. Okay, I just can't handle those, right? But he's preaching along the middle Danube to the Germanic people, right? He formed a phonetic alphabet based on Greek, Latin, and runic characters. So it was a mix, right? So here, this is the alphabet, right? So, right?

But it follows the Greek model. So it's alpha, beta, and that's a G right there. That's a gamma, a gamma. So instead of ABC, it's ABG, then delta, then epsilon, like that. But it was based on Latin and Greek and runic characters. So that's the old Gothic script that Euphilus created so that he could give the people, so he had to teach them how to read in a language he invented so that they could have the scriptures. I can't even imagine. I can't imagine not being able to read. I don't even know what I'd do. Imagine not being able to read. when the slaves were starting to give them a hard time in North Carolina back there in the mid-1700s and they passed the law that it was illegal to teach a black man to read?

Can you imagine forbidding a human being to read? I can't even imagine. I don't know what I'd do without being able to read and read his word and learn. But that's what he gave them. That's what he gave those people. That's what he gave your ancestors. So he translated the Bible into the script that he invented. Now the Goths moved west, I told you that, and it was assimilated into Latin to form the Spanish language. Here's another example to the Greek and to the barbarian. This is the old Cyrillic script. Okay, so Cyril and Methodius, they were Thessalonican, Byzantine Greeks. And around the middle of the 9th century, they preached along the lower Danube.

So that would be Bulgaria today, where it enters the Black Sea area. And these people were Slavic, so Polish, Russian, Ukrainian type folks. They created the Galgalitic script, which is an alphabet out of Greek characters. So some guys made an alphabet out of Latin in the West. They made alphabets out of Greek in the East. So the languages of Eastern and Southern Europe came from a Greek, excuse me, the written languages. The written languages of Eastern and Southern Europe came from a Greek alphabet where someone was trying to give people the Word of God. The languages of Western Europe, right, came from, the written languages come from a Latin-based alphabet, again, trying to give Europe the Word of God in Latin and then in their language.

And so these guys translated the Byzantine Greek Bible into Slavonic in 870 AD. It was updated to the Cyrillic script. It's used by 250 million people today. That Cyrillic script is used by Russians, but it's also used by Turkish. It's Turkish-type people, Turkic, the Turkic languages, the Uralic languages. There's a bunch of them. Okay, but that came from these two brothers right here just trying to get people the Gospel. Now, so this is the background of your English Bible. Now I want you to look at John chapter 19. John chapter 19 and look, what do we always learn about the Bible? That it's the sure word of what? Prophecy. John chapter 19 verse 19 and Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross and the writing was Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

Closing

This title then read many of the Jews for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city and it was written in what? Greek and what? Just coincidentally. The Old Testament was given in Hebrew. We understand that. It was translated into Greek sometime in the early Christian era, maybe before, right? But, because the Bible came into a Greek and Latin world, it was almost immediately given in Latin as well. And so even on the cross, this is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, right? The one that all of Scripture points toward. It wasn't given in just the two original languages. It was given in three. Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

Why? Because the Lord knew what was going to happen. He knew what was going to happen in Europe and how the face of Europe would change forever. And he used Latin to get the truth to the west and Greek to get the truth to the east. And then to the far east he used Syrian. Now we might talk about that later, but it's mainly to do with us, right? We want to know where we got our stuff. So here's a simplified English Bible history. Now this is up to 1611. This is just up to 1611. So this is a basic overview so you kind of are not completely lost as we go through these things.

Old Testament was in Hebrew. It existed at the time of Christ. Christ never corrected at one time. Then you got the Greek New Testament was given from about 33 to 100 A.D. before the last book was finished the first books were already being passed around. Then almost immediately your Bible was translated into Old Latin for all the people in the west around 120 A.D. Now that Old Latin was updated and we'll probably talk about this next week. That Old Latin was revised and updated and standardized in 383 A.D. by a guy named Jerome. By a guy named Jerome. So what you had is in the Christian world you didn't have the Christian world of the west you didn't have one language stream.

If you add in the east which I don't have room for you got the Syrian and you got the Egyptian as well but we're just doing how we got our English Bible here if that makes sense. You didn't have for the New Testament you didn't have one language stream you essentially had two right because right from the get-go people were using Latin and the empire divided and it kind of divided the Greek and Latin worlds. Okay and so for an example here okay your incomplete Old and Middle English translations started in and the Catholic Church never put any effort into getting people the Bible in their own tongues. in fact they were they were always the priests and the bishops were pushed to get the Bible in local languages normally by whoever was on the throne so a good example of that would be Alfred the Great the great quote unquote Christian king of Wessex in the late the late ninth century I guess around 900 AD right he and other guys would push the monks and the church to translate the Bible into people's language because people Anglo-Saxons are going to church and they're sitting in church and they're listening to a sermon in Latin and a lot of them don't know Latin they don't know I don't know when they finally switched the Latin mass to English officially was it in the 60s 50s or 60s wasn't very long ago yeah I remember my dad because I remember my dad those saying all that he can cite quote the mass in Latin right because he grew up here in the mass in Latin in the 50s in North Dakota and some of you probably remember it probably remember the Latin mass okay well nothing against Latin but it's been dead since the 7th century it's been dead for a very long time right it morphed into other languages and so but there was no interest in giving that knowledge to the common people the entrance of thy word giveth light and it's best to keep the light locked up in the church with your tithe yeah I mean that's that's an oversimplification okay but it's true it's also kind of true now so there were many old and middle English translations of your English Bible attempted between 680 and 1340 mostly gospels and psalms because they would sing the psalms in church they call it the Psalter right but those are old and middle English old and middle English another term for old and middle English is Anglo-Saxon right so it's just it's a mix of Gallic and German okay it eventually became English when it mixed with Latin all right then you have the Wycliffe version John Wycliffe in 1382 that's that's the first full English Bible right but it wasn't translated from the Greek it was translated from the Latin which came from the Greek the Wycliffe version was translated from the old Latin Vulgate edited by Jerome all right and then okay historically what happened is they started to get more access to Greek manuscripts after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire the Crusades and the Renaissance and Europe began to get access to the East again especially when it came to literature and so people had the Latin and now at this point okay say 1525 when Tyndale translated the Bible in Greek or excuse me printed a Greek New Testament and then English excuse me not a not a Greek New Testament an English New Testament Erasmus printed a Greek New Testament when Tyndale did that the Bible had been in Latin for 1200 years more than that 1400 years okay what Tyndale did and by the way he ended up getting killed for it ended up getting killed for this he had to run away King Henry didn't like him tried to kill him many times eventually ended up getting some friendlies over there on the continent to put him in jail and kill him Tyndale used Erasmus' 1516 printed Greek New Testament and he translated the Bible into English from this Greek line but comparing it to the Latin and then all these guys started being updated in the 16th century there was just updates after update right why well first of all a lot of the work was done by an individual okay so like there were the guys that worked on the authorized version they worked on it for like four or five years and there was like a committee of 50 plus guys right most of these revisions were done by one or two guys running for their life or if they weren't running for their life if they had a favorable king at the time they were still it wasn't it wasn't a big organized effort it was just the initial efforts to get the Bible to the English people okay and so Tyndale was up a guy named Coverdale translated the Bible that's the first full Old and New Testament in 1534 okay a guy named Matthews updated the Tyndale in 1537 then a guy named Taverners he relooked at the Greek and updated Matthews the great Bible was an update of the Matthews Bible or what we call the second Tyndale revision it used a lot of Latin and Greek and then the Geneva Bible which was Theodore Beza and John Calvin and all those guys over in Switzerland in Europe they produced this Protestant Bible right here and it used a lot it went directly to the Hebrew and used a lot more Greek then the bishops in England decided that it wasn't liturgical enough for them so they produced the bishops Bible and now this is all in a nutshell right but there was no standard text in England there was no standard text right you had different religious factions that couldn't agree on what Bible to use and you had the church that wanted to keep the power and the Puritans that thought the church was too powerful and blah and so finally they all appealed to King James and James said okay let's let's fix this thing and so they started in 1604 and didn't finish until 1611 alright you ended up with the A.V.

Bible which was basically the standard text for 250 years it supplanted the Geneva Bible and it became the standard text until 1880 right when you got the revised version okay so but what I wanted to show you about all this is that your English Bible and I'll give you an example of that when Erasmus got to the end of the book of Revelation he didn't have verses 16 through 21 he didn't have them well for one manuscripts are scraps of paper or parchment right and the very back of the book wears out first there's that right there were corruptions which we're going to talk about next week right but everybody knew that there were those five six verses at the end of revelation but he didn't have a manuscript that had them so what he did when he printed this great new testament is he took those last verses out of the Latin and back translated them into Greek okay but he didn't have them well of course what happens a few years later a manuscript shows up that's like oh it is in the Greek Bible well we know it was in the Greek Bible because the Latin goes all the way back to the time the Bible was written does that make sense and so the Bible God you the God preserved the word his words really not in two languages in some senses he preserved them in three and that's you know from Latin you know the words you get from Latin here's some words you get from Latin justification that's a Latin word sanctification regeneration resurrection predestination reconciliation adoption salvation those are all Latin words revelation mediator grace peace those are all Latin words that's you got those from Latin your English is based on Latin and those words all came from a Latin Bible right scripture script right and so God used that all through this time and so your English Bible is a composition of both it's mainly a translation from Greek right but it's development right it's influence on our language right and a lot of the words they didn't come from Greek they came from Latin because our language is Latin right and so it was two language streams what did that Bible say he says that on the cross it was written in Hebrew Greek and Latin look at Ecclesiastes chapter 4 look at Ecclesiastes chapter 4 what are you doing preacher I'm not proving anything I'm showing you what God did does that make sense right we don't prove the existence of God we demonstrate his existence right we already have the promise of God that he would preserve his word we don't prove that we show it we show how he did it right and so look at Ecclesiastes chapter 4 I think it is Ecclesiastes chapter 4 and look what it says there in verse what verse I got written down there someone read it yeah read it what's he say amen two are better than one right look what it says in verse 12 someone read it see that two are better than one and a what is not quickly broken right what's that book say there are two that bear record in heaven the father of the word and the holy is that what it says what'd it say three right you're you're a trinity you're a body soul and spirit that's what you are God does things in threes always done things in threes it's God's number we get that right that book was preserved for you your English Bible came from three language streams it came from Hebrew Greek and Latin you say when did the Lord know that well he knew it in eternity past when did he tell you he told you in John chapter 19 two are better than one and a three fold cord is not quickly broken now that's a basic that's just a basic English Bible history that your Bible is the language was more influenced by Latin but the text itself came from Greek and all those words that we hold so dear when it comes to the doctrines of salvation they came from the Latin language now let's see here this is John Chrysostome excuse me that's he was a bishop in Antioch and got in trouble for preaching against the empress a couple of times and but he was the golden mouth that's what his name means the golden mouth and around 391 AD this is what he said about the spread of John's gospel Christ gospel he was comparing them to Plato and Pythagoras he said but not so of the words of him who was ignorant and unlettered speaking of John for Syrians and Egyptians and Indians and Persians and Ethiopians and 10,000 other nations translating into their own tongues the doctrines introduced by him barbarians though they be have learned to philosophize and what he was it's just a quote showing that by the end of the third century your Bible had gone all over the place and it had been translated into many languages and I think I do have some of that up here all right so what we're going to get into then is this we're going to get into okay if the Bible went everywhere and so many different languages had it and there were churches all over the place 100,000 Christians by the end of the first century 6 million Christians by 300 AD what happened to all the manuscripts because we have almost no manuscripts from the first two centuries we have almost none all right now what happened to them and so it went this is just kind of the dates of when these people got their languages so that you know the Asian steppe people Georgians Albanians Armenians 4th and 5th centuries Syriac Greek and Latin really early right I showed you this but what I wanted to see is this early and middle translations as per academia okay Greek right now we have about 1500 Greek manuscripts 61 of those are complete Bibles okay 61 of them the rest are pieces of Bibles all right we have about 10,000 Latin manuscripts and we have about 8,000 from other languages and those are when we say manuscripts we what we mean by manuscripts are handwritten copies prior to printing see so that's from 100 to 1450 AD okay now so there's over 24,000 manuscripts exist from the 3rd to the 16th century only a handful are from the first two centuries what happened to all of them well here's one example here's one explanation right you saw the maps earlier about the Roman Empire all right this is the world by 750 AD right or common era on this map right what all this became what all that is that's all Islam that's all Islam right the world in many ways got cut off from the land where Christ was born now it wasn't as bad as some people say yes there were some places where the people fought back that their churches and their manuscripts was burned but it wasn't like that everywhere a lot of places the Muslims treated them pretty well but there was still there was still it was a different time it was a different era okay so you have a lot of explanations all right and I want to show you one example what time is it okay one example of manuscript scarcity okay just to give you an idea this is Tatian's diet tesserin all right the diet tesserin was something written by Tatian anywhere from 160 to 173 that's about you know 60 years after the death of the apostle John what it was a harmony of the four gospels not a side by side parallel of Matthew Mark Luke and John but actually a cut and paste gospel where he would put pieces of verses or several verses chronologically and he made all the gospels chronological okay it was called the harmony of the four gospels okay most people didn't I shouldn't say most scholars and skeptics said it doesn't even exist it's just a legend it never happened the reason tations by a test room was so important to biblical scholars is because if you actually had something proven that there were four gospels and only four together in the second century it would show you that the church accepted four gospels and only four the gospels of Thomas the gospels of Judas all that stuff the apocrypha right they rejected those it would be a great it be a great evidence of something it would also be an evidence of a very early Greek text okay but we don't really know it's a legend people made stuff up back then blah you know and so how do we know about it well we know about it from Eusebius Epiphanius and other ancient writers they talked about it right Theodora the bishop of Syrus which this is on the Euphrates river he wrote that he removed 200 copies from churches because Tatian was supposed to be a heretic in one 1600 square mile parish in Syria in 460 AD so in 460 AD there were 200 churches that each had their own copy of this right which this thing that supposedly didn't exist okay because there was no evidence right well I mean first of all this is evidence people wrote about it we call it the written record okay but it was considered a myth until a couple of guys found a commentary on the diet test written by a guy named Ephraim Cyrus he was the bishop of Edessa in 373 AD this is a manuscript of it that's 1500 years old it's a Syrian commentary by Ephraim Cyrus who by the way was pre millennial pre trib just as a note pre trib rapture was not invented in the 19th century right this guy was pre trib okay but all right that's now that's but that's a commentary on the diet test and what guys did was they read his commentary and they reconstructed the text of the diet test from the commentary on the text okay so then everyone's like okay there was a diet test okay right a Greek then and this is just how it goes what did I say every time they dig a hole over there right they find something this is dura europis this is in far eastern Syria right you can see that special ops guy right there right but he's but he's not supposed to be there all right we're not there he's not there he's not there what's he doing target practice right they gotta they gotta spend half the federal budget they gotta do something all right I'm teasing all right this is Duraeropis this was a city it was a Greco-Roman city that was sacked by the Sassanid Persians in 256 AD right they took all 10,000 inhabitants and relocated them and this thing got buried by mud and sand for the next 1700 years okay they started digging there in the 1930s they start digging and they find this little thing they find this little thing right here right because it was because the city was abandoned and never inhabited right because they found it way down right in someone's house right they know that manuscript cannot be later than 256 right and what it is it's a it's a greek version of tatian's diatesserin right just one little scrap of paper right that's the manuscript evidence for something that in one diocese right a diocese that was 40 miles by 40 miles okay the size of the mission and flathead valleys there were 200 copies of it what's left that what is it's about 12 by 8 that's what's left of it that's what's left of it you say what happened to all the manuscripts well we'll talk about it next week okay all right thank you lord for the bible love you thank you for preserving it for us we're rich we're rich we're rich thank you thank you for your word thank you thank you